Reddit reviews Thai Reference Grammar

I was also learning informally by talking to people.

The book Thai Reference Grammar was helpful in filling gaps in structure/usage. The title sounds dry/technical/academic, but don't let that deter you. The book provides many examples and is remarkably practical in explaining common Thai language patterns in a way many teachers would not be able to.

If you can't read/write much, but can listen well, Thai2English provides a dictionary with good lookup by approximate transliteration (e.g. you can write nam/num/nahm and get a definition for นำ).

Great book for this : http://www.amazon.com/Thai-Reference-Grammar-James-Higbie/dp/9748304965

>There's a blue, textbook sized grammar resource whose name is escaping me that is a bit dry but very useful once you get past the Becker books.


Thai Reference Grammar

I agree, this book is is the most useful book I own. Really important for learning how to put the sentences together. Lot of times you know all the vocab but just can't figure out the right way to put it all together. Well this books has thousands of example sentences that are neatly organized. You will be able to say almost anything with this book.

The Foreign Service Institute puts Thai as a Level 4 Language difficulty (source: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty), which means around 1100 hours to be proficient in speaking and reading. If you are in Thailand and motivated, I think that you can develop some serious Thai skills in 2 years.

Anki flashcard decks to pick up vocab + a good textbook for grammar (https://www.amazon.com/Thai-Reference-Grammar-James-Higbie/dp/9748304965) and daily drilling will get you proficient quickly.

I'm actually in the final stages of development of a Thai language digital textbook/app for iOS but I don't think that it will be released until sometime in the first few months of next year.

Best of luck on your learning!

Grammar is just a way to formalize/describe the language usage patterns.

Babies learn those patterns without formal rules, and adults can as well.

Knowing the rule can sometimes be a useful shortcut compared to having to hear 100 examples and only have a vague sense of the pattern. My favorite Thai language learning book is a reference grammar.

The problem is that specific grammar rules are easy to write down and learn by rote, as well as test. Real language proficiency is much harder to pin down.

Therefore, language teachers with low confidence in their own proficiency or teaching ability (which is most of them!) tend to emphasize grammar rules and use them as a crutch... so students end up learning the grammar rather than the language.

A language teacher needs to know the grammar rules to better explain the common patterns (and to focus on them), but students don't have much need or use for those rules.

Apologies, the book is actually titled Thai Reference Grammar

There's another book on Thai grammar which is supposed to be good but which I haven't read. I might've gotten the titles confused, not sure.

Anyway, Thai Reference Grammar is an excellent book.