ADVANCED THAI READING AND VOCABULARY BUILDING VOLUME 2 – Different language learners have different needs, skills, and personalities, and therefore they develop different ways in which they adapt to learning a foreign language. Some, like me, have an intense desire to learn to communicate as fast as possible. We learn to speak long before we attempt to read. Others are more visual and need to see something written down in order to learn and remember it. Whichever type you are, if you have picked up this book then you have probably already been working very hard on trying to learn to read Thai.

Like me, you probably went the route of starting with the equivalent of ABC books or the “ ” books, and you’ve been reading everything you can get your eyes on, including street signs, advertising billboards, and restaurant menus. Then you moved on to the “ ” or Thai children stories including probably all of Aesop’s Fables in Thai. Now it might be time to graduate.

Thai newspapers are the logical next step. Thais are great newspaper readers. There are dozens of Thai newspapers that you can buy at almost every street corner. Most newspapers also have an on-line edition. If you read on-line you can also make quick use of on-line Thai/English dictionaries (a list of newspaper and dictionary URLs is given in the appendix). However you read, the problem with Newspaper-Thai is that it is a very different animal than what you have been practicing on. Reading Thai already has its serious difficulties.

Not only are you dealing with a new (and huge) alphabet and unfamiliar vocabulary (newspaper vocab is quite different from everyday Thai), but, just to make a difficult task even harder, Thai doesn’t think that those cute little spaces separating words are important, let alone nice features like full stops or upper case letters for proper nouns.

But newspapers have even more obstacles. Even Thais find interpreting newspaper headlines an almost impossible task. Making things even worse, there are idioms (“ ” literally means “to extinguish” but in Newspaper-Thai it means “to die”, or “to be killed” ), abbreviations (“ .” is an abbreviation for “ ” or policeman, “ .” is just like the English “Dr.”), and contractions (“ ” is a contraction for “ ” meaning stagnant or sluggishness, as in “ ”, “economic stagnation”). These are things that one usually only finds in newsprint. They of course are completely absent from spoken Thai. 5

Headlines in any language are sometimes difficult to read. Some papers, like the New York Times, spell out the story more clearly than others. Thai newspapers are often not very clear. Here’s an example.

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