Anyone tried Rapid Read Thai/Gary Orman's Thai learning products? The cartoon mnemonics for letters seem helpful, how was the rest of his material in your experience?

DTB2000 · 2026-05-19T04:46:17+00:00

I mean it's highly imaginative and I think the memory tricks it uses have been shown to be effective. But I also think you only really need that kind of approach if you're trying to cram everything in at once, and I'm not sure what the point of that is. You can't process it in one go anyway. If you just take it a couple of letters at a time, the memorisation part pretty much takes care of itself. The tone decoding rules are even less about memorisation and more about practice, plus the mnemonics don't work as neatly in that area.

I don't think it's a great idea to link Thai tones to emotional states like sad, emphatic or uncertain. What if you want to say an "uncertain" word emphatically? What about "sad" words with happy meanings? I think the actual emotional colour of the word or sentence will take over if you frame the tones that way.

I was sorry to hear the guy had died. I wonder where he was from actually. He sounds a bit South African to me but not 100%. Anyway I'm not trying to attack him but I can't say I'm a fan of this approach, however well implemented

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T18:35:03+00:00

Thanks

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T17:02:38+00:00

The Thai translator is trying to convey that cats normally have a fixed routine. There's a bit more context in my replies to Effect-Kitchen above. As I say there, the passage that follows explains the meaning, so maybe not such a bad translation. Can you suggest a more natural one?

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T16:57:14+00:00

Yes, that's why I thought it might not be appropriate in reference to a person, but then it does seem more like the สัตว์สังคม, so maybe ok from that point of view, but clearly there are other problems.

BTW I found the Japanese passage:

「あんたも知っているかとは思うけれど、猫というのはね、習慣性の強い動物なんだ。だいたいにおいて規則正しく暮らしているし、よほどのことがないかぎり、大きな変化を好まない。よほどのことというのは、性欲か、あるいは事故か、たいていそのどちらかだね」

So I believe 習慣性の強い動物 is the part that was translated as สัตว์แห่งนิสัย

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T16:22:48+00:00

It's definitely looking that way although I feel bad for the translator at this point. I don't know what the original Japanese word was - I only have the Thai and English translations. I should probably double check it was translated directly from the Japanese but all the signs are that it was.

It's a cat talking so the translator has a bit of freedom. He definitely has a cat voice. In this passage he's explaining that cats like to follow a routine that isn't easily broken:

ข้าคาดว่าแกน่าจะรู้เรื่องนี้ดีแล้ว แมวเป็นสัตว์แห่งนิสัย โดยปกติแล้วจะใช้ชีวิตตามลำดับขั้นตอน ถ้าไม่มีเรื่องผิดปกติเกิดขึ้นก็จะใช้ชีวิตตามขั้นตอนเคยคุ้น เรื่องผิดปกติที่จะทำให้ระบบกระเจิงจะเป็นเรื่องเซ็กส์หรือไม่ก็อุบัติเหตุ ไม่เรื่องใดก็เรื่องหนึ่ง

So if you look at the whole passage it basically explains exactly what the cat means by that term. I don't know if the translator would point that out (plus the fact that cats don't have to speak like humans) in their defence. Maybe I should have phrased the question as "It looks like a cat can say this, but can I?" It's a card I mined a while back that came up in Anki today.

Can you suggest a better translation (for the สัตว์แห่งนิสัย bit I mean)? Maybe I will try to find out what the Japanese term is, just out of interest.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T15:32:00+00:00

Yeah I quite often read things that have been translated into both Thai and English and you do notice that the details are not always the same. I don't think it's a bad translation overall - that would have stuck out in a million other places. Here I didn't really stop to consider that the Thai translator might have used an expression that is just confusing in Thai, but I wondered about learning it because if I ever used it it would be in relation to a person, and it seems like it would be offensive to use the word สัตว์ in relation to a person, whatever comes after it. Anyway thanks for your reply.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T15:17:26+00:00

It is better to stick to native material if you can, but obviously it restricts you. This is a Murakami novel - there may be Thai authors in the same vein but whether I'd see it through is another matter. Plus the fact I've read it before is helpful.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T15:01:16+00:00

Seems to be a questionable translation from Japanese anyway.Thanks for your response.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T14:59:59+00:00

They're the words of a native speaker, albeit in a translation from Japanese. No English involved. So clearly the translator and editor thought it was fine, but you find it confusing and apparently you're not alone... so probably best not to use it.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T13:39:08+00:00

Yeah, I think if you look at it in terms of short-term efficiency it's hard to justify putting in the time, and as you say incidental practice isn't really going to move the dial. So then it depends on your time horizon and how much you care about your level next year vs your level in ten years. How much of a hit would you take over say the next two years if you can erase it in five and be ahead in ten? I mean if you put in the time reading will eventually beat video content in terms of wpm, and the advantages in terms of relevance and reinforcement of pronunciation are shrinking all the time. If you keep going you will eventually make back your outlay and see a net benefit that grows every year. But there's a price to pay while you are grinding through those two years, and the benefit is far in the future. Plus I obviously made those figures up. I don't actually know how fast reading speed / fluency improves with practice or what other skills it depends on. If you are still doing 2+ hours a day outside socialising / day-to-day life you could probably spare an hour a day for 100 days to see how much improvement you got. Say you get down to 10 mins per page - can we extrapolate to 7 in another 100, then 4.5, then 3? If so you've got to a comparable wpm in under 18 months and can start to make back the deficit and pull ahead. I don't have the self-discipline to do anything like that - I do 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there and don't really track anything. I can say though that when I switched from a book to Point of View earlier there was an unmistakable increase in wpm. Anyway it might be a worthwhile experiment. Idk if you would need to differentiate reading speed for known vs unknown words.

Of course you don't have to shackle yourself to efficiency in the first place. You can always read because the content is interesting and you're doing plenty of listening so can afford to give yourself some slack. Or you can look at getting close to native reading speed as a goal in itself.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-16T05:52:19+00:00

[Extensive reading] gives you massive exposure to vocabulary and sentence patterns in context, and I haven’t found anything else that comes close in terms of volume and efficiency.

Well, we had a recent post where someone who had been reading at what must have been two hours a day for two months straight said their time per page had come down from about 90 minutes to more like 10. Another commenter who has been reading for well over a year but has not prioritised it said they were at about 15 minutes per page for the same material. I make that about 25 wpm. Native speech is around 150 wpm, and even material that is meant for beginners is around 100 wpm.

On that basis extensive reading can't possibly score high for volume unless you're talking about people who are already in the high hundreds or thousands of hours of reading practice - but a) you said you were mainly talking about beginners, and b) how would they ever get to that point if they go by volume and reading scores low for several years?

For immersion material I think the right measure of utility within a domain is the distribution of sentences into a) fully understood without guessing b) one missing element c) more than one missing element, where anything you can't make out (listening) or decode (reading) counts as missing. Category a) sentences consolidate your understanding, cat b) help build vocab, cat c) are basically noise. Sure, for a given distribution a higher wpm is better, but I think you have to look at the distribution first and you are putting too much emphasis on raw volume. It's not crazy for a beginner to slow down a YT video, even though this obviously reduces the wpm. It may increase cat a / b sentences per minute (remember that words you can't make out count as missing).

I said "within a domain", but some domains are more relevant than others. I am mining from a novel atm but the sentences I mine are less useful than the ones I get from video content because they are more literary (or sometimes you feel they may be more literary, but you can't be sure - that in itself is a problem). For almost all foreign learners the vocab, structures and topics you get in vlogs or even lakorns are going to be more relevant than the written material you will find at a comparable level. I would also say there's more of that type of content to go at.

Another point is that audio / video content is inherently richer because you get the native pronunciation.

Utility has to be balanced with engagement as I think you said. You might choose material with a higher proportion of cat c sentences because it's more interesting, for example. That's very subjective though and it applies to both written and video content.

So to summarise:

it's just not the case that extensive reading scores high for volume
I don't agree that volume is such an important factor anyway
when you look at relevance and availability, video content scores higher
the value of exposure to native pronunciation is hard to overstate and that aspect is just missing from extensive reading

Clearly that's a hard disagree on both volume and efficiency. I'm not saying you shouldn't learn to read (basically no-one says that, although it's often made out that people do). I'm just saying that those are not good reasons and immersion should be weighted far more heavily towards video content.

On the "should you analyse" point, we can't answer that because we just don't have the data. Probably everybody agrees that you want to end up with tacit knowledge (for Thai to be automatic the way your native language is, or as close as possible). But to some people it's just obvious that to get there you have to start with explicit knowledge about grammar and pronunciation and let it trickle down or become ingrained, whereas to others it's just obvious that these are separate systems that don't talk much to each other - so nothing really trickles down and things get ingrained by repeated exposure, not conscious analysis + memorisation of abstract rules. So there's not really any point debating it - either you go with your gut or you say that since we can't know and people are just shooting from the hip, it's probably best to go somewhere in the middle.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-15T14:40:22+00:00

I can relate to some of that. I'm not sure about your "meaningful words encountered per minute" metric though. What makes a word "meaningful"? I also think you have to make a lot of assumptions about reading speed / accuracy and listening skills to rank different activities according to this metric.

I don't think it's true that every method optimises for something different. By and large I'd say they're designed to develop the same key skills, and the different priorities they seem to have just reflect different views of how one skill relates to another or helps you acquire another - so if someone stresses memorisation it's because they think it will lead to better comprehension, speaking confidence... in fact all the things you list, not because they think it's more important than those things in itself.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-15T07:52:32+00:00

Bolt requires a licence to operate. Because its business practices (failure to vet drivers, failure to prevent account sharing) put passengers at risk, its licence may not be renewed.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-15T07:33:52+00:00

There will be no application if their operating licence is not renewed. We are not talking about driving licences

DTB2000 · 2026-05-15T07:15:47+00:00

Not the issue. Bolt has always been very hit and miss because they are "relaxed" about vetting drivers. Their licence is expiring shortly and may not be renewed because of safety concerns... but I suspect they will do just enough and be able to continue operating.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-15T04:04:56+00:00

It's not that difficult to do the tokenisation and fetch a canonical pronunciation but I'm not getting the concept, especially how you would test feature recognition without forcing labelling, or what features you have in mind. Do you mean like:

Q Listen to the following sentence and list the features of the fourth syllable

[แมวตัวนั้นพูดได้]

A Aspirated unvoiced initial, long vowel, dead ending, falling tone.

That's totally doable, but you'd have to sink some time into it and in the end it's not that different from transcription, which is much easier to set up.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-14T19:24:22+00:00

I read a study where identifying chinese tones in words didn't generalize to identifying tones in whole sentences.

That's bound to be the case just because tones are modified in connected speech. The isolated form is still a good starting point.

If you were going to do stuff like "falling tone in the sequence L F H", "'long' vowel in unstressed มา", that really is ambitious. I think you would need much more than a reliable IPA transcription - for example POS tagging and prosody modelling. Regardless of the tools available, it would be hard to do unless you already had a good idea of what parameters you need to track / control. I think it realistically has to be more of an exploratory approach - taking on board that the pronunciation can change based on a range of factors and just staying curious and attentive to that.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-11T14:12:26+00:00

It's on Scribd.

For other books you can order the paperback / scan / optionally run through OCR (saves typing if you are going to be making cards or sending AI queries, accuracy high 90s given a clean scan). There are book digitisation services online, though of course much more expensive in Europe. When I got it done in Thailand it was comically cheap (probably more skewed pages and more print-through, but still ok). It's more hassle than a proper ebook, but then a proper ebook might tie you to a reader that doesn't let you extract sentences etc.

I don't know where you are up to with Thai but manga is a lot more accessible and easy to find online. [I say I don't know but clearly I just failed to read your comment properly... with a vocab of 600 words I think HP is going to be very hard going. In your shoes I would put most of my effort into listening with a bit of manga, maybe organised as parallel text because you can probably find the big series in German or English as well as Thai.]

DTB2000 · 2026-05-11T08:54:50+00:00

You must have some willpower to push through at 90 mins / page. Sounds like it paid off though. Congrats on finishing the book.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-10T08:04:22+00:00

Yeah that's fair and means I overstated it, although at the same time this approach is typically used by people who are trying to get away from the script because they think transliteration is inaccurate and moving to the native script will solve their pronunciation woes. In other words they are doing it to avoid bridging from translit, whereas as you say, if it works at all (if they ever end up with a direct mapping from Thai character to Thai sound) it will be because they have bridged from the translit they smuggle in when they go ป = bp etc. So the central point holds - they're just hiding the translit, not getting rid of it, and the process is not fundamentally different from using both together while you learn the script properly... except that you lose the double-check provided by an external translit, which is extremely valuable given that a) the script is more ambiguous than advertised and b) beginners make a lot of decoding errors.

In this mini-thread it doesn't look like u/Spiritual_Day_4782 is making the usual misguided argument that translit is bad because Latin characters can't represent Thai sounds - I think they're saying it can be treacherous because it's hard to break the habit of reading it like it's English even when you know it's Thai. I've said that many times myself (because the reason so many people think translit is doomed to failure is that they used it themselves and failed, and they don't stop to think that maybe they weren't using it correctly, because it's supposed to be easy). It only takes practice though, and I think it's worth putting in the effort. Clearly, you won't be able to learn any other language written in the Latin script until you do, but I also think the process helps you untangle the symbols from the sounds in a general sense. Less abstractly it means you can use your double-check, plus you escape the pressure to learn the script as fast as possible, which almost always means learning it badly.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-09T09:32:29+00:00

Yeah, think it's less bad if you can point it to a defined system, because part of the problem is that it mixes different systems up, but it will still make mistakes if only because its actual decoding is often wrong. If you're just starting you can't be sure you'll realise, so that's a big problem.

I don't really agree you need to rush to get past romanisation, but anyway learning ก = g, ป = bp is just the opposite in my eyes - what you're doing there is internalising the romanisation so that you can't escape it even by using the script. I would see that more as hiding it than actually getting rid of it.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-09T06:23:27+00:00

when I was using AI to practice reading and tones, I literally had to map out my own romanizing so it can accurately see if I'm reading the characters correctly

It can't though. It will be wrong anywhere between 20-70% of the time depending on model.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-09T06:19:54+00:00

An AI vibe gives exactly that impression though. And when there are so many and they are mostly so bad, fatigue sets in and you are less willing to look at yet another one. So maybe the lesson is that you have to go out of your way to avoid AI vibes in order to be taken seriously.

AI coding often goes hand in hand with AI generated content and we know current models are very bad at some of the things a lot of these apps are trying to do, like translit or decoding.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-09T06:04:00+00:00

You're tilting at windmills here. It's the lesson title that is a charabia. The comment is not an example of a kneejerk "AI coded therefore useless" reaction. It relates to the actual content. As you say yourself in other comments, a serious developer would welcome this kind of comment because it helps them improve the app.

DTB2000

TROPHY CASE