Thai for Advanced Readers

Rating:
Summary: A very helpful book
Review: This is a very good book to help you practice the critical Thai language skill of READING. You need a lot of practice in this because the words are all run together in Thai sentences, and so you need a lot of practice in "chunking" the words out of the long sequence of letters, and you also need practice in word recognition and pronunciation. (Those tone rules need a lot of practice!) I wouldn't pay too much credit to the idea that Thai is written with a phonetic alphabet. Of course, it IS, but there are lots of irregular words, and the big difficulty is this: if you can read a word, you can generally pronounce it. But the reverse does not work: knowing how to say a word does NOT tell you how to spell it, not when there are three S letters, and multiple choices for th, t, p, ph, etc., not to mention umpteen ways to write a final t. (A final t can be an s or a th or t or d or.....) Frankly, if you're learning Thai you will probably wind up with all the books from Paiboon Publishing. They are very useful! Highest recommendation!