Thai for Beginners,   ISBN:9781887521000

Customer Rating: 

The book and companion CD are widely used to learn Thai language. In my opinion English speakers will learn faster and with better pronunciation using these materials and having a tutor as well.

Customer Rating: 

I've owned the Thai For Beginners book for several years, just purchased the CD to go with it. The book is excellent. The CD follows the book very well and is helpful with pronunciations. I only have two minor criticisms of the CD: When the conversations are read in Thai, it would be helpful if they were spoken a bit more slowly. Also, throughout the CD, you can hear a lot of background noise -- Music playing, traffic noise, even airplanes flying overhead! It would have sounded more professional if the CD had been recorded in a studio or soundproof room.

Customer Rating: 

This book prepares the absolute beginner to the Thai language with the foundations to start speaking, reading, and to some extent, writing Thai. The topics covered include pronunciation rules and examples, basic greetings, introductory grammar rules for verbs and adjective, and vocabulary for tell time and body parts etc.

I like the format of this book because each chapter is laid out with vocab, sample sentences and conversations based off the vocab, and quizzes to test your retention. It is ideal for classroom use or self study.

I didn't give this book five stars because there really isn't 260 pages of solid material here. For example, the Read Aloud exercises I did not find useful whatsoever and the alphabet tracing exercises take up altogether too much space. I think it's debatable whether or not a student of this level should even worry about how to draw each symbol in the alphabet.

All in all, this is a book that any beginner to intermediate student of the Thai language should have in their collection.

Customer Rating: 

Just a really good beginner book.

But because you have to buy the tapes separately, I am only going to give it four instead of five stars.

Cheers!

Customer Rating: 

It's hard to add anything to the large amount of commentary here, except to corrobarate some comments that others have made.

This book (and the whole series) are quite good. It falls down in three areas. First of all, the lack of presentation of grammar. Arguably, Thai grammar is very simple (which it is - simpler than Chinese, I'd say) but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. While Ms. Becker is an experienced teacher, I can't help feeling that she presents the material in a way that Thai learners would prefer - that is, by presenting sample sentences, mostly for memorization. Western learners take more comfort in having the structure explained to them along the way.

Secondly, a large amount of vocabulary is thrown at you early on, including a lot of words that you don't immediately need for everyday situations. Of course, this is not a phrasebook, but I think most users of this book are of the type that are planning a trip to Thailand and want to first learn what they need on the street.

Thirdly, the explanation of the writing system is a bit difficult to deal with, and the explanation in "Teach Yourself Thai" really is better and easier, as somebody else has commented.

On the plus side, I think that the student will get a much better grasp of the spoken language from this book than from the "Teach Yourself" book, since it really does provide more serious material. The dialogues in "Teach Yorself" seem almost childish after dealing with "Beginning Thai."