A great way to practice Thai is by reading Thai literature. What you find in Thai language books is considered \u2018perfect\u2019, \u2018correct\u2019, \u2018intelligent\u2019, polite, lacking of slang and regional\/dialectal vocabulary, and follows proper grammatical structure. All beginners to the Thai language are taught this form by Thai teachers – it\u2019s considered the benchmark of fluent prowess.<\/p>\n
But no Thai actually speaks like a book.<\/p>\n
Thai as found in books is not the same as spoken Thai. No one uses perfect, correct, polite speech, without slang or regional dialect, and correctly follows all grammatical structure. This isn\u2019t just because Thai schools fail to properly educate, but because \u2018book Thai\u2019 is too unwieldy for daily usage. It\u2019s bogged down with complexity and over redundancy.<\/p>\n
Enter: spoken Thai.<\/p>\n
The Thai language is very contextually based. Sentences are chopped up, redundant words are removed – you say exactly what you mean and no more. You avoid words with more than one syllable. You then add a single word at the end of the sentence to make the entire thing polite, or harsh, or whatever. Straight and to the point.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not all. You can even remove the subject, unit words, verbs, and even syllables within words.<\/p>\n
Why is this? Context. If the situation is obvious, there is no need to redundantly explain it. In the following examples I\u2019ll show how you take a full \u2018book\u2019 example and shorten it to be \u2018normal\u2019 spoken Thai. The great advantage to all this is that your mind doesn\u2019t need to formulate complete sentences to speak or to listen. It just needs to know the context.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Example 1<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s take this first simple sentence, \u201cI like to eat fish.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u2018perfect\u2019 book translation would then be,<\/p>\n \u0e1c\u0e21\u0e0a\u0e2d\u0e1a\u0e01\u0e34\u0e19\u0e1b\u0e25\u0e32\u0e04\u0e23\u0e31\u0e1a<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As it is obvious you are referring to yourself, there is no need to say \u2018I\u2019:<\/p>\n \u0e0a\u0e2d\u0e1a\u0e01\u0e34\u0e19\u0e1b\u0e25\u0e32\u0e04\u0e23\u0e31\u0e1a<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you are at a restaurant, or referring to food in general, we already know you mean \u2018to eat it\u2019. So let\u2019s shorten that some more to:<\/p>\n \u0e0a\u0e2d\u0e1a\u0e1b\u0e25\u0e32\u0e04\u0e23\u0e31\u0e1a<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let\u2019s say the context was about fish, for example you were asked \u2018do you like to eat fish?\u2019 Well, you don\u2019t need to repeat the word \u2018fish\u2019 as it\u2019s already contextually understood. So you then just say:<\/p>\n \u0e0a\u0e2d\u0e1a\u0e04\u0e23\u0e31\u0e1a<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The word \u0e04\u0e23\u0e31\u0e1a with that \u0e23 requires an awkward tongue movement. Remove that syllable to get:<\/p>\n \u0e0a\u0e2d\u0e1a\u0e04\u0e31\u0e1a<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even then,you shouldn\u2019t be too polite. If you\u2019re just with friends, that last word isn\u2019t neccessary. So what are we left with? to be continued…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thai as found in books is not the same as spoken Thai. No one uses perfect, correct, polite speech, without slang or regional dialect, and correctly follows all grammatical structure. Read on to learn about the differences.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[10208,3],"tags":[3125,138,192231,10177],"class_list":["post-1256","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-beginner","category-culture","tag-book","tag-slang","tag-spoken","tag-thai"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1256"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1263,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256\/revisions\/1263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u0e0a\u0e2d\u0e1a<\/p>\n