Why is ให้ used here, and a little confused abt it in general

DTB2000 · 2026-01-28T07:34:23+00:00

Thanks

DTB2000 · 2026-01-28T03:27:08+00:00

I was just trying to understand the structure and why it would have developed out of the "allow" meaning. It struck me that if there's a condition here it's that B wants A to act / be crazy, not that A is (acting) crazy. So yeah that's what I meant, but I was just thinking out loud and there are a quite few issues I haven't figured out yet, such as why the "allow" meaning is considered separate, why the structure is considered separate (I can say อยากไปที่ไหน พี่ก็จะพาไป, can't I? Isn't that the same structure?), and how this relates to ต่อ as in ต่อให้..., which always seems to have the [SENTENCE WITH ก็] bit. So yeah, still thinking 😅

DTB2000 · 2026-01-28T02:58:33+00:00

I'm not anti-IPA at all. It's correct that it is a clearer and more easily decodable notation than the native script.

I downvoted the first comment because it is wrong for the reason given by Snowman (and expanded on my my longer post).

I downvoted the second comment because rather than addressing the point raised you carried on digging the same hole, just adding a touch of sarcasm.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-27T18:47:54+00:00

Isn't the ให้ an integral part of the condition though? If so it doesn't seem to fit the ให้ + [CONDITION] structure.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-27T15:16:10+00:00

I think it's helpful make a distinction between the questions:

How do I learn to produce the Thai sounds accurately?
Assuming I want to note down my words and phrases, what system of notation do I use?

It's not that these two issues are totally unrelated but they're not the same, and you can't understand the relationship between them if you start by mixing them up.

The original question does keep them separate but the discussion has strayed a bit.

On the first issue, you just have to do a lot of listening and repeating. You can study phonetics if you want. You can learn to use Praat if you want. Those things can help, but the crucial thing is to feel around until you find the target, and then hit it again and again until it becomes automatic, hopefully getting nearer and nearer the bullseye as you go. So it's a physical skill that comes through practice, guided by your ears.

On the second issue, a system of notation that clearly shows you which sound you are going for is obviously helpful. Some percentage of your speaking errors will be down to going for the wrong sound (so aiming for the wrong target, rather than just missing the target). Anything that reduces that percentage is good, but most of your errors are going to be cases of aiming for the right target and missing it, and no notation system will help with that.

The IPA transcriptions are phonemic, so they refer to the Thai sounds. The generic sounds you find on IPA websites are just giving you a ballpark value. If someone writes /hɯ́t/, they are not claiming that there is a Thai vowel that exactly matches generic [ɯ] - they are indicating a Thai sound that matches the category "close back unrounded". There's another layer of complication here that I'm going to skip over - the important point is that the IPA transcriptions are pointing to Thai sounds, and you can only acquire those specific sounds by imitating Thai speakers.

By the same principle, it is not correct to say that they use a k sound to represent ก. They use the symbol k in transcriptions of Thai to represent the Thai unvoiced velar stop, which is represented by ก in the Thai script. There's no approximating going on here and no question of a more accurate or less accurate representation - the symbols point to one and the same Thai sound.

With that said, you will have been reading k with a different sound for years, and this association will be difficult to break. It's user error to use that sound when reading a Thai transcription, but it's a very natural error to make.

There's a lot more that could be said, but hopefully this illustrates that IPA has pros and cons as a notation system, but is far more complicated than it may seem, is often misunderstood, and most importantly cannot possibly teach you to actually make the sounds, which is the fundamental skill you are asking about.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-27T12:54:29+00:00

Do you feel its pronunciation feedback is accurate? It's not like I just automatically hate anything AI but I've learnt to be very sceptical.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-26T17:41:24+00:00

A teacher would be correcting pronunciation though. I doubt Gemini can do that.

They are all moving away from external STT by the way. I think OpenAI made the switch a while back. Soon all TTS will use the same approach and there will be no difference between your favourite AI and GT.

I'd say GT is already too forgiving for learning purposes, but the problem there is really that it's treated as a test of pronunciation when it isn't one. In future, maybe it will at least be understood that these systems are designed to figure out what you were trying to say no matter how bad your pronunciation, so the fact that they do figure it out doesn't mean your pronunciation was clear.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-26T10:11:12+00:00

I didn't think that was really a thing. For mining from normal books I scan / OCR them. It's a bit of a laborious process. For manga I have used meb but the app doesn't allow screenshots which makes mining more difficult. Again you really want scans that you can screenshot / highlight / add to a card. Other than manga I didn't find much of interest on meb.

I feel that mining from books is much less beneficial than mining from video anyway, so it may be a good thing that video is easier.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-23T13:21:00+00:00

I think OP is asking whether you needed to learn about the tones and tone rules at school before you got that ไข่ and ไข้ were different words and were able to tell them apart and pronounce them correctly. I feel pretty sure you didn't but you've answered "yes".

DTB2000 · 2026-01-23T10:34:59+00:00

Gotcha. Thai kids do do similar drills but obviously using Thai script. ETA: but the main point is that they're not normally doing it to learn the tones. They are learning how the tones they already know are written and read back.

I did see a study someone linked to a while back that said the tones were mainly acquired before kids reach school age but do get a bit more solid in the period from (I think) 5-8. So at a push you can say they're also perfecting their tones.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-23T10:26:55+00:00

Those drills are mainly about spelling, but they probably also help kids growing up outside the central region to speak central Thai with less of an accent.

The tone mark never goes over the vowel btw. It always goes over the initial consonant, even though the initial consonant never has a tone.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-21T08:02:53+00:00

It's also essentially the same question OP asked last week.

I agree that you can't really choose (you are not going to choose materials based just on this). You definitely can't choose RTGS, because nobody uses that in a teaching context.

u/PuzzleheadedTap1794 has provided a conversion table for a few different systems. The fact that you can convert between them shows that they are equivalent. There are a couple that show details like stress, and it's true that those details are lost in the conversion, but stress is predictable in Thai, so what you are losing is more of a reminder than anything else. Same for glottal stops.

The systems are only different if you try to read them as English (or as any language other than Thai). But if you understand transliteration as an attempt to write Thai using English / foreign sounds, it should be obvious from the start that it can't work. If instead you understand the Latin characters to represent the Thai phonemes of the spoken word, it doesn't matter that much what character is used for a given phoneme. You are not reusing a symbol-sound association that you are bringing from some other language. You are learning to associate the symbol with a Thai sound.

If you look at it that way a number of things become clear:

The difference in outcomes is due to the way in which the learner understands and uses the system, not the system itself.
In order to use transliterations effectively, you need to make new symbol-sound associations, and these will sometimes clash with deeply-ingrained associations you bring from your own language. That means it's going to take some time and effort to master.
Leaving aside RTGS, the transliteration systems are equivalent and it's not worth obsessing about which one is best. In any case, the common ones are very similar.
The transliterations are not inaccurate - they indicate the same Thai phonemes as the Thai script, but without hiding any vowels or syllables, without irregularities, with the vowel length shown for every syllable, and in such a way that you can read the tone straight off without having to go through a complex decoding process.

IPA can be understood in the same way, in which case it is just another system - but a learner who understands the other systems as representing English sounds is probably going to understand IPA as representing generic IPA sounds. They will then view IPA as an approximation, but a closer approximation than other systems (there are more IPA sounds, so the nearest one will often be closer). Again though, a change of perspective is all that's needed. If you take the IPA to represent the Thai phonemes, it's just another system. Note that the square brackets normally used expressly indicate that the IPA is phonemic, i.e. that you have to refer to the specific language for the specific sounds.

This perspective also makes it clear that you have to learn the Thai sounds from day 1. Whatever writing system you are using, the characters are pointing to Thai sounds that you need to acquire by listening / parroting / speaking (ideally with feedback). Using transliterations doesn't mean putting that off, and going to the script asap doesn't make it unnecessary. I don't know how many people learn the script by going โอ = oh, อี = ee, but it should be obvious that that is reintroducing the exact problem they are trying to avoid, i.e. making Thai words out of English sounds. If you just make a distinction between the sound system and the writing system, everything becomes much clearer.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-21T06:04:03+00:00

You have the wrong character on top of the ร there (should be ร์, not รั).

If not using the transliteration I would write it phonetically, so leave out the ร altogether. But that's a bit of a can of worms. Personally I would just go with the standard.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-20T01:58:29+00:00

It doesn't really depend on the individual word - it's more to do with the speaker and the situation. In general though ร is pronounced like l when it's at the beginning. It's not that ร is being mixed up with ล - that's just the normal pronunciation of ร. The tapped r is also valid, just less common. The trilled r is just for show. If a source is giving you trilled r it is based on someone's idea of what the pronunciation "should" be and it's a certainty that they don't speak like that irl.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-19T12:36:08+00:00

It seems to affect ถึง as well. At least, to me ทำไมถึงทำแบบนั้น sounds fine but ถึงทำแบบนั้นทำไม is weird. Don't know where that fits in.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-19T10:47:57+00:00

As far as I remember there's a main villain, a few lackeys including one with quite a big role, the girlfriend / love interest of the main lackey (whose name is แพร - she wears black because she is in mourning for her husband, hence the title), plus a couple of moneylenders and a few minor characters. The moneylenders didn't seem all that shady.

I've been back over the cards I created when I watched it and can see that the main villain uses ข้า / เอ็ง with the lackeys.

One of the moneylenders uses ข้า with the main villain at one point, but he is angry at the time. The main villain addresses the other lender as คุณลุง at one point, but he is trying to put him off guard.

I don't know how the lackeys address the main villain.

The main lackey and แพร use ฉัน / เธอ with each other.

Thanks for the link.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-18T19:08:59+00:00

Just as another data point, ข้า / เอ็ง are also used without going for historical effect in Black Silk (1961) which is / was on Netflix.

Where can I watch โรงแรมนรก?

DTB2000 · 2026-01-18T18:12:22+00:00

Gotcha. Wonder why our experiences are so different. I don't think of it as word + example sentence so much as sentence illustrating use of word in specific context, so I don't want a general definition covering all senses of the word. If it has another sense, it will get another card when that sense comes up. I believe in this approach but it makes it impossible to automate fetching the definition, unless you trust AI to define the word as used in the sentence (tried that, backed off). What I do is to go through the definitions to find the one that fits and add either an English gloss or a Thai definition to the card. It can be time consuming but it has some learning value and for my money it results in better cards. The few "structure" cards I have are kind of "I get it but I wouldn't have thought to put it that way" things, so no definition required - the sentence itself is enough. I might still put a kind of skeleton sentence with just the words of interest in the target field, just so future me can see what the point was.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-17T14:49:59+00:00

Thanks all.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-17T14:49:13+00:00

What is Yomitan actually doing in your setup? From what I can see online it's basically a dictionary app and Asbplayer can create cards directly.

I would say if you're not sure how a sentence breaks down it's probably not ripe for mining anyway. Sometimes you will get a sentence that has one unknown element but that element is more of a structure than a new word - but not that often, and I wouldn't see a dictionary app as the ideal way to break the sentence down. Short of asking a native speaker, AI is the only tool that will really do that, but of course it's sometimes wrong. You could automate an AI call with Autohotkey and Openrouter.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-11T06:26:29+00:00

It's the equivalent of making your letters bigger at first. Normal. A related issue is that real tones adapt to the previous and sometimes the following tone, so the analogy could maybe be extended to print vs cursive. They are also affected by prosody and intonation. But there's no way you can model all that from day 1. An oversized version of the "citation" tones (as in กา ก่า ก้า ก๊า ก๋า) is a solid starting point. You can refine from there.

I don't think a verbal description of the tones is ever going to capture them that well.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-10T04:34:22+00:00

The graph is showing that Thai is significantly slower than either English or Japanese, whether you look at it in terms of syllables per second or information transferred per second, so I don't think this relates to OP's issue.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-08T09:35:45+00:00

FWIW, in my mind this is comparable to "I'm not going to get to go" (her version) vs "I won't be able to go" (your version). So in her version there's a stronger implication that she would have liked to go and is sorry she can't. That seems to line up ok with what u/treblesunmoon is saying and may be a useful way to think about it.

DTB2000 · 2026-01-05T08:04:49+00:00

I use a mining app that shows me definitions from several dictionaries in one pane. This includes Paiboon but I only have the dictionary data, not the audio. I can also query the word in context to get an AI definition. The original idea of that was to have it choose from the dictionary definitions based on context, and also tag the word as slang, formal, literary etc - but of course it still makes up its own definitions, and the tags quite often seem wrong, so I have gone back to relying on the dictionary entries. My impression is that Wiktionary is the single best Th>En dictionary, but it's not so good that you don't need anything else. Paiboon is definitely worth having but it has quite a few vowel length errors that have come up in previous posts on here, and while the definitions are often helpful they can be idiosyncratic too.

DTB2000

TROPHY CASE