Product Description

These CDs are recorded by native Thai and can be used on their own or to accompany the book, helping you with pronunciation and listening skills.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3001592 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Audio CD

Customer Reviews

Ok for a starter but don't believe everything in the book!
I am writing this review on behalf of two of us who have used this text with tapes and CDs. Overall it has helped us get to the basics pretty quickly but some of what is shown in the course has to be validated by a local Thai. There are numerous - and I mean numerous - typos in the text book and the style of speach is often a bit old fashioned, albeit very polite, compared to modern Thai. e.g pronunciation of 'khrap'. The structure of the course leaves me a bit baffled. I can't remember how deep you have to go into it before you learn how to ask for someone's name!!! All other language courses usually start with basic conversations like "what is your name", "where are you from" etc. This course does not but you get there in the end. I found the transliteration logical and in fact I find other systems more confusing but most other reviews that I have read disagree with my point of view. This was the best course I could find at the time but there are probably better ones out there now.

This book is ok, better for buisiness traveler than pleasure
I went traveling in Thailand and wanted to prepare by learning a little Thai.

This book was ok, but could have been much more useful if:

1) The dialogue excercises and examples had been more geared towards typical traveler conversation. Instead, the first dialogues present "in the office" conversations.

2) The roman letter pronunciation system followed a more standardized model. I found the system that this book uses to be far different from other pronunciation systems, and hence very confusing.

On the good side, the flow of the book and the CD match up pretty well, and the book has lessons in Thai script, though I wished that it showed the differnt fonts, or all the different ways of writing the same Thai letter. In Thailand, I was not able to recognize many letters that I thought I had learned, because they did not match the examples in the book.

OK for starters, but with reservations
This is a useful introduction to a little basic Thai. It cannot compete with the more expensive and comprehensive courses, but then it does not pretend to do so. However, it is plagued by several misprints, has some fairly strange statements about grammar and unfortunately handles the introduction of the script rather poorly - the passages in Thai script in particular could use a proof reader. The transliteration scheme is a handicap and I cannot help but feel it would have been better to introduce the script more effectively earlier and then use that. It is much easier to handle than what we have. The Thai itself is acceptable and only rarely too awkward - this means that as a small cheap introductory text it has much to recommend itself. The introduction needs some serious rewriting though. The history is just a little too sweeping and the fact that the Thai language is a Tai-Kadai language is missed entirely with readers being told they are dealing with a Sino-Tibetan language. Compared to its nearest comparable competitor (Teach Yourself Thai), for all that book's faults, it comes off in second place.