by rapidthai » Wed Dec 09, 2015 12:59 pm
It's a shame that some people who have already learnt to read the conventional (brute-force) approach seem to disparage anything that might make it easier and more effective for newcomers.
I've done a lot of comparative research and - except for a relatively small group of diehards (usually people who are very academically-minded or prefer to study 'linguistically' and memorize facts by rote) - nearly everyone who has followed the Rapid Method of learning to read - and subsequently speak and understand - Thai have found it to be remarkably effective.
Unfortunately, once you start learning the conventional way, it is very difficult to break out of it. You can't really unlearn what you've invested so much effort into learning: try looking at this English text and think back to the time when as a child you could not read it. It's impossible. You can't unlearn the skill and subsequently it's very difficult to break bad habits. (You can get a feel for what it was like if you turn a page upside down.)
One of the problems of learning Thai by studying the alphabet and then learning a bunch of disconnected rules is that you invariably read like a dyslexic; and even when you have mastered every single letter, it's slow reading... at least until you develop the vocabulary that allows you to recognize whole words as chunks. It works, but it's a very steep learning curve that takes a huge amount of mental effort and a long time to master. Most people give up.
The misconception that some people have about 'mnemonics' is that it takes an extra and unnecessary effort that detracts from the raw fact.
That may seem to be true. It does require a lot of effort to come up with a workable mnemonic (often different for each person) and then to focus on the mnemonic rather than the fact in question.
But here’s the rub: Thai letters look very much alike and seem to be completely arbitrary and random. The worst offenders are what I call the “chicken” letters (which by coincidence happens to be the “ko kai” character): ก ภ ถ ณ ญ ฌ ฏ ฎ ฦ ฤ They all look the same! So how do you tease them apart? Learning their names (which are NOT ‘mnemonics’, by the way, because there is absolutely no way to connect the visual properties of the letter to its name) is not at all helpful. Even if you are Thai, the names of the letters do very little – except give you the sound of the letter. But you have to memorize the shape by rote. I’ve monitored Thai kids and noticed that it takes them about 6 months of shouting out the alphabet every day just to learn the names of the letters (in alphabet order) – the equivalent of our ABC. But it takes them another 4 years (usually much more) to connect the names of the letters to the actual letters themselves. They get the most common ones after a year or so, but aren’t able to recognize the more obscure ones until much later.
As adults (and foreigners), we need a completely different approach. For a start, we learn more effectively when we think strategically, not by repetition. (Who’s got the time!?)
It’s been demonstrated clearly that mnemonic devices work! (Just look up Dominic O’Brien, a kind of memory athlete…)
Here’s a ball-park comparison between the amount of time and effort to memorize a bunch of facts (letters of the alphabet, vocabulary, etc.) by rote and with mnemonics:
Learning the 70-odd letters and symbols of the Thai alphabet takes about a week of 4-5 hours of memorization and recall each day by rote (no reading and not bothering to remember the names of the letters, just recognizing them). If you look at a collection of 70 pictures, the same process takes about two days, staring at the pictures and trying to recognize them for a couple of hours each day. That’s 25 hours vs 5 hours. Five times quicker.
When it comes to actually reading whole words (without any understanding), those who study really hard and in a focused manner will usually take about 6-8 weeks, studying 4-6 hours per day (excluding weekends). I based this on the intensive reading course offered by AUA in Chiang Mai and monitoring some of the students who attended it. Those who attend my intensive 6-day workshop (6 hours of study-time per day) get to read by the end of it at roughly the same level. To really consolidate what they’ve learnt, it usually takes another 30 hours to gain the same kind of fluency as a 10-year old child. That’s 150 hours (with AUA) vs 66 hours. Less than half the time yet resulting in a greater competency at reading and pronunciation including the business about tones.
Now, what about understanding, you ask? To read conventionally, you do need to have quite a deep understanding of what you are reading just to make out what’s going on. The Rapid Method takes a different approach: you learn the logic and mechanics of sounding out the words (it helps that Thai is a very logical and consistent language). And then you learn the meanings separately (now that you can read each word).
I did a quick ‘n dirty comparison using Anki – learning 500 vocabulary words used in the reading exercises – with mnemonics and without mnemonics. Anki is one of the most effective ways to learn vocabulary, it’s spaced-repetition flash cards. It’s extremely efficient because you focus only on what you don’t know. However, it still takes a while and a considerable effort to learn 500 words by rote: approximately 100 days studying about 20-30 minutes each day. When you add in hints and mnemonics (a little tweak I added to Anki), it takes about 20 days to remember the ‘easy’ 80% (400 words) and then maybe another 10 days to get the final 100 words. Oh and that’s only 10-15 minutes of study each day. So that’s over 40 hours (by rote) vs 7 hours (with the mnemonics).
But what do you do if you don’t have mnemonics? I’ve done most of the work already by thinking up mnemonics that will help you to remember the vocabulary list. It’s not always effective because mnemonics are very personal. I can easily remember what “soap” is in Thai because I already know that it’s “savon” in French. So it’s a very easy step to then get “saboo” in Thai. If you don’t know French then that mnemonic is useless for you… in which case you’d have to devise your own mnemonic.
bifftastic, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, I’m afraid. If “u-boat” doesn’t work for you then you might prefer “bucket” instead. And you could easily pack more information into the mnemonic by thinking of filling up the bucket with leaves. That gives you the Thai name as well (if you know what a leaf is in Thai). it’s an extra step – which I consider quite unnecessary, unless the word is a useful, everyday word anyway (and in this case, it is). But I opted for “u-boat captain” instead. A lot of thought went into this because u-boat captains are invariably male and so this letter also happens to be a “male” letter (what I call the “middle class”, the other classes being “females” and “ladyboys”).
Then when it comes to the next letter, the mnemonic is of a “spy balloon” (or you can think of it as a “periscope raised for spying out the enemy ships”). It’s a very small step between the two letters and people learn them as a pair (and they’re both “male” letters). I don’t know where they are in the alphabet and I don’t care. Now, “spy” is a crucial mnemonic because it gives you the exact sound of this letter: the “p” sound that follows an “s” in the English language. Very few people who study Thai the conventional way (using a kind of transliteration scheme) get this right. If I wanted to (and in this case it’s kind of useful too) then I can also pack in an extra mnemonic for “fish” [catching the fish that are splashing about from the deck of the u-boat]. What’s so elegant about this seemingly-convoluted approach is that I now know exactly how to correctly pronounce “fish” – ปลา or (s)plaa – in Thai.
When it comes to the ต letter, the mnemonic I use is “stomach”. Most people get this sound wrong also and confuse it with a regular T – because that’s how they learn it, or maybe they faff around with a halfway sound like TD or something. But you’ll never really hear this sound accurately, which means you’ll forever have difficulty pronouncing it, unless someone explains the mechanics of producing the sound in great detail. Like the “spy” (or “fish”) letter, the sound of this letter is exactly like the “t” that follows an “s” in the English language, like "stomach".
Thinking up mnemonics takes time – and a lot of mental effort. That’s the main disadvantage of using mnemonics and why a lot of people don’t like it. It takes much less mental effort to just repeat stuff over and over again almost mindlessly than to have to go through mental gymnastics to come up with a decent mnemonic. Nevertheless, I’ve done some informal research on this and, when you factor in the time and effort it takes to come up with a mnemonic for each word, it still works out to be more efficient and require less effort overall than to learn by rote. It took me about 12-15 hours of mental effort over a period of several months (off and on) to come up with 500 mnemonics. It took me longer than it should because I was searching for mnemonics that would be fairly universal, I couldn’t just pick the first thing that came into my head because it might not work for other people.
But, even then, the amount of time and effort to memorize 500 words – including the effort in coming up with the mnemonics in the first place – is still about half of what is usually required to learn the same 500 words by rote. If I were a memory gymnast like O’Brien then it might only take me a day or two (8 hours) to learn 400-450 words, but most of us have flabby brains, so it takes a bit longer!
. He's tryin' to teach himself to read using books written in English designed to teach non-native speakers to read Thai. Still it's not an easy go for him and he's struggling a LOT. 
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