Comments on: TV Method Thai

By: L2 Holy Grail Books | babelhut.com

L2 Holy Grail Books | babelhut.com — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:55:37 +0000

[...] the time, I had just made a commitment to watch 1000 hours of Thai TV and learn Thai. Since I seemed to be on the path already, I entered [...]

By: thomas

thomas — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:41:11 +0000

@Noa: The whole idea is to not use a second language (English) at all to help me learn Thai. That’s the method. By immersing myself in Thai audio (and video), I am completely relying on my ears and eyes to observe and figure everything out myself. It’s a neat idea, and there isn’t a lot of data on it, so I’m volunteering to be one of the lab rats.

I’m not dogging using a dictionary. I use one everyday, for Japanese (and books and an SRS too!). But now I found an opportunity to start a new language with a (to me) new method. Clean slate, I’m going for it.

By: Noa

Noa — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:29:25 +0000

@thomas

“Watching Thai dramas without knowing Thai has been a lot of fun for me, so in that sense it’s not a waste of time.”

I didn’t mean that. I’m not against watching dramas. What I’m saying is you are slowing yourself by not using your own language. You can watch it with thai subtitles or find and read the script, and look up words you don’t know. So instead of hearing a word 10 times before you learn it, you can look it up the first time, and reinforce it when you hear it 9 more times.

“Is it possible to learn Thai only using Thai? Sure. Thai people do it. Can I do it? I’m going to try!”

Sure it is possible. Thai people learn it that way because they don’t know any other language they can use to learn it. But it takes a very long time for them to learn, even though they live in Thailand and hear it all the time.

By: Ramses

Ramses — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:24:04 +0000

@Noa: That’s not true. Have you ever tried the immersion method? If not: please try it first before attacking it.

By: thomas

thomas — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:46:12 +0000

@Noa: You could be right. I’ve never used the TV Method before, so I have no idea if it will work well or not. The primary reason I’m doing it this way is to try it out and be a guinea pig for the method. It’s an experiment. The whole idea is not to use my native language as an anchor into the new language. Does looking things up in a dictionary (and thus thinking about Thai in English) slow me down in the long run? It might. Is it possible to learn Thai only using Thai? Sure. Thai people do it. Can I do it? I’m going to try!

Watching Thai dramas without knowing Thai has been a lot of fun for me, so in that sense it’s not a waste of time. I look forward to watching Thai TV everyday. It’s intellectually stimulating for me to figure out the meaning of something from a big garbled mess of sounds that I’m not familiar with. I’m approaching Thai like it’s a big puzzle to solve, and using a dictionary is like peeking at the answer book.

By: Noa

Noa — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:21:02 +0000

I think you are wasting your time. Babies don’t know any language to start with, so they have to use that method. But you know at least one, so you don’t have to hear a word a thousand times to learn it. You can just look up the dictionary. Writing comes last for kids because thay can’t properly handle a pencil, but you can. Writing the language greatly helps you to learn how to read it, especially if it has a writing system that is new to you.

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:05:37 +0000

Hey Thomas! Thanks for the compliments.
This is a really good post too!
Looking forward to reading more.

By: thomas

thomas — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:13:38 +0000

@Ramses: I sure will. I’ll cross the 10 hour mark today, so I’ll make my first progress report after that. The drama I’m watching now has 1.5 hour episodes, and I’ve been watching an episode a day. One nice thing about YouTube is that the 10 minute limit for videos gives you a lot of good stopping points to take a break :)

@rikker: I was really happy to find a lot of Thai dramas on YouTube. I had to do some digging to find the one without subtitles though. :) Hour 1000 seems so far away. Hope I get there soon!

By: rikker

rikker — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:18:07 +0000

There’s an insane amount of Thai TV on YouTube these days. I’ll be interested to learn where you are around hour 1000. Keep it up! :)

By: Ramses

Ramses — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:54:31 +0000

Wow Thomas, KEEP US UPDATED!

I know a big portion of my Spanish skills is because of watching TV (I do it more than anything else) and listening Spanish music. But still, I read books, write e-mails and do SRS sentences in Spanish. I’d love to start with Mandarin one day and wanted to go about it with the AJATT method (the method I use for Spanish), but this might be nice for the first (lets say) 500-1000 hours of input: TV ONLY (oh, with some cool Mandarin hip-hop, of course).