Debunking the Biggest Myths About Learning Thai - Reaction to AirLearn's Clip

[00:00:00]This is what pisses me off about these systems that try and teach these languages across Asia by some zitfaced kid probably sitting in their garage in Silicon Valley. They know nothing of them and just think that they can apply these systems to say English or romance languages. Oh, let's go and get Asia.

[00:00:14]Asia is a big market and apply these same things without actually knowing anything. and they just maybe do a chat GPT research and put some AI slop together to try and fogg a piece of crap application that doesn't know what it's talking about >> because once you know enough words the boundaries become visible and >> no it's got nothing to do with how many words you know it's because you know what the vowels are >> above it and you get >> g >> this creates a genuine chicken and big problem for learners. You can't read the words until you know where they are.

[00:00:53]>> Rubbish. Rubbish. Just for that sentence alone, I wouldn't go anywhere near your app.

[00:00:58]>> Languages that are not total. They have strong vowel notation systems, wellorganized consonant inventory.

[00:01:05]>> So, you can see she's just reading this AI slot.

[00:01:08]>> The learning curve is longer.

[00:01:10]>> Rubbish.

[00:01:11]>> Thai children typically take more years to reach reading fluency than English speaking children do.

[00:01:16]>> Rubbish.

[00:01:17]But they get there. The script is honorable. It's in daily use across an entire country. I bet that you have something that's going to help us learn it. Absolute rubbish.

[00:01:38]learn or air languages. Now, I think they're trying to flog some kind of app and whatever I say here, you can see this lady. She's the presenter and she's probably just an actor. She probably I don't know if you she knows anything about languages. She's probably just reading some AI slop that the marketing department threw at her hoping that she can flog off this app. And if listening to what she's got to say is bears any resemblance to the app, I would run a mile from the app because so much of what she says is just utter rot. Not only that, it made me angry as you can probably sense. I've worked for like 30 years trying to get people to learn that Thai is not actually difficult. Most of the time that people run into the difficulties is a mental thing. And usually it's because of foreigners who have set up some system or just didn't understand the language. And so all of their baggage of what they didn't understand becomes the subsequent baggage of generations of Thai learners to come in the future as they put these courses together to clunkily try and explain something that's actually very simple for most of the people on the planet that speak either tonal languages or languages that use an abuga indic script. So I'm going to try and put a silver lining on this today. So, thank you for putting such a piece of crap clip out about the Thai language. I'm going to hopefully be able to help you, as a result of that clip, become masters of Thai tones, the Thai script, and being able to pronounce things in Thai by the end of this clip.

[00:03:22]>> Here's a sentence in Thai.

[00:03:31]Thai is one of the most hardest languages to read. I call >> How many words is that? You can't tell.

[00:03:41]Pie doesn't use spaces between words.

[00:03:43]Before you can read a single syllable, you have to figure out where one ends and the next begins.

[00:03:49]>> Yeah, that's easy enough. I'll show you in a minute. It's not hard at all. And even two, three-year-old Thai kids can do it after a few hours of looking at the letters.

[00:04:01]>> And the only way to do that is to already know the word.

[00:04:03]>> Did I hear that correctly? Let's listen to it again. What did she say?

[00:04:07]>> Single syllable. You have to figure out where one ends and the next begins. And the only way to do that is to already know the word.

[00:04:14]>> What a load of rot. The only way that you can know where a word begins and ends is to know the word. That's absolute rubbish.

[00:04:27]I'm going to try and hear her out. Let's see what she says next. But I can't let this go.

[00:04:32]>> That's the first wall. The second wall is 44 consonants.

[00:04:38]>> Okay, I have to jump in here. Now, if you're reading that and you say 44 consonants actually some say 46 and throwing these numbers and pictures of all the consonants out like that and put it but it's done like this for a reason.

[00:04:55]People are trying to scare the learner.

[00:04:59]Have a look at this. I actually did this graphic years ago. As you can see on the left, I'm showing pretty much what she showed is this list of just letters in cereal.

[00:05:10]And it looks like chaos to me. That is like slicing up an image of me and then putting these random slices together like you see in the picture on the left.

[00:05:23]in reality and I want you to have a look here and this is why I've built this but all of the scripts that come from India which and then tie basically all the scripts of Southeast Asia that are based on this abuga system is just a map of the mouth I've said it a zillion times and so you got the back of the mouth and so here we go >> you've got the pallet >> moves up to the pallet here you've got then let's Move forward to the teeth.

[00:05:54]So, and you got the lips.

[00:05:57]>> I'll put here.

[00:06:00]>> Okay. So, back of the throat, pallet, teeth, lips, and you've got the roof of the mouth, too, for these cerebral ones.

[00:06:05]So, you've got this map of the mouth and you can see for all these scripts. So, Devonaguri has it too here. You'll see they'll get this purple row in here in dean. So, t this is with the rolly tongue. So you've got back of the throat G pallet top of the mouth du teeth.

[00:06:24]Okay, easy. Five points of the mouth and then g throat stopped. C throat opened.

[00:06:34]G voiced which gets lost in Thai. G puffing air with voice and throwing it out your nose. Okay. Okay.

[00:06:44]And then cha cha cha da da da da da da da da da da. It's it's a 5x5 matrix GPS of the human mouth. So actually they're just basically coordinates within the mouth. Welcome to the alphabet of all of the indicripts from across India through to Southeast Asia. And you'll see even in China because it was so good for tonal languages that they started using this in about 600 AD in the Cherun system. I can actually I can show you here. Have a look at this Chinese. This is the Cherun system. If you've ever learned Mandarin Chinese, you've learned your opinion. So this is where it came from. Exactly the same thing. So except it's in reverse.

[00:07:30]So you start with a lips here. So is the last bit, but you'd notice by that that this is say for Cantonese or old Chinese, but by the time you get to pinion, let me just click it over here.

[00:07:46]You can see because there are less sounds in modern Mandarin, but it's pretty much the same system.

[00:07:54]Boop. You got the same map of the human mouth. And this is the system based on a 3,000-year-old map of the mouth that the Indians did. Um, the Chinese called it the Cherun system. Tonal languages have been using it forever. It fits beautifully with tonal languages. And Thai still uses a system that can beautifully map out every part of the mouth, the syllable, what you're doing with your throat and your tongue and your breathing, all just with spelling.

[00:08:24]It's freaking amazing. It's amazing technology for language. I wish more languages used it. The cool thing is is so you saw that these have stopped throat.

[00:08:33]>> And so with tones, tones are not pitch.

[00:08:36]Tones basically mean syllables where you're stopping your throat. Oh, okay.

[00:08:40]Well, we'll call these ones that start with a stop throat one group. We'll call the ones that have a puff of air another group. And the ones that start with your voice activate another group. Just the same as we have yin and yang tones in um Chinese dialects in Vietnamese, we got the same sort of thing in Thai. So exactly the same principles and they fitted beautifully into this system from thousands of years ago. So coming back to that picture looking at the right, this is actually the picture. It's a beautiful GPS map of the mouth. It's set up perfectly. But when people learn it or people who don't know what they're talking about, they will present the Thai alphabet like you see on the left >> where multiple letters make the same sound and which ones are used changes the tone of the entire syllable. The third wall is bells that can appear in any four directions around a consonant.

[00:09:37]The tone of the entire syllable. The third wall is bells that can appear in any four directions around a consonants.

[00:09:44]Above, below, before, after. We just saw that Thai and any of these indices, not an alphabet, it's an abugida.

[00:09:53]Consonants and vowels are different species. Vowels breathe life into consonants. If you have bought my Cracking Thai fundamentals book, let me just put it up here. If you haven't got it and you're learning Thai or any tonal language, grab a copy. If you're in Thailand, you can click on the link in the description below. Otherwise, you can order it on Amazon. But you would have heard that that consonants and vowels are different species. Vowels breathe life into consonants. And I want to show you how easy it is to distinguish words. So have a look at this. We got the word Thai. Okay. Uh it might be a bit hard to read. I'll try and zoom in a little bit there. So if you don't know Thai, okay, fair enough. But have a look at this. Rather than looking linearly, let's think in 3D. Okay. And so now think of the scanner like a barcode scanner and you've got consonants that sit lower than these vow frames. So this one thing here is actually a frame. So what happens when you read rather than reading linearly you're just reading block by block and Thai kids learn what these vowel frames are. And so you say consonant then vow t i. So when this scans up what does it do? It hits the t.

[00:11:11]So t i t i tie and every single word then every syllable is beautifully broken into consonant to vow. So if you have multiple words, let me just turn that off and turn this on. So we might have it looking like that. But if you have a look at the green ones, these are the vowel frames that Thai kids learn.

[00:11:33]And so they will know then that this vow here can only come to the right of something if you're looking at it. But it's just a frame. Okay? This is a frame and it's only going to come on top of the top letter. So as people read then it's going to hit this way. So that is that's the vow. This one is the beginning of a new one because this can only come at the beginning of something.

[00:11:58]So this is bin. So this you don't need to know the word. All you need to know is this is a vow frame and it comes on the first letter of a syllable don. And again, this one here is a vow frame. This green one here, let me just shift it over. So this is the vow. Okay.

[00:12:17]So if I turn it around like that, you can see that this scanner is going to hit the m first, then the m and then m at the end. So that's M and then just comes at the end. I would encourage nobody to go anywhere near that app because it's obviously been put together by somebody who knows nothing about the Thai language. Okay, continue.

[00:12:43]>> Thai text is information stacked in the four dimensions. 70 million people read it fluently.

[00:12:50]>> Yeah, 70 million people read it fluently. And then you've got Lao and then you've got command and then you've got all of the other languages that use index scripts and nobody has a problem reading it.

[00:13:01]>> And the reason it works the way it does goes back to a 13th century king who invented a script for tonal language.

[00:13:10]>> He didn't invent a script for the tonal language. There were already scripts being used. The lam script that we used today was one of many scripts that were being used. If you go back and look at my clips on the comm script and then you've got the lana script, you've got a ton of different scripts that do the same thing. They got the same tone marker that he didn't invent them from nothing. Scripts already existed. Just happens that that's the one that we use now. But there are many many other scripts that do this and they all work on the same technology. Chinese had their cherun system that did exactly the same thing. And you could notate syllables in the same way. You could even notate Chinese using this in Thai if you wanted to, if you really wanted to because it encodes the same information.

[00:13:55]>> And every adaptation made sense to hold all that information in one place.

[00:14:00]Welcome to the Airline Language Show.

[00:14:03]Just look at that logo and don't go near it if this is resemblant of what their app represents at least for tonal languages.

[00:14:14]>> Today we're pulling Tai apart layer by layer. The no spaces problem, the 44 consonant symptom, the floating vowels, the >> I suspect that she's just a role actor.

[00:14:25]She actually really doesn't know much about languages at all. phones baked into the letters themselves and by the end the script that looks like visual chaos is going to >> doesn't look like visual chaos but you know what you're doing. You're planting visual chaos into potential learners potentially destroying their enthusiasm towards the language. It's not visual chaos. It's actually a most beautiful simple symmetrical logical system that you could imagine for encoding syllables in any language.

[00:14:58]make complete sense if Thai is on your list or any tonal language alert is built exactly >> I don't believe you if this is what you're saying >> this kind of complexity real language context tested so it sticks links in the description now let's start with the wall most people hit first written English is generous it puts a space between each word a capital letter at the start of every sentence punctuation to tell you when it pops is doing a lot of work for you even before you start reading. Tai doesn't know that. Tai text runs continuously. One broken stream a lot of work for you even before you start reading. Ty doesn't know that.

[00:15:42]Fix links in the description. Now let's start with the most people first.

[00:15:47]Written English is generous. It puts a space between every word, a capital letter at the start of every sentence, punctuation to tell you when to pause.

[00:15:56]The page is doing a lot of work for you even before you start reading. Tai doesn't know that. Tai text runs continuously on an unbroken string of characters with no spaces between words, no capital letters, and minimal punctuation.

[00:16:21]>> Damn it. effect.

[00:16:27]>> Okay. So coming back to that, let me just show you again using the tool written there is jet lan.

[00:16:38]Okay, you see how mine split it out easily. If you're really into it and you want to geek out, I actually wrote an algorithm that does that, but I've color coded it. So the yellow is the vow, the white is the initial consonant just like we saw in there and the ready one is the final and the blue one is the tone marker. So Thai kids when they learn to read actually they learn from books like these this one is called and by the time that they're four four and a half most Thai kids can read. They learn pretty fast and they use that and they see the vowel frames. These are frames I actually built a set of hand signs. So salah salah sal. This is a that's e that's that just clips on. And so you can learn those vowel frames in about 10 minutes. Bang.

[00:17:36]Bob your uncle. Not an issue. So you can see how they've passed out here. And if you want to then bring the spacing together there, that's what a Thai kid would see. And so these are delineating the end of each syllable and these are delineating the vowel frames. Okay? And any native Thai speaker would see those after about age four.

[00:17:58]>> And minimal punctuation. The spaces you do occup.

[00:18:05]>> Okay. I will also mention that we don't call them spaces in Thai. We call them w which comes from the word var which means family. So in English, we focus on the nothingness, the actual space. What vara literally means, if you speak Indonesian, you'd know. Vara means a group. And so, and so you're actually glu grouping grouping, you're grouping meanings together. Bang. Which she says are causes. So actually the amount of spaces doesn't really matter. It's the group that's important. So this is called the Wakbar, not the space bar. So while westerners focus on the nothing, in Thai we focus on the something.

[00:18:49]>> How to work inside a sentence everything runs together. This isn't unique to >> inside a sentence. And the way that she's saying that, it's almost like she's intentionally trying to say it to confuse you and wow you on how hard it is. It is not.

[00:19:06]>> Several major scripts including Camar, Burmese, and historically Sanskrit work the same way. The technical term is scryptocontinua and it was also how ancient Greek and Latin were originally written. But for a new reason, the absence of spaces creates an immediate problem >> because people like you are saying it's a problem.

[00:19:28]>> Cannot segment the text >> because people like you cannot segment the text. Everyone else who uses the script segments it perfectly fine because it's not English. It's not a Roman script. It's an abugida. It's not an alphabet.

[00:19:43]>> You cannot find words. And >> you can find the words. You just look for the vowel frames in the final. You feel them, you get them.

[00:19:51]>> Like ancient Greek, where a scholar can use grammatical knowledge to work out where the words begin and end. Thai has no inflection. Words don't change their endings to signal their grammatical role.

[00:20:04]Every word is the same at the start and the end. The only >> no, every word does not look the same at the start and the end because you've got vowel frames and you've got all of these other things that are just screaming out this is what frames the syllable.

[00:20:19]>> Wait, find the word boundaries is to already know the words.

[00:20:23]>> Again, just doing my head in hearing this. You So, you're saying that you can't read a word if you don't know it?

[00:20:29]That's utter rubbish.

[00:20:32]>> This creates a genuine chicken and egg problem for learners. You can't read the words until you know where they are.

[00:20:39]>> Rubbish. Rubbish. Just for that sentence alone, I wouldn't go anywhere near your app.

[00:20:44]>> You can't know where they are until you can read them.

[00:20:47]>> Rubbish.

[00:20:48]>> Fluent Thai readers solve this unconsciously the way fluent English readers don't sound out every letter.

[00:20:54]The brain pattern matches known words instantly >> because you recognize the vowel frames.

[00:21:01]And it doesn't have to be just known words. You just know the shapes of where those vow frames are. Bang. You got it.

[00:21:09]Bob's your uncle. No sweat.

[00:21:11]>> But reaching that point requires extensive exposure.

[00:21:15]>> Reaching that point requires probably about 3 to 4 days from starting from zero to getting that point. If you're learning with somebody that knows what they're talking about and can lead you through it, it is not difficult. I recommend aside from my stuff. Go and grab yourself uh Bingo's book, Learn Thai in 10 Days. Fantastic. And he can take you through there. Bingo is amazing. Uh he's there at the Duke Language School. They don't sponsor me, by the way, but I think it's a great book. And of course, get my stuff, too.

[00:21:43]But I've built a whole bunch of free tools for you to use there at crackinglanguage.com, too. But between all of that stuff, there's no reason why you couldn't learn the entire script in a couple of days and starting to develop fluency and at least reading it. Maybe you're not understanding, which goes against what she just says exactly what you're reading, but you'll be sounding it out accurately >> because there is no structural shortcut script provides. Modern technology has partially bridged this for learners.

[00:22:13]>> What? Rot.

[00:22:14]>> Digital tit can be parsed by software that inserts visual cues.

[00:22:20]>> What do you mean the software inserts visual cues? I built the algorithm that separates this, but I just based it on basically what a Thai kid's brain's going to do.

[00:22:28]>> The Thai consonant inventory has 44 letters.

[00:22:32]>> The number sounds intimidating, but the reason for it is actually >> again, now notice how she's saying it sounds intimidating, but I'm going to show you how not to be int. It's not intimidating at all. It's just basically a point position, a GPS map of the human mouth, and it's got these points. Now what you've got wrong some will say 46 but there there are reasons why you don't look at the numbers you look at the function and I can tell you most native Thai speakers if you said to somebody can you write ABC a to zed in English most people can do it A bg if you asked a tie to do it unless they're a kindergarten teacher most probably would get to about doan and stop because they don't think of it like that it's a totally different system where the series position of a letter doesn't really matter. It's the function of how the system works which matters >> once you understand what the actual letters are doing. High has around 20.

[00:23:35]>> Now again look at that.

[00:23:38]Okay. Again versus that. Look at that.

[00:23:41]And and there's a reason why she's colorcoded those the way they are. And it just looks like a freaking landmine.

[00:23:48]um a landmine field that you're going to go in and h how on earth are you going to remember that looks so random as opposed to this image on the right here.

[00:23:56]Again, if you see anybody trying to throw this kind of thing at you and saying, "Oh, look at this. This is so confusing. So many consonants." That's just turn off. walk away from them cuz they either don't know what they're talking about or they're just trying to scare you or they want you to go through as much difficulty that they went through when they were learning the Thai language cuz they didn't realize how easy it actually is.

[00:24:22]>> One consonant sounds. So 44 letters for 21 sounds means a significant number of letters are redundant at the level of sound. Several letters that look completely different. So let me just show you why these letters are different. Originally these were totally different in Sanskrit. Okay. So if I pull back to Sanskrit here, there's a perfectly reasonable reason. These were all totally different sounds. So now I mentioned this is the roof of your mouth. So you had three sh we call them sibilent sounds. So you had a sh normal sh like we have in English. You had a sha sha if you're talking the Indian people are talking with a lori tongue.

[00:25:07]So this is a sha. So you've got sha sha and a s.

[00:25:12]>> By the time you got to Thai, the ties didn't have all of those sounds. But because the Buddhist texts were written in Pali, and this is the reason why Thai retains all those letters, all of those are pronounced saw saw. Saw. All of them are saw. And they're actually, if I click on here, they're all actually high class because they're about these classes are throat positions and actions. So all of these are siblings that you blow air through. The reason they kept them there is because they wanted to retain the spelling of the original Pali and Sanskrit words to respect the religion and respect the language. And so if you read something in Thai and you see any of these letters here, you know that it's probably a pi or a Sanskrit word.

[00:26:00]Pali was the spoken language of the Buddha. It was a prit. Sanskrit was the language of academia and knowledge. It was the Sanskrit literally means polished. So the polished language pali was the spoken language. But these you have multiple letters then because one they want to keep a onetoone letter spelling. two sounds that didn't exist in Thai that existed in Sanskrit. So for example, you have this da da da da. You see I have a purple circle or purple enclosure around them because originally they were different sounds but in t these sounds just merged which resulted in a whole bunch of t sounds but they maintain the original differentiation between letter shape. So you can do a onetoone spelling from the Sanskrit and pi. Lao went the other way and they basically got rid of all of those other versions and they just have one letter per sound in each class.

[00:26:58]>> Produce exactly the same consonant when spoken. So why keep them? Because they're not redundant. They're doing a second job. Thai is a tonal length with five tones. Mid, low, falling, high, and rising. And tone and tie is not just a property of how you say a word. It's part of the word. say the same syllable with the wrong tone and you've said a different word.

[00:27:21]>> Okay. Okay. So, we can see these spellings here. Okay. This is how this is modern Thai. Actually, in this tool here that I built, we got 300 different dialects. Okay. And this same system.

[00:27:37]So, you want to go to Isan, the contours change like that. And there actually more. You got what? Eight. If you want to go to northern Thai, look at that.

[00:27:47]You got eight again. You can even go to Cantonese.

[00:27:52]Stop counting tone pitch contours. Every tonal language from China, Vietnam, Thailand has these categories in one way or another. Mandarin lost these dead. We call them we have this voice starts normal, pins a glottal stop and then releases to normal. So that might change thing. That's why the number three tone in Mandarin and even in Cantonese, this um shung is does really weird stuff. In Vietnamese, you've got that and the which represent that same tone and entire the same things happens as well. Your spelling is encoding which box this is in. But every single tonal language runs on this same engine. And Thai back then when they invented the script say for modern Thai didn't just have five tones. Five tones is just central. It's just one snapshot of one T AI Thai dialect, which there are hundreds of dialects. Um, but they all run on the same system. The beautiful thing is if you know how to spell it, you can just use something like this and click over to another dialect. So this word then the word for news rather than cow. If you go to Isan is cow. If you go to the north and this word which was cow in standard Thai becomes cow, your tone contours may change. The throat actions are the main thing the ties are going to be listening out for, not the contours. And almost nobody actually teaches this. And this is why you get so many foreigners pronouncing tones wrong because they think tones are actually just pitch contours. They're not. They're these throat actions which are the cues for the Thai ear >> entirely or no word at all. Thai encodes tone in writing and the primary mechanism for doing that is the consonant class system. Every Thai consonant belongs to one of three classes high mid or low. These classes don't describe the sound of conu they describe its term behavior.

[00:29:53]>> Okay, I showed you that already.

[00:29:54]Syllable's tone is determined by a combination of its consonants class, its vowel class, whether the syllable is open or closed, and the presence or absence of tone marks. This is why Thai has multiple consonants that produce the same sound. The language needed letters from different classes to be able to write the same sound.

[00:30:15]>> It's a chicken and the egg thing in a different way than what she said. The words were already there.

[00:30:21]This just notated them. They didn't come up with these letters because that was a thing. The tones are a product of the nature of what the throat was doing and that's what the letters originally represented. It wasn't like that at all.

[00:30:38]It goes the other way around. But I think for Westerners that have never known it before, they're just trying to wrap their head around it and nobody explained it to them. So they come up with these convoluted reasons, >> different contexts. the letter and the letter >> a C sound, but >> a low class consonant and >> it's a high class consonant.

[00:31:05]>> Use one or the other and you're writing the same sound.

[00:31:08]>> Yeah, but they weren't originally the same sound like I mentioned. And if you go to say that first one there is a different sound. It's in Kam. So only for we're only looking at the snapshot of modern central Thai which is standard Thai now. But this is just one. It just happens that Bangkok became the capital city of modern Thailand. And so that's the dialect they use. But it's different to what the standard was say 800 years ago when they first started using the script from Sukotai.

[00:31:40]It's signaling different tonal behavior for the syllable.

[00:31:45]For a reader who's internalized the system, seeing the consonant immediately tells the tone class, which feeds into the calculation of the final tone.

[00:31:54]>> Yeah. And it's all just based in that map that I showed you.

[00:31:57]>> It happens automatically.

[00:31:59]>> Yes.

[00:31:59]>> For a learner seeing Thai for the first time, it looks like the script has four to four consonants with no reason. The reason that tone is baked into the letters invisibly from the ground up.

[00:32:11]>> Tone is baked into the system.

[00:32:15]And don't call them letters either. I I I guess what else are you going to call?

[00:32:19]But you've got consonants and vowels.

[00:32:21]Tones baked into the syllable.

[00:32:24]>> Yeah. At the vowels. In most alphabetic scripts, L's follow predictable spatial logic. In English, they sit on the same line as consonants, left to right in sequence. In Arabic Hebrew, short vowels are marked above or below the consonant, but they follow the consonant they modify. Thai vowels don't follow spatial rules.

[00:32:45]>> They do follow spatial rules. I just showed you. So, here we have the word Thai. This is the vowel here in yellow.

[00:32:53]That's the frame. And I've in fact even built a tool for you. So, look at this.

[00:32:58]This is G.

[00:33:01]And I want to swap this vowel frame for it. So the I bang G.

[00:33:11]They just clip on.

[00:33:12]>> And above the consonant, below it, to its left, it's right.

[00:33:15]>> Again, these Westerners coming in and say something like that, they're saying it like this to confuse you, saying, "Oh, we have a system." It's not that confusing. It's just a different system.

[00:33:26]It's just not the system that you use to read English because we don't use an alphabet. It's an abuida. And every abugida functions like this.

[00:33:35]>> Split across both sides simultaneously.

[00:33:38]And crucially, a vowel that appears to the left of consonant is still pronounced at >> consonant vow. Consonant vow.

[00:33:45]>> Take this consonant.

[00:33:47]>> This is unaspirated k. So it's not c it's g. Say it with me.

[00:33:56]which produces a K sound at >> unaspirated K not C >> this vowel form to >> E so it's easy we got E K >> it's left and you get >> G >> pronounced K say she's just an actress >> above it and you get >> G cheat >> place >> n >> below it and you get >> but the thing is that's it you're never ever going to get this anywhere else it's the vowel frame clipping below anyone sees that they know it goes it's in that position so have a look at this in English if I write the word cat okay cat you saw the e there And so you go back and your entire vowel sound of the a changes because you saw an e at the end.

[00:34:54]It's no different to what happens in Thai. You're seeing a vow frame here.

[00:34:58]The vow frame is actually more complex because you've got vow plus e at the end creates a different rule against whatever the internal is vow is to do the long version of it. That's no different. What you think it is is actually not what you're actually doing as a native English speaker. And so that is no different to what you're doing in Thai. She's just trying to make it sound complex because then we have the solution. Come and use our app.

[00:35:26]>> And the scripts of Cambodia as much of India. The Brahmic scripts were originally designed for Sanskrit and related languages. Languages that are not total. They have strong vowel notation systems, well organized consonant inventory.

[00:35:41]>> You can see she's just reading this AI slot >> and clear syllable structures. But they were not built with tone in mind because Sanskrit doesn't have phenomic tone.

[00:35:52]>> Actually, Sanskrit did have tone before was like a pitch. So, originally it did.

[00:36:00]>> Here's something worth saying clearly because it reframes the whole picture.

[00:36:05]70 million people read fluently.

[00:36:09]Children in Thailand learn the script in school. Yep.

[00:36:12]>> The same way children in England learn the Latin alphabet. No, they don't. They learn it very differently. They learn it from these books.

[00:36:19]>> The learning curve is longer.

[00:36:21]>> Rubbish.

[00:36:22]>> Thai children typically take more years to reach reading fluency than English speaking children do.

[00:36:27]>> Rubbish.

[00:36:28]>> But they get there. The script is vulnerable. It's in daily use across an entire country.

[00:36:34]>> And I bet that you have something that's going to help us learn it.

[00:36:38]>> In newspapers, on street signs, text messages. What fluent readers have done is internalize a system that looks from the outside like chaos.

[00:36:47]>> No, fluent readers actually already speak it as their mother tongue and they see this system that fits their tongue like a glove.

[00:36:56]>> The consonant classes become intuitive.

[00:36:58]You stop seeing low class consonant and start just seeing the tone. The vowel positions become automatic. Your eye learns to gather from multiple directions without thinking. The >> just like in English, >> word boundaries emerge from pattern recognition built up here's breathing.

[00:37:15]>> Just like in English, >> the no spaces problem, which is the first wall most learners hit, is actually the one that resolves fastest for fluent readers >> because it's not a problem. We have vowel frames that delineate syllable blocks >> because once you know enough words, the boundaries become visible.

[00:37:35]No, it's got nothing to do with how many words you know. It's because you know what the vowels are.

[00:37:41]>> Same way that you can read the cat without spaces because you >> No, that's rubbish. It's because you know that this vow is only going to come here. This vowel is only going to sit on a first letter. You just know it. You don't have to know the and cat to be able to read that in the Thai equivalent.

[00:38:00]>> No, the and cat already. the deeper complexity, the constant class system, the interaction class with syllables.

[00:38:09]>> This is what pisses me off about these systems that try and teach these languages across Asia by some zitface kid probably sitting in their garage in Silicon Valley. They know nothing of them and just think that they can apply these systems to say English or romance languages or let's go and get Asia. Asia is a big market and apply these same things without actually knowing anything. and they just maybe do a chat GPT research and put some AI slop together to try and flog a piece of crap application that doesn't know what it's talking about. Sorry, I just had to vent.

[00:38:42]>> It total works. That takes a but it develops the system that looks impenetrable from the outside is in practice a learnable coat. That just requires understanding what it's actually doing, >> which you don't take a snapshot of that and do not use that to learn Thai if what she's saying is resemblant of what that app does. I'm sorry this was a bit of a long one. I hope that I've been able to shed some light on this system.

[00:39:11]Thai is not an alphabet. It's an abuga.

[00:39:14]It's a beautiful, beautiful, amazing symmetrical system that's used to encode the Thai language. All Thai languages, Lao uses the same system. And basically all the languages of India through Tibet and Dan Bali, Javanese, they've all used this system to encode the language because it's just so brilliant. Once you understand one, it's easy to port across to another which I've built a tool there for you for free. You can jump in at crackinglanguage.com.

[00:39:43]If you are learning Thai, get a copy of Cracking Thai Fundamentals, the book.

[00:39:48]Um, if you want to come and join with us, uh, join Minecraft. Come in at jacademy.com.

[00:39:54]Uh, but I'm not doing this to flog my stuff. I just really want to encourage people to not be put off by rubbish and AI slop like this. I know the lady presenting probably didn't mean to, and she probably really doesn't understand what she's talking about. Um, she's just reading from a script that the marketing department gave her. But it's just really sad that such rubbish is being put out there. And I hope that learners are not put off or led astray. I'm Stuart J. Raj. I'll see you on the other side.