Thai: An Essential Grammar (Routledge Grammars)

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable guide
Review: I recently picked up this book in Bangkok and found I could put it to immediate use. Such an example would be the use of serial verbs where in English we would need a number of conjunctions. This enabled me to break out of stilted, one sentence at a time, conversation with my Thai friends.

This is not a dry academic treatise but a ready-to-use guide that is clearly explained in lay terms.

The author also wrote the Teach Yourself Thai book which I found very helpful when first visiting Thailand.

I strongly recommend this book, particularly for those people like myself wanting to "break out" of beginner's Thai. It is an invaluable reference that will need to be supplemented with a text book and good tape set, if you do not already have those.

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable guide
Review: I recently picked up this book in Bangkok and found I could put it to immediate use. Such an example would be the use of serial verbs where in English we would need a number of conjunctions. This enabled me to break out of stilted, one sentence at a time, conversation with my Thai friends.

This is not a dry academic treatise but a ready-to-use guide that is clearly explained in lay terms.

The author also wrote the Teach Yourself Thai book which I found very helpful when first visiting Thailand.

I strongly recommend this book, particularly for those people like myself wanting to "break out" of beginner's Thai. It is an invaluable reference that will need to be supplemented with a text book and good tape set, if you do not already have those.

Rating:
Summary: The best Thai grammar in print!
Review: This book is excellent in every way. I believe it is more valuable than the "Thai Reference Grammar" published recently.

And I'm not "just saying that." Let me give you a specific example, which concerns a problem with the "tone rules" in Thai. Once you have learned these tone rules, you will notice that some words apparently disobey them, e.g. "market" or "talaat." Where the tone rules would lead you to expect a falling tone on the second syllable, you find instead (!) a low tone.

Why?

In all the years I have been studying Thai, I have only found two places where this is explained. (The answer is that some seven "low-class consonants" are "weak low-class consonants," which can be overruled by the first consonant in a two-syllable word.

The first place is the Linguaphone Thai Course, a universally-praised self-instruction kit.

The second place is right here, in this "Essential Grammar" by David Smyth.

If you are a student of Thai, get this book!!

Unconditional recommendation!!!