De Groot Jacob Y. (ed.) PSU Thai for beginners

Phuket: Prince of Songkhla University (PSU), Phuket Campus, 2010. — xvii, 258 p.If you want to learn Thai well, you will encounter some barriers which you didn’t meet when you learned French or Spanish in secondary school. Thai is not an Indo-European language. It does not resemble English. Thai has taken some loan-words from Chinese, some from Malay, and another few hundred from Pali, Sanskrit, and Khmer. Even if you have made a thorough study of those languages, it won’t help you with recognizing their meaning in Thai. In the course of your study of the language, you’ll discover a significant number of loan-words from English, but initially, you’ll be thoroughly swamped with information which you’re badly going to need in learning to manage the language, but which you might not consider useful at first sight. The experience of every foreigner who has taken on this effort is: that after a short period of intensive study of a lot of theory, a stage will follow in which one will have become able to express oneself in Thai in a satisfying, adult way, without having to fall back into ‘tourist-Thai’ – that is: without picking up wrong habits which are difficult to get rid of later.