Using IPA to improve my Thai
thai language learning IPA pronunciation
Learning Thai
I’ve been (slowly) learning Thai since moving here. Partly because of time constraints, and partly because it’s a very difficult language for westerners. It has tones, a different alphabet, meaningful vowel durations, and more.
I started with the immediate goal of communicating when ordering food, and so I began with phonetic vocabulary learning. This is when you write something that sounds like Thai, but using Roman characters, e.g., “kohr moo nueng jaan krap” (which means “Can I have a plate of pork?”)
The problem with this is if you don’t get the tones right, you’re highly likely to be misunderstood, since they will sound like different words. The official Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) is the standard for writing Thai in Roman characters, but it’s not consistently used outside of government signs, it doesn’t cover tones, and depending on your dialect of English, it’s not even the closest-sounding match. For example, the word for island is usually written as “koh”, but the Thai is pronounced more like “gaw” for American English speakers.
Incorporating IPA
Eventually, I got a new tutor, and started to learn to read actual Thai. My new tutor’s materials all used the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which I’d heard of, but never used. I found it a godsend to vowel pronunciation.
See, English is actually one of the harder languages in the world when it comes to its loose relationship between spelling and pronunciation. Some of this is its dual Romance/Germanic heritage, but some of it is just quirkiness. I explained to my tutor that “cupboard” and “cup board” are pronounced differently, but could not for the life of me say why.
For the most part, all Thai vowel sounds are in English (or pretty close), but there’s no consistent way they’re spelled or named. A lot of beginner Thai learning materials use English examples, like “โ = o as in ‘row boat’”. Of course, every time the examples are for UK English pronunciation, it just adds to the confusion.
I hadn’t planned to learn IPA, but I saw the characters in my new study materials, and started to learn them. Within a week, my pronunciation was way better. I hadn’t realized how much extra difficulty the RTGS and other inconsistent systems had been adding to the learning process.
The IPA is not perfect by a long shot. The IPA characters have changed in recent decades, so some older materials may be unfamiliar. The use of rotated letters was no doubt helpful in the typesetting era, but probably hostile to people with dylexia. It has a bit of a older eurocentric bias, since it was created by English and French people a century ago. Plus, even the IPA’s use isn’t consistent, since apparently linguists who have criticisms with it, are prone to altering the pronounciations occasionally to suit their needs. Not to mention it’s difficult to both type, and write by hand.