Chinese is definitely way harder to learn because you have memorize the pinyin spelling, the tone, and the character. Whereas in Thai, the phonetic script, albeit very complicated, tells you both pronunciation and tone within itself.
But there's no syllable separator in Thai. Imagine written tieng Viet not as "etyng eVyt", which is clear, but as "etyngevyt", which is not. The systematic sound change is not a thing for learners, which can be easily managed, but the lack of syllable separator is.
@@GyacoYu oh yeah! the lack of space between words in thai is really changeling, but the more thai words you learn, the more easier it gets to separate them!
@@renatam.r.6762 i can't say anything about chinese as i've never learnt it! as for the thai language, if you are REALLY INTERESTED, well, try (1) to memorize the 45 or so of THAI CONSONANTS (a few are obsolete or seldom used). they are divided into three groups, low, middle, high. (2) learn three tone marks called "máy thoo, máy trii, may cáttawa", and you'll be surprized how "easy" it is to read thai! now, everybody (i think!) will tell you this, there is one big hurdle when learning thai: there is no space between words, indeed! like, for instance, in "ตอนนี้ผมเรียนภาษาไทย"= at the present time, i study thai" . oh yeah, you've got to learn how to separate words. and it requires some time consuming practice :-), i reckon. as for the thai vowels (it's difficult to explain here), they follow "naturally"! i needed not to memorize them, anyway.
@@piquedard Thanks. It's hard for me because my language is Portuguese and my language has sounds and symbols more regulars. Thai and even English changes the sound a lit bit more. I try sometimes learn the word, like in Arabic too and not the system, but I see Thai has regularity with the sounds.
I'm Thai, I can speak Chinese and I know the basic system of Sanskrit language. I totally agree with you that foreigner should learn Thai by its alphabet, it's easier than using Roman alphabet. The sound of the language derives from Sanskrit as you explain as well as most of Thai vocabulary. I think Thai and Chinese people can learn each other's language easily with similarity of the tone of the language even though the sentence structure is comparably different, but it's not that hard. The only difficulty in learning Chinese for me is its characters which took me half a year to memorize.
agree, I’m Thai too so I think if learn Chinese for speaking maybe not much difficult but for writing or reading is difficult to memorize same as you said
@@maxpaper2560 I think Chinese people are more advantageous for pronunciation but I'm not sure about alphabets. There are 44 letters in our language, but some of them pronounced the same, you just group it. The reason for redundancy in the letter sound just because of the Sanskrit roots. The difficult part is you have to remember how to spell, which alphabets to use , if you just prefer only basic conversation, I think that's not problem just to learn speaking and basic writing. 🙂
I'm Mexican, my native language is Spanish. I'm learning Chinese (it's so hard) but I'd like to learn Thai like my next language. I love your culture and language Thai friends. 👍
También estoy tratando de aprender chino, pero wow estoy entre o aprender el mandarín o el cantones. Mas aprendiendo los caracteres simplificados y las tradicionales. 🥲 Está fuerte pero de veras es un lenguaje muy interesante así que no me rindo.
I love the language so much because of how it sounds (very exotic for a french person like me). I also love the food, the architecture, traditional clothing, cinema, khon theatre, sak yant, muay thai, the history of the country and I think that thai people are jovial. Your culture is very attractive to me and that's why I want to learn thai.
I’ll be honest, after becoming a fan of Lisa and lakorns, I want to watch my lakorns without waiting for them to be English subbed and after to seeing the beautiful places in the lakorns, I’m going to visit
I‘m a native speaker of Chinese, I majored in Thai Language and Culture when I was in college. For me the alphabet and writing system is quite hard, but once you get through that, everthing gets much easier. So for who is just starting learning Thai and think it's too difficult, don't worry, things will get better after you finish the alphabet part. And I think Thai is easier for Chinese to learn than who speak English as their native language, because the Chinese grammar system is more similar to Thai than English, HAHAHA...
Yes I agree, I have Chinese friend who self study by watching Thai drama. They can understand and speak Thai very fluently. Compare with me that I cannot speak Chinese as fluent as them speak Thai even I watch so many Chinese drama. So that's why I think Thai language will be easier. And of course for reading and writing skills, you no need to remember too much characters and stroke.
I thought Chinese has many similarities to English. It was easier to teach Chinese by speaking English explanation, but too many things in Thai are just the opposite, which is tricky to remember. And the Thai alphabet is just pure hell.... I'm struggling!
I'm Thai, but I still think my language is difficult. Anyone who wants to learn our language must have a patience.I'm very glad that you would like to learn our language.
Living in China for 2 years. My advice in regards to learning characters (汉字), learn it like they learn it. Start with learning basic characters and the correct stroke order. Then move on to studying the radicals. Do a lot of repetition. Don’t try to use mental shortcuts to memorize, or the “Chineasy” technique of interpreting the meaning from the visual aspect of the character. This works for very few characters and is more of a novelty than anything. Learning the radicals will actually enable you to infer meaning/tone from characters you’ve never seen before, or are having trouble remembering. That’s just my experience!
I'm Malaysian of Chinese descent (Hakka-Cantonese to be precise) and I'm currently learning Thai. So I'm pretty blessed to be able to converse professionally in Malay, English, Mandarin, Cantonese and hopefully Thai in the near future 🙏🏻 I had learnt basic Japanese before but forgotten the hiragana and katakana after a few years of non-active usage. Hoping to be a full-fledged polyglot one day!
Thai pronunciations and its upper case and lower case writing is very complicated. Due to ancient caste culture. The honorific version of Thai language when you speaking to royal family menbers, the sangha Buddhist bhikku or bhikkuni or even higher rank society people can be tricky and confusing to learn. Chinese wise is the confusion of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are not just difficult to write and remember, many characters shared the same pronunciation can be utterly confusing if you apply in verbal conversation without seeing the characters. At the same time, the same Chinese character might have totally different application and meaning in classical, old and ancient Chinese.
True. And also, difficulties vary with native speakers of different languages. An American will find Japanese writing system hard to learn but not will Chinese since there is Kanji.
I’m Australian and I learnt both Mandarin and Thai, I found Chinese easy to pronounce, but it took 10 years to be fluent at reading, but I found Thai pronunciation hard, but easy to learn the vocabulary, and I found the grammar easy , maybe it was easy for me to learn cuz I was living in the country, whereas I learnt Chinese without even going to the country
Love it. I learned faster Japanese after remembering hiraganas, then kanji learning went easier too. What good advices. I really wanna learn Thai and Chinese from you.
My mother tongue is mandarin and I grew up in Thailand so I understand both relatively well (even though English is my best language). Personally I feel like Thai listening is pretty easy to pick up if you hear it every day. The speaking however takes a lot more time. It’s a tonal language which is what makes it tricky. To write thai is actually not too hard to learn, they don’t have as many characters as Mandarin Chinese. To read Thai can often be confusing because they don’t use spaces and it’s sometimes hard to tell where one word ends and where the next one starts, plus they have a lot of tone marks with like a billion rules. I learned mandarin from birth and I can speak and listen quite well, yet I still have problems writing and reading because there are so many characters.
I am Zhuang ethnic in China. As my native language Zhuang language is also one of the Kra-Dai languages, I found Thai is easy to learn either in phonology or in vocabulary.
Holy cow this is treasure. As a Thai, this is very useful and very accurate. It’s also easy to understand. I’d recommend anyone who wants to start learning Thai watching this.
I have been learning both since the COVID-19 pandemic, my Thai is amazing , my Chinese is at level 3/ intermediate level , I can sing more than 10 Chinese songs, and I watch Thai drama on UA-cam with no sub titles
@@wall5699 like any new languages I watch n listen to music/ song that very catchy over n over with English sub then sing along til I memorize the lyrics and understand the words , I also watched thai drama some with sub , some don't and repeat their pronunciation , repeat repeat...
absolutely right! the sooner you start the better preferably in school. I am older, 60 and although I have learnt Mandarin for about 2 years I still have problems remembering the words and find it difficult to go beyond HSK 4. Age takes it toll on memory and memorizing is a big part of language learning
@@hardeepsingh-sg2kz I Learn english and spanish by myself... Um Brazilian. Still have lots od problems to write, but not to understand. Do u think i still can learn chinese? Im 28 almost 29. I really love chinese. I can understand japanese too.
I'm actually living what you've posited here. I grew up in Japan and learned Chinese 40 years ago; I've used it professionally ever since. I knew how to read 汉字 from the outset making vocabulary building relatively easy, at least up to an intermediate level. By contrast, 40 years later, I started learning Thai from scratch at the start of the pandemic, and from outside Thailand. Two things have stood out. First, lack of cognates with other languages that I know have made vocabulary building in Thai more difficult & time consuming than I anticipated. Second, it took me some time to adjust to the Thai tonal system and stop imposing Chinese tones onto Thai. Given the above, I was fascinated by your observation concerning Vietnamese!
As Stuart mentioned, there are in fact a really large number of recognisable words in Thai for any Indo-European language speaker (such as English) because of the influence of Sanskrit on Thai. As you learn to read, a lot of scientific and religious words will jump out at you as clearly related to English. It's a tough language, mate, but keep it up - you'll love it!
@@srijulakhotha7247 Thanks for the encouragement. I 'get' the large number of loan words from English related to science & tech as well as pop culture. That's expected. Still, for me, compared to learning Korean while already fluent in Japanese, there are an awful lot of words in Thai that I just need to memorize. But the deeper in I get, the easier it is to leverage what I already know. All languages build on themselves! And you're right, it's a lot of work but enormous fun!
If you learn Cantonese Chinese you are more likely to pick up Thai tones and pronunciation faster compared with Mandarin which lost most of its glottal stops and words starts with “ng”. Maybe learning Cantonese before switching to Thai since it has many cognates with Mandarin.
@@seanxim3697 I long wanted to learn Cantonese but it's something I just didn't get to do. But I was recounting the process I went through to learn Thai tones in my first six months rather than describing any current problems. I experienced 'interference' with cognate languages, when I learned Spanish while already speaking Italian, but in never occurred to me that interference exists in terms of tone systems as well. Hopefully I'll get to experience a third tonal langauge at some point, be it Cantonese or Vietnamese!
I'm wondering if I know you or not. Have lived in Japan (Chiba) for almost 50 years, also worked as a Chinese and Japanese translator, and also speak pretty fluent Spanish. Actually my Thai and Cantonese are also quite fluent, and have also studied Korean on NHK, and studied Vietnamese from a refugee in Japan 30 years ago. Seems we have exactly the same interests.
Absolutely true, learning Thai lay down with pronunciation and grammar then the only left is reading. I spent 2-3 months insanely reading Thai novels. Altho i don't know the meaning at first but if i read it out loud its not that hard to recognise what that word is and its meaning. At least if i dont know the meaning i can pronounce it. It's a good consolation. While Chinese? altho it‘s grammar is a lot harder when i have to write, its meaning when reading is easy to understand. The only problem is vocabulary as 1 word in Chinese can use in many contexts and have a slightly different meaning. And as He said Chinese vocab is kinda hard to remember. The feeling of seeing the word but can't pronounce it and have no clue what that means often happens to me as i sometimes totally forgotten that word.
@@yueyu7185 Thank you Yue Yu. I know that we can guess what the word might sound based on the root character in the front and the meaning on the character inside. But I still cannot grasp the essence of it yet. -Correct me if I'm wrong. I cant really remember about it. So I plan to dive into the characters topic soon. It has been long since i learned about it. p.s. google translate help xD I cant understand all of that as I'm still in the novice level. But i like how the same character can create a verse of a poem. That's literally amazing.
@@yueyu7185 xD i get it only 80% so i need google help. It's not bad at least I can look at the pronunciation. Some words I know in speech but not in written so it was good.
As a half Thai-Chinese and my major French language when I was in the University, I really appreciate what you contribute your lesson to make it more clear for both languages. น่าสนใจมากครับ 讲的很清清楚。Je vous remercie profondément de votre gentillesse.
I am a Hong Konger living in Canada for over 40 years and have been using English as my working language. To be honest, I now forget many Chinese characters and prefer to text my Hong Konger friends using English. I learn Thai on my own for over 20 years. While the learning curve was steep at the beginning, however, once you learn the script, the vowels, and can read, you basically know how to pronounce, because Thai is basically a what-you hear - how-you-write (and vice versa) language. Besides, many long, complicate-looking Thai words are actually made of individual shorter words with their own meanings. So if you learn how to break down a long word (that comes with time, when the vocabulary list is 4000 words or so in my case), you learn a number of new words at the same time! And these shorter words in turn will be used in other longer words, that make learning them faster. In short, Thai is easier to learn than Chinese in my opinion.
I really like how you break down the systems of both languages into minor aspects, rather than simply rating them as a whole. It is more practical and useful.
As someone who now speaks Chinese fairly fluently and is learning Thai, this made me very happy. You went so deep into the differences for pronunciation and how the languages are made up. I look forward to checking out your Thai stuff, because I've been struggling with the Thai characters.
i'm not fluent in thai, but i find thai characters much more "human" than chinese! i'm trying to learn some japanese, and i'm able to decipher hiragana and katagana, the 2 first japanese alphabets. but only the look on kanji, the third alphabet based on chinese characters, makes me sweat already:-). now the big hurdle in thai, as for me, is the lack of space between words!
I ove your video, studied Chinese intensively for about a decade and now I fell in love with Thai language, studying the alphabet now and really like it. I will see how far I will get it on my own. I guess I will find out when visiting Thailand in the future. It’s real fun and your content is really helpful. Please move on with your excellent work, cheers!
As a Thai citizen of Chinese descent who speaks both Thai and Mandarin (and a few more southern Chinese languages), I did enjoy your video. It is interesting to see how the languages I always take for granted are learned by non-native speakers. I have never learned any romanisation of Thai. I agree it would more useful to just learn to write and read Thai characters. For Chinese, I didn’t learn it with Pinyin when I was young, since my family isn’t Mandarin speaking (although my parents did learn Mandarin at school as kids), Pinyin wasn’t in my education at all until I was about 12-13 years old. It didn’t help me much by that time as I was so accustomed to the Chinese phonetic system way earlier by pronouncing the sound of each character every time I practiced writing both in Mandarin and my family dialect. Pinyin is very useful for language learners as an adult, but you still need to practice writing and recognising the characters a lot.
thanks for the video, as a cantonese speaker, i was intimidated by the thai writing system but your video made me a bit more confident to take that thai course in uni
As Half Thai-Chinese, I can say Thai is more difficult in wording while Chinese is more difficult in vocab and pinyin. But, TBH, I work as a translator and found out that Thai language is quite difficult to understand when we need to translate into other languages.
When you said 'computer' in Thai, it is exactly what Thai accent sounds like. That really amazes me! Never heard any foreigner speak like this before *0*
Greeting from Northern part of Thailand. It's only a few second of watching your VDO I subscribed immediately. Your pronunciation of Thai is really "perfect".
omg I’m Thai, I’ve learning Chinese for long but I could say it’s really hard language 😅 I like this video so much it’s such a useful video! Thank you for making this! btw your Thai accent is really wonderful, that’s really cool 💕
I'm thai, and I think thai is easier, considering chinese letters..are..ahem..too many. I'm also studying chinese so Once u try learning it and understand it bit by bit is more easier then u expected. But yeah I agree with what u said👍 (in the end both languages are TOUGH, so who is gonna learn it DON'T GIVE UP!! U CAN DO IT)
Yes - as a Thai, check out the chart I put up in this clip of the tone comparisons between Thai, lao and Mandarin. This is actually a super useful tool that can be used to switch Thai to any other Tai or Chinese dialect / language.
knowing Chinese character has advantage both in Korea and especially Japan even if you don’t speak their language. Once in Japan, we got lost and try to ask a Japanese who speak no English or Chinese. We ended writing in Chinese which we somehow manage to understand.
@@kaidanalenko5222 true but try to keep it simple when communicating with Japanese Kanji like asking for direction left, right, time and name of places. The most useful is ability to read address and name of places in kanji both Korea and Japan
I'm Laotian. I can speak and read thai fluently. 95% of my books are Thai. Now I'm mastering Chinese. I reckon that I will be completed in the near future 😂☺️⏩☺️⏩😂
@@cashcash5995 Yes you're correct. But I meant I have so many good books for reading.. a lot of Thai books translate from English. Thai is better than Lao ( Lao is communist) Lao don't have any good books
@@cashcash5995 oh no it is not the same language! The scripts are different. How can you say it is the same? Then Lanna and Thai also the same? So for me , Laos who can read Thai and mastered it mean they are intelligent,
As a Thai who's learning Vietnamese, and Spanish, I totally agree that Vietnamese is somewhat quite a "piece of cake" for us. The sentence structure is almost identical to Thai and it is not a big hassle to replicate the 6 tones. Never tried Chinese though, but after watching this video, maybe it's time. :P :P
I’m Thai. I can learn many SEA languages easily due to similar grammar structure: Vietnamese, Karen, Khmer and Malay-Indonesian. These have SVO and N+Adj like Thai. Chinese has SVO but adj+N. Burmese is different with SOV like Tibetan, Nepali, Korean and Japanese, etc. Tagalog is more challenging with VSO/VOS and complicated verb morphology.
I'm a Filipino. I agree that Tagalog is really challenging because of its complex grammar. Most of SEA languages have similar grammar structure except for Tagalog. What only makes Thai language hard for me is the tones because Tagalog is not a tonal language.
Now, its time for you to learn javanese language (the most spoken local language in indonesia), its an Austronesian language (with 3 level speech based on politeness) with brahmic writing systems (called Javanese script/carakan) ✨ *Learning this language will makes you learning 3 language in one language 🤣
Interesting. I've never attempted to learn Chinese, but I have learned Arabic, Farsi, and some others - including Thai...and for me it has always been necessary to learn reading and writing along with speaking otherwise I never feel sure about what I am saying and thus, won't.
One misconception Chinese beginners often have is that they put more effort on remembering the initials and finals of a character, but ignore the tone. However the tone is actually more important. Many Chinese people also misuse the initials or finals (mixing "s" and "sh" etc.), whereas a misuse of the tone will completely change the meaning of the word.
I found the beginning in mandarin was much harder than Thai. Used both Chinese and Thai when I worked in Kenya 🇰🇪. Can't wait to join your program one day.
I can speak and write Chinese and I'm learning Thai。 I think Thai is harder than Chinese . IT takes a long time for me to read and after months I can't read fluently yet . because of my poor brain sure ! and not enough exercices. But I find Thai language so beautiful . As you explain Chinese with pin yin system is easier to learn.
Well, I've been speaking both languages since I was born and for me, I feel like I find Chinese harder because it's not written in alphabetical form, and you have to learn both pinyin and the characters. For English words like example "ice cream" in Chinese since you don't have alphabets to spell with, the language created another word for it 冰淇淋 (bing qi lin) and the Thai pronunciation for ice cream is ไอศครีม (I sa cream) and there isn't a big difference from English. If you want a more challenging language I suggest you do Chinese because it has a simplified version (people from mainland China use this) and there's traditional (Mostly Taiwanese uses this) But in the end, this is just a personal opinion.
Stumbled on this vid Stuart and most impressed with your advice. Initially I could not get a handle on spoken Thai at all so I went through the laborious process of learning the alphabet and when I did not understand what was said I asked people to write the word for me. "Bingo" the spoken word really did not correlate (for me) with the everyday spoken Thai as I needed to get my ear tuned in and the structure of general speech!
German, many people think its easy cause it's kind of similar to English but the grammar is horrible here. I am german and I have a very hard time speaking in good or decent grammar especially writing a little text its literally my nightmare like come on we have 10 different ways on saying "the"
I totally agree with what you say about tones, counting the number of tones and saying one language is harder because it has more tones. If you want to speak any language well you have to learn its intonations whether it’s English or Chinese! Although Standard Thai has 5 tones and “Mandarin” has 4, I’d say the Mandarin Chinese tones are harder to get right. 3 of those 5 Thai tones are level and the rising and falling tones sound like a question mark and exclamation mark. But the Chinese tones aren’t so simple. Also Chinese has tone sandhi or tone harmony, something I never noticed in Thai. I’ve been learning Japanese for years and I can tell you Japanese is a LOT harder than Thai. The grammar is very different and words have endings or they take inseparable particles that come after them, so to all intents and purposes the particles become word endings. I never knew “rot” meant “rota” i.e. wheel. I would have assumed a little word like that was native Thai. I did notice that “phaasaa” (language) was similar to Indonesian-Malay “Bahasa” and they both come from Indian. Re Tai languages, a friend of mine showed me a phone app for Bible missionaries. It reads out the Bible in various languages from across the world, mostly Asian and African languages. There was no Standard Thai, but we scrolled down an immense list and found “Thai Dam” (Black Thai) a language spoken in parts of Vietnam hundreds of miles from Thailand. The phone started reading a Bible book giving genealogies talking about somebody being a father “pho” and having “leuk chaay” (a son) and this person was the son of that person... I was amazed that my basic Thai gave me even a tiny bit of understanding of a language spoken in Vietnam! PS: Can I ask a question re the FALLING TONES in Thai and “Mandarin”? Can anyone please explain how they differ? They’re not as similar as they look on paper (a line starting high then plunging straight down to low.) I learned some Thai a few years ago but found myself pronouncing the falling tone in a very “Chinese” style, falling abruptly. Whereas in Thai it falls somehow differently... I couldn’t explain what the difference was, which is probably why I kept getting it wrong!
Very good advice. I tried to learn Lao via a course what was set up by an American, and as a result the first part of the course book was set up in American-English romanized Lao. As for an example the word for "no/not" (ບໍ່) was spelled as "baw". Locals often use however "bor" when writing karaoke. I would as a Dutch speaker use bò or boh. Very confusing and better just to learn the Lao writing system directly.
I born in a Hokkien family, speak Hokkien with mixture of Malay and English. I studied at Malay school but pick up Chinese from my mother and sister. I can write my own name and few simple words. But I am feeling more comfortable with Thai. Now I am self-learning about the letters of Thai.
I learned both Chinese and Thai (and Lao script) as an adult and do regular work as a translator. You're right that people learning Thai should just skip romanization. There are so many phonemes that westerners don't have in their first languages. I disagree with the timing you give for learning Thai script and being able to use them meaningfully. When I studied Thai at a military school (with students who are considered "high" altitude), they spent six weeks on script and pronunciation just to get us off the starting blocks. People generally ask me which is easier, and my one sentence answer is "Thai is more difficult to speak; learning to read Chinese is a lifetime endeavor."
And yes it’s a lifetime endeavour cuz after 7 years I could read 80% and now I’ve been learning for more than 20 years and I read everyday to maintain my reading and will always have to look up 1 or 2 new characters in the dictionary. But I love learning the characters!
I think the trick of N+Adj in Thai language is you must first think of the noun you see or think of. Then put Adj after as an explanation of how that noun looks like. Example, a big red car = รถสีแดงคันใหญ่ (car +red, big) or รถคันใหญ่สีแดง (car+big, red). Personally, learning pronunciation with the Thai alphabet is a good beginning because Thai people do like that. We’re trained hard about the tone rules. And we take several years on it when we’re kids. So, Don’t give up and find any passion to learn for. It’s gonna take time, but it’s worth it. Actually, I’m also Thai. I’m not good at English, but I still keep practicing right now. Hope you understand what I try to suggest. 😃
Haha i love how you threw Vietnamese in there....so true. I kinda heard your Chinese and Thai fusion when you were switching back and forth. This was a great comparison video! Thank you friend. 👍🏽🙏🏼❤️
STOP COUNTING TONES!!! YESSS!!! Finally someone said it. Also, I hate pinyin for the same reason you said not to learn Thai romanization. At best, pinyin should be training wheels, but people stay with pinyin too long. I actually ended up learning the zhuyin (?) from Taiwan and only use pinyin because it is faster to type.
Exactly, i started learning to read characters since the beginning instead of using pinyin, and it wasn't difficult at all. But i see people who have been learning chinese for 4 years and still struggle reading because they stayed with pinyin for too long 😥
I think when you learn Thai it’s hard at the beginning. Once you get the basics I think it’s not that hard. This is speaking and listening. I think Thai writing is quite difficult due to the lack of spaces and spelling for language learners could be a problem. Spelling I would say is difficult for new language learners because due to the different alphabets that correspond to similar sounds. An example of this is the “k” sound, we have ข ฃ ค as the alphabet that sounds similar but are inherently different due to the tones. Another aspect that I believe is hard in Thai is the tone of the language used. We have colloquial language that is spoken everyday, polite language, written language and the Thai used when speaking to or about the royal family. Literature in Thailand is also difficult due to the written language. So I would say it’s not too hard to learn Thai, but it’s very hard to get to an advanced level.
I've learned both. I learned Chinese because it is my heritage language and I learned Thai because i love the culture and want to live in Thailand someday. With Chinese, you do have to rely on rote memorization. Once you nail down the pronunciation with the correct tone, it actually flows nicely. I struggled with Thai, but I think it was because I did not commit myself to rote memory in the same way that I did with Chinese. With Thai, you have to know how to write silent letters in loan words coming from Sanskrit and English. Sometimes, you have multisyllable words where you have a Thai character that is pronounced as final for one syllable and then pronounced again as an initial of the next syllable and the pronunciation of the character varies depending if it's initial or final. Also many characters have the same sound, and you just have to know which one to use. So, there is a certain level of rote memorization that needs to happen with Thai. It's not a purely phonetic situation. That being said, Thai script is fairly predictable if you know all of the rules, and there are a lot. There are consonant classes/tone rules, vowel frames created by mixing vowel components and placing them all around the consonant, differences in pronunciation of consonant symbols depending if they are in initial or final parts of syllables, silent consonants, leading consonants that are silent but make you apply a different set of tone rules, inherent vowels, legal consonant clusters with no vowel in between, unwritten "short a" vowels in clusters which also can impact tones if the second character is sonorant, and then t+r=s sound. Because there are no word breaks, sometimes I don't know if a consonant is in initial or final position of a syllable.
I spent 7 years in HK before going to live 17 in Thailand. I was already English-French bilungual. Cantonese is far harder IMHO. I got quite fluent in Thai after 3 years there. And remain so 20 years later. But I still remember quite a lot of Cantonese. Japanese is loads of fun, too ! (My current challenge)
I'm a half Thai half American who learned both English and Thai because my parents each only spoke their main language to me. So my dad would talk to me in , English and my mom would in Thai. I ended up becoming fluent in both. Now I'm also conversational Japanese. Finding out about the cultured of each language is so cool!
@kayyayeare my highschool provided a Japanese class. I also do my own studying. One huge tip is to talk to Japanese people to get how the conversation flows.
I always get asked this question to, and I agree with you. And I'd add that after learning enough Hanzi, expanding your Chinese vocabulary is just so simple as the composition of new words is quite logical. Whereas with Thai, I feel like I'm having to work hard to find a new word's etymological roots to help me remember the word. Do you have any recommendations for something comprehensive regarding Thai etymology? (Thai or English) Side note-Cool! Vietnamese is my next language...as far as vocabulary in Vietnamese, Thai wouldn't be much help right? I know it's filled with Chinese and sprinkled with French.
agreed. you can probably guess the meaning of the new words in Chinese, but there isn’t any clue for new Thai words. Over 60% Vietnamese words are imported from Chinese, it’s easier if you speak good chinese
Sanskrit (and it's derivatives Pali and - to lesser extent - Hindi) are absolutely necessary for anyone interested in Thai etymology. Bonus - Sanskrit is SUCH a cool language!
Thanx for this stimulating video. You, a falang as simultaneous interpreter Thai - Mandarin and fluent in a few else I guess,.... Rather a feat to write home about. Thanx again.
Hey Stuart, Mandarin is the official language used in the court during medieval period. Chinese being the language used by Chinese encompasses Mandarin and all dialects of different provinces. In China, mandarin is often referred as the Putonghua, while in Taiwan is called the National language 国语。
As a native Cantonese speaker knowing Vietnamese, i think Thai is easy for me because the pronunciation of Thai is similar with Cantonese rather than Mandarin and the Thai grammar is similar with Vietnamese.
Very interesting, and I agree with everything. Funny you mentioned about Chinese ppl may have difficulty with certain Thai sounds - watching my Shanghai wife say the NG & เรือ had me in a fit ( then I slept on the couch that evening ) I didn't follow through with learning Chinese characters ( too time-consuming for me ) so this time around, I am pushing to learn Thai script and I feel that my Thai will surpass my Chinese because of this. Many thanks Stuart.
Yeah - Mandarin speakers have very distinct issues with Thai pronunciation - as opposed to speakers of more Southern Chinese languages like Cantonese and Hokkien. The lack of glottal stop in Mandarin combined with lack of differentiation between long and short vowels gives Chinese speakers of Thai a distinct 'sound'
I just learn characters as I go. A few by noticing I see them all the time, a few by thinking I need them and looking them up. I'm not at a stage to do well with the more abstract ones but I found getting to a stage where you can make pretty useful guesses about what a character either means or sounds like or both started to come much earlier than I would've thought.
I haven't studied Chinese, but I can read, write, and speak Thai. I am from the US, and I have found Thai sentence structure to be SO painful. There are so many things that don't make any sense, and there are many times when I ask a Thai person (who is fluent in English) to help explain why the sentence is structured that way or why they used a given word in a specific position, and often they can offer no explanation lol. It's so defeating...I would really love to be native fluent someday, but I there seems to be quite a roadblock for me at this point...
Thai sentence is easy. You can struct only Subject + verb + Object or Subject + verb only its can make any means. Likes ฉันกินข้าว (I eat rice) ฉันจะซื้อตั๋วเครื่องบิน (I will buy an airplane ticket) ฉันกำลังจะซื้อตั๋วเครื่องบินเดี๋ยวนี้ (I will buying an airplane ticket now) ฉันกำลังซื้อตั๋วเครื่องบินอยู่ตอนนี้ (I just buying airplane ticket right now) etc. And Thai language past or future tense is also easy, just use only word that mean day like “yesterday” = “เมื่อวาน” , future = อนาคต , tomorrow = “พรุ่งนี้” . For example ฉันจะไปงานฉลองวันเกิดเขาพรุ่งนี้ = พรุ่งนี้ฉันจะไปงานฉลองวันเกิดของเขา = “ Tomorrow, I am going to his birthday party.” Or its mean “ I will be his birthday party tomorrow” . Thai meaning to tense of English is up to only the word you use in your sentence you can place the words in any place but its still mean in the same way that is correct. Don’t mind about that much, because if you use its everyday you can be fluently. If you has any question you can typing in this comment by tag me I will help you if I can. (Pardon me, if my english is not well) , from Thai.
The screenshot of the Chinese wechat dialogue is sooooo hilarious lol. I wonder how you find such a dialogue. I'm Chinese and I've tried to learn Thai so many times but always got defeated from learning the alphabet/writing system. I know once I digest the letters I can improve a lot because I found Thai and Chinese have similar grammar and expressions. Still it is just too difficult to remember the letters and the tones.
It's awesome you mentioned that, because I was working as a multi lingual loan signing agent, offering services in English, ASL, Español, ภาษาไทย, 中文，と日本語。this was great, as with all the languages if I ever got stuck, I could make it through with very little modifications of Spanglish, Japanglish, even Thinglish... However, I would run into speed bumps, trying to use Chinglish. I say speed bumps, because I can't really use the full English word, sometimes... They'll just sit there and stare at me, whenever I would. Thank God they created Google!!! We'd always get through it, without any hard feelings!!! Although sometimes my fluency wasn't to par, I feel that everyone preferred my services over someone who wouldn't even try to speak their language. Because, I would take the extra steps of making sure I had the list of words I would use in my loan documents. Like Sign here, Date Here, Percentage Rates, Balloon Payments, etc. When they're prompt for further explanation, I'd offer using the document translator. Sometimes, when all else would fail, we would call someone.
I started studying Thai over this past year (after a very short bout maybe 5 years ago) and I will say that it really reminds me of Chinese. Chinese is highly intimidating to English speakers for its exotic-sounding consonants and vowels, those pesky tones, and the massive library of hanzi characters, but after a bit of practice is surprisingly easy. After a few weeks, you'll be comfortable having very basic conversations, and after a few months, you'll be building vocabulary faster and feeling more at ease with hanzi in general. Sadly, I eventually had to give up Chinese class because of my schedule (I was taking Chinese and Japanese at the same at school --as someone who still lives and works in Japanese, don't even get me started on that bag of worms--, and my last year there was only a single time slot for both), and have forgotten much of it. When I started studying Thai, it really beat me to a pulp. I started with the alphabet and my ass was kicked even before I bothered thinking about the tones, but after a few days of wondering if I was ever going to get the hang of it, I was looking at some text and it just "clicked." I'm still not the best at tones (I think that map that shows the relation between pronunciation and consonant class could really help me), but it's surprisingly easy now to look at a new Thai word, read it, and use it right out the gate. There are a lot of words with Pali/Sanskrit origins but honestly with the alphabet out of the way I'm not afraid at all.
I'm watching this video just out of curiosity. I congratulate you for this excellent analysis of both languages. I'm really pleased to see I recognize lots of Chinese characters (because I have learned Japanese). As a native Spanish speaker I can say Thai is kinda easy because I can grammatically filter it through Spanish and sometimes through English (tones are no different than orthographic accents in Spanish and we have lots of words with repeated vowels), writing is not that hard either you just need to train your memory (there are exceptions but you get use to it too). Classifiers are another story but "no pain no gain". I vote for Thai and in top of that I feel really attracted to aesthetics of written Thai.
I'm spaniard and I'm interested in learning Thai, but i thought it was very difficult and completely different. Is Thai pronunciation similar to the Spanish one? 👀
@@emarcostar Si y no. Porque tienen bastantes más vocales y consonantes que nosotros, la dificultad radica más en las excepciones escritas, en los tonos, en que la mayoría de palabras son solo de una sílaba (con tono) y en los clasificadores que nuestra mente occidental no interioriza tan rápidamente, sin embargo te animo a que lo hagas, es una lengua hermosa.
That was a great video Stuart I am wanting to increase learning in both languages based on your video and my interest in both languages I have a small understanding of Chinese and a little of Thai . .Question ... is it best to learn and focus one at a time or is it "do able" to learn simultaneously ? Any input on this platform would be appreciated
Thai is easy (in my opinion). It is by far the easiest language I've learnt. The tones are really not that hard and neither is the writing system. The hardest part is understanding the hundreds of one syllable words they frequently use in everyday conversations.
For me Spanish was easiest. After six months immersion I was conversational on any topic but not truly fluent. To get to a useful beginner level was even easier in German. That only took me eight days but then progressing further got tougher than with Spanish. Chinese and Thai are taking much longer, but I'm not immersing either.
@@StuartJayRaj a little bit of both but there aren't that many particles all in all. It's more about the words of Chinese origin as opposed to the longer words of Sanskrit or Pali origins ... The amount of short words kind of threw me at the beginning, they can be easily misunderstood for other very similar sounding words. I would also throw a few syntax problems such as the change of meaning according to where the word ให้ goes in the sentence etc... At the beginning it can be complicated but I also feel that Thai isn't extraordinarily rich in vocabulary and I have always felt that you can say a lot with very few words and a lot of these words are very often "recycled" or reused to convey different meanings. Compared to my native language French or the other languages I've learnt (Italian, English, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Chinese and Spanish, I'd say Thai is the easiest. Again, it's my opinion. Thai people are also very good at repeating and rewording what a learner says back to them which in my case has proved incredibly helpful.
I agree with Stu JR, I would add one thing that comes to mind with regard to Chinese. My major problem was not the tones, i got those down pat pretty quickly. My problem was with breaking the sentence down into individual word units. I am not sure if this is the case in Thai as well, but in Chinese when you link the last syllable of the preceding word to the first syllable of the next word, you very often get a word that makes sense, but that linkage is wrong and you end up with a meaning that is not there. This happened to me all the time while my vocab was not yet very good.
Chinese is definitely way harder to learn because you have memorize the pinyin spelling, the tone, and the character.
Whereas in Thai, the phonetic script, albeit very complicated, tells you both pronunciation and tone within itself.
But there's no syllable separator in Thai. Imagine written tieng Viet not as "etyng eVyt", which is clear, but as "etyngevyt", which is not. The systematic sound change is not a thing for learners, which can be easily managed, but the lack of syllable separator is.
@@GyacoYu
oh yeah! the lack of space between words in thai is really changeling, but the more thai words you learn, the more easier it gets to separate them!
For me Thai is one of the harder languages to learn. I really prefer to learn pinyin, hanzí and tone. It's easier than understand how to read in Thai.
@@renatam.r.6762
i can't say anything about chinese as i've never learnt it! as for the thai language, if you are REALLY INTERESTED, well, try (1) to memorize the 45 or so of THAI CONSONANTS (a few are obsolete or seldom used). they are divided into three groups, low, middle, high. (2) learn three tone marks called "máy thoo, máy trii, may cáttawa", and you'll be surprized how "easy" it is to read thai! now, everybody (i think!) will tell you this, there is one big hurdle when learning thai: there is no space between words, indeed! like, for instance, in "ตอนนี้ผมเรียนภาษาไทย"= at the present time, i study thai" . oh yeah, you've got to learn how to separate words. and it requires some time consuming practice :-), i reckon.
as for the thai vowels (it's difficult to explain here), they follow "naturally"! i needed not to memorize them, anyway.
@@piquedard Thanks. It's hard for me because my language is Portuguese and my language has sounds and symbols more regulars. Thai and even English changes the sound a lit bit more. I try sometimes learn the word, like in Arabic too and not the system, but I see Thai has regularity with the sounds.
一位西方人把东方2国语言研究这么深！同时我也是懂得中泰2国语言。觉得非常佩服。เราก็พูดอ่านได้ภาษาจีนไทย แต่ฝรั่งคนนี้น่านับถือจริงๆ ศึกษาภาษาจีนไทยลึกซึ้งขนาดนี้ หายากจริงๆ
จริงครับ
你是中國人嗎
很明显，他是泰国人，他写的泰文比较自然。
B 也是，雖然看不懂泰文，
但中文確實有些怪
你佩服中国人吗？
I'm Thai, I can speak Chinese and I know the basic system of Sanskrit language. I totally agree with you that foreigner should learn Thai by its alphabet, it's easier than using Roman alphabet. The sound of the language derives from Sanskrit as you explain as well as most of Thai vocabulary. I think Thai and Chinese people can learn each other's language easily with similarity of the tone of the language even though the sentence structure is comparably different, but it's not that hard. The only difficulty in learning Chinese for me is its characters which took me half a year to memorize.
you are an OG for memorizing the basic chinese vocabs in just half a year lol
i’m chinese and i’m interested in Thai. is it really easy to learn?😂
agree, I’m Thai too so I think if learn Chinese for speaking maybe not much difficult but for writing or reading is difficult to memorize same as you said
@@maxpaper2560 I think Chinese people are more advantageous for pronunciation but I'm not sure about alphabets. There are 44 letters in our language, but some of them pronounced the same, you just group it. The reason for redundancy in the letter sound just because of the Sanskrit roots. The difficult part is you have to remember how to spell, which alphabets to use , if you just prefer only basic conversation, I think that's not problem just to learn speaking and basic writing. 🙂
@@baqikenny I was major in Chinese, so I had to. 😂
I'm Mexican, my native language is Spanish. I'm learning Chinese (it's so hard) but I'd like to learn Thai like my next language. I love your culture and language Thai friends. 👍
También estoy tratando de aprender chino, pero wow estoy entre o aprender el mandarín o el cantones. Mas aprendiendo los caracteres simplificados y las tradicionales. 🥲 Está fuerte pero de veras es un lenguaje muy interesante así que no me rindo.
Yo sólo estoy estudiando Japonés, no sé qué hago aquí.
Mentira jajaj el chino y thai son muy interesantes.
Greetings from Kyrgyzstan 🇰🇬
@@TheAnonEye你好，如果需要，我可以帮助你
รักคุณเม็กซิโก
As a Thai, I'm curious why would anyone want to learn Thai... We ain't big.
Thai is a amazing place. I wanna learn Thai too!
I love the language so much because of how it sounds (very exotic for a french person like me). I also love the food, the architecture, traditional clothing, cinema, khon theatre, sak yant, muay thai, the history of the country and I think that thai people are jovial. Your culture is very attractive to me and that's why I want to learn thai.
Thai peoples nice
I’ll be honest, after becoming a fan of Lisa and lakorns, I want to watch my lakorns without waiting for them to be English subbed and after to seeing the beautiful places in the lakorns, I’m going to visit
I want to learn pasa thai cause I am fascinated with the thai culture..lovelots from the philippines
I‘m a native speaker of Chinese, I majored in Thai Language and Culture when I was in college. For me the alphabet and writing system is quite hard, but once you get through that, everthing gets much easier. So for who is just starting learning Thai and think it's too difficult, don't worry, things will get better after you finish the alphabet part. And I think Thai is easier for Chinese to learn than who speak English as their native language, because the Chinese grammar system is more similar to Thai than English, HAHAHA...
as a thai person learning chinese, I can say chinese is harder
Yes I agree, I have Chinese friend who self study by watching Thai drama. They can understand and speak Thai very fluently. Compare with me that I cannot speak Chinese as fluent as them speak Thai even I watch so many Chinese drama. So that's why I think Thai language will be easier. And of course for reading and writing skills, you no need to remember too much characters and stroke.
Hey Qian, do you teach online? I speak Chinese and I want to learn Thai, thanks a lot!
I thought Chinese has many similarities to English. It was easier to teach Chinese by speaking English explanation, but too many things in Thai are just the opposite, which is tricky to remember. And the Thai alphabet is just pure hell.... I'm struggling!
ผมเรียนภาษาจีนแบบใต้หวันอ่านชนิดจีนแผ่นดินใหญ่สำหรับผมยาก
I'm Thai, but I still think my language is difficult. Anyone who wants to learn our language must have a patience.I'm very glad that you would like to learn our language.
I can speak English. Can you help me with Thai?
Indonesian here, trying to learn thai language, wish me luck!
@@xuanhoado9128 Yes,of course.(But I'm just a kid so sometimes I use English wrong,please forgive me.)
@@rayatsu5826 Good luck!,you can definitely do it.
Filipino here, I’m currently learning Thai 🖤🤍
Living in China for 2 years. My advice in regards to learning characters (汉字), learn it like they learn it. Start with learning basic characters and the correct stroke order. Then move on to studying the radicals. Do a lot of repetition. Don’t try to use mental shortcuts to memorize, or the “Chineasy” technique of interpreting the meaning from the visual aspect of the character. This works for very few characters and is more of a novelty than anything. Learning the radicals will actually enable you to infer meaning/tone from characters you’ve never seen before, or are having trouble remembering. That’s just my experience!
Im a native thai speaker and i've learned some mandarin, and i have to say that your mandarin and thai are really impressive. Great explanation video.
Agreed. I don't speak Mandarin but his Thai is really on point.
wow你中文泰语都很厉害
ผมก็เรียนภาษาไทยอยู่ครับ สำเนียงคุณเหมือนคนไทยมากครับ
我也自学了中文ผมก็เรียนภาษาจีนด้วยตนเอง.
I'm impressed with your Thai pronunciation. I'm trying to teach my kids Thai. They're half Thai-American. Teaching Thai is not easy!!
a lot of half thai kids aren’t interested in learning their language, I’m glad you’re teaching them!! how is it?
@@chetbqkerit depends where they live
@@stephie444 yeah, I meant when they live abroad
I'm Malaysian of Chinese descent (Hakka-Cantonese to be precise) and I'm currently learning Thai. So I'm pretty blessed to be able to converse professionally in Malay, English, Mandarin, Cantonese and hopefully Thai in the near future 🙏🏻 I had learnt basic Japanese before but forgotten the hiragana and katakana after a few years of non-active usage. Hoping to be a full-fledged polyglot one day!
Thai pronunciations and its upper case and lower case writing is very complicated. Due to ancient caste culture. The honorific version of Thai language when you speaking to royal family menbers, the sangha Buddhist bhikku or bhikkuni or even higher rank society people can be tricky and confusing to learn. Chinese wise is the confusion of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are not just difficult to write and remember, many characters shared the same pronunciation can be utterly confusing if you apply in verbal conversation without seeing the characters. At the same time, the same Chinese character might have totally different application and meaning in classical, old and ancient Chinese.
Saya pun
Same here
@@jeffreysetapak 泰语和汉语一样有许多同音字，其实更适合使用汉字，而不是拼音。 比如 九 旧（汉语普通话读 jiu）, 泰语读gao， 汉字虽然读音相同但是字不同很容易区分
I’m thai, i think any languages have both Hardness and easiness in their own ways. So I can’t tell which overall is the hardest and the easiest.
I agree
True. And also, difficulties vary with native speakers of different languages. An American will find Japanese writing system hard to learn but not will Chinese since there is Kanji.
I’m Australian and I learnt both Mandarin and Thai, I found Chinese easy to pronounce, but it took 10 years to be fluent at reading, but I found Thai pronunciation hard, but easy to learn the vocabulary, and I found the grammar easy , maybe it was easy for me to learn cuz I was living in the country, whereas I learnt Chinese without even going to the country
Love it. I learned faster Japanese after remembering hiraganas, then kanji learning went easier too. What good advices. I really wanna learn Thai and Chinese from you.
Chinese is such a worthwhile language to learn
@@StuartJayRaj Chinese is a hidden treasure.
My mother tongue is mandarin and I grew up in Thailand so I understand both relatively well (even though English is my best language). Personally I feel like Thai listening is pretty easy to pick up if you hear it every day. The speaking however takes a lot more time. It’s a tonal language which is what makes it tricky. To write thai is actually not too hard to learn, they don’t have as many characters as Mandarin Chinese. To read Thai can often be confusing because they don’t use spaces and it’s sometimes hard to tell where one word ends and where the next one starts, plus they have a lot of tone marks with like a billion rules. I learned mandarin from birth and I can speak and listen quite well, yet I still have problems writing and reading because there are so many characters.
I am Zhuang ethnic in China. As my native language Zhuang language is also one of the Kra-Dai languages, I found Thai is easy to learn either in phonology or in vocabulary.
Holy cow this is treasure. As a Thai, this is very useful and very accurate. It’s also easy to understand. I’d recommend anyone who wants to start learning Thai watching this.
I have been learning both since the COVID-19 pandemic, my Thai is amazing , my Chinese is at level 3/ intermediate level , I can sing more than 10 Chinese songs, and I watch Thai drama on UA-cam with no sub titles
What's your native language?
Hi, how to learning Thai? Please tell me! Thanks
@@kanister21 Vietnamese
@@wall5699 like any new languages I watch n listen to music/ song that very catchy over n over with English sub then sing along til I memorize the lyrics and understand the words , I also watched thai drama some with sub , some don't and repeat their pronunciation , repeat repeat...
@@kathydinh2908 I heard that Thai and Vietnamese languages had almost the same grammar constructor is that true?
I'm Thai. You can learn any language while your memory is still good. :) When you get older, it's hard to remember words.
absolutely right! the sooner you start the better preferably in school. I am older, 60 and although I have learnt Mandarin for about 2 years I still have problems remembering the words and find it difficult to go beyond HSK 4. Age takes it toll on memory and memorizing is a big part of language learning
@@hardeepsingh-sg2kz I Learn english and spanish by myself... Um Brazilian. Still have lots od problems to write, but not to understand. Do u think i still can learn chinese? Im 28 almost 29. I really love chinese. I can understand japanese too.
Wow! Your Thai accent is excellent!
I'm actually living what you've posited here. I grew up in Japan and learned Chinese 40 years ago; I've used it professionally ever since. I knew how to read 汉字 from the outset making vocabulary building relatively easy, at least up to an intermediate level. By contrast, 40 years later, I started learning Thai from scratch at the start of the pandemic, and from outside Thailand. Two things have stood out. First, lack of cognates with other languages that I know have made vocabulary building in Thai more difficult & time consuming than I anticipated. Second, it took me some time to adjust to the Thai tonal system and stop imposing Chinese tones onto Thai. Given the above, I was fascinated by your observation concerning Vietnamese!
As Stuart mentioned, there are in fact a really large number of recognisable words in Thai for any Indo-European language speaker (such as English) because of the influence of Sanskrit on Thai. As you learn to read, a lot of scientific and religious words will jump out at you as clearly related to English. It's a tough language, mate, but keep it up - you'll love it!
@@srijulakhotha7247 Thanks for the encouragement. I 'get' the large number of loan words from English related to science & tech as well as pop culture. That's expected. Still, for me, compared to learning Korean while already fluent in Japanese, there are an awful lot of words in Thai that I just need to memorize. But the deeper in I get, the easier it is to leverage what I already know. All languages build on themselves! And you're right, it's a lot of work but enormous fun!
If you learn Cantonese Chinese you are more likely to pick up Thai tones and pronunciation faster compared with Mandarin which lost most of its glottal stops and words starts with “ng”. Maybe learning Cantonese before switching to Thai since it has many cognates with Mandarin.
@@seanxim3697 I long wanted to learn Cantonese but it's something I just didn't get to do. But I was recounting the process I went through to learn Thai tones in my first six months rather than describing any current problems. I experienced 'interference' with cognate languages, when I learned Spanish while already speaking Italian, but in never occurred to me that interference exists in terms of tone systems as well. Hopefully I'll get to experience a third tonal langauge at some point, be it Cantonese or Vietnamese!
I'm wondering if I know you or not. Have lived in Japan (Chiba) for almost 50 years, also worked as a Chinese and Japanese translator, and also speak pretty fluent Spanish. Actually my Thai and Cantonese are also quite fluent, and have also studied Korean on NHK, and studied Vietnamese from a refugee in Japan 30 years ago. Seems we have exactly the same interests.
Absolutely true, learning Thai lay down with pronunciation and grammar then the only left is reading. I spent 2-3 months insanely reading Thai novels. Altho i don't know the meaning at first but if i read it out loud its not that hard to recognise what that word is and its meaning. At least if i dont know the meaning i can pronounce it. It's a good consolation.
While Chinese? altho it‘s grammar is a lot harder when i have to write, its meaning when reading is easy to understand. The only problem is vocabulary as 1 word in Chinese can use in many contexts and have a slightly different meaning. And as He said Chinese vocab is kinda hard to remember.
The feeling of seeing the word but can't pronounce it and have no clue what that means often happens to me as i sometimes totally forgotten that word.
这种情况中国人自己也会遇到。我作为一个中国人，并且在中国生活了14年，有时候我也会忘记这个词怎么写，那个词怎么读，原因就是我不在中国上学了，每天不需要读课文和写字。但是有一点我觉得你说的不太准确，当你学多了以后你会发现中文的发音是有规律的，当你看见一个字的时候你可以利用它的偏旁部首来大概猜一下这个字的发音。一般来说每个字都会有一个形旁，一个声旁。形旁一般是跟这个字的意思有关的，声旁一般是跟这个字的发音有关的。总之，学的时间长了就懂了，但是不要停止学习，要不然等你再想学的时候你应该都忘了。（还有，你要是能读懂我写的，那证明你的中文已经很好了。）
@@yueyu7185 Thank you Yue Yu. I know that we can guess what the word might sound based on the root character in the front and the meaning on the character inside. But I still cannot grasp the essence of it yet. -Correct me if I'm wrong. I cant really remember about it. So I plan to dive into the characters topic soon. It has been long since i learned about it.
p.s. google translate help xD I cant understand all of that as I'm still in the novice level. But i like how the same character can create a verse of a poem. That's literally amazing.
@@mildzamakmak 哈哈哈，Google translate确实是个好东西，我有时候也用。形旁和声旁也只是一个范围，有时候你猜的和事实的差距还是很大的。不过也不要急于求成，语言类的东西没有捷径。其实环境是很重要的，就像我以前在中国的时候，老师、同学、朋友以及家人都是中国人，说中国话，所以我的中文肯定好。但是我其实从幼儿园就开始接触英语了，但是我来美国之后发现自己的英语水平还是无法和同龄人相比。
@@yueyu7185 xD i get it only 80% so i need google help. It's not bad at least I can look at the pronunciation. Some words I know in speech but not in written so it was good.
As a half Thai-Chinese and my major French language when I was in the University, I really appreciate what you contribute your lesson to make it more clear for both languages. น่าสนใจมากครับ 讲的很清清楚。Je vous remercie profondément de votre gentillesse.
I am a Hong Konger living in Canada for over 40 years and have been using English as my working language. To be honest, I now forget many Chinese characters and prefer to text my Hong Konger friends using English. I learn Thai on my own for over 20 years. While the learning curve was steep at the beginning, however, once you learn the script, the vowels, and can read, you basically know how to pronounce, because Thai is basically a what-you hear - how-you-write (and vice versa) language. Besides, many long, complicate-looking Thai words are actually made of individual shorter words with their own meanings. So if you learn how to break down a long word (that comes with time, when the vocabulary list is 4000 words or so in my case), you learn a number of new words at the same time! And these shorter words in turn will be used in other longer words, that make learning them faster.
In short, Thai is easier to learn than Chinese in my opinion.
I really like how you break down the systems of both languages into minor aspects, rather than simply rating them as a whole. It is more practical and useful.
As someone who now speaks Chinese fairly fluently and is learning Thai, this made me very happy. You went so deep into the differences for pronunciation and how the languages are made up. I look forward to checking out your Thai stuff, because I've been struggling with the Thai characters.
i'm not fluent in thai, but i find thai characters much more "human" than chinese! i'm trying to learn some japanese, and i'm able to decipher hiragana and katagana, the 2 first japanese alphabets. but only the look on kanji, the third alphabet based on chinese characters, makes me sweat already:-).
now the big hurdle in thai, as for me, is the lack of space between words!
I ove your video, studied Chinese intensively for about a decade and now I fell in love with Thai language, studying the alphabet now and really like it. I will see how far I will get it on my own. I guess I will find out when visiting Thailand in the future. It’s real fun and your content is really helpful. Please move on with your excellent work, cheers!
As a Thai citizen of Chinese descent who speaks both Thai and Mandarin (and a few more southern Chinese languages), I did enjoy your video. It is interesting to see how the languages I always take for granted are learned by non-native speakers. I have never learned any romanisation of Thai. I agree it would more useful to just learn to write and read Thai characters. For Chinese, I didn’t learn it with Pinyin when I was young, since my family isn’t Mandarin speaking (although my parents did learn Mandarin at school as kids), Pinyin wasn’t in my education at all until I was about 12-13 years old. It didn’t help me much by that time as I was so accustomed to the Chinese phonetic system way earlier by pronouncing the sound of each character every time I practiced writing both in Mandarin and my family dialect. Pinyin is very useful for language learners as an adult, but you still need to practice writing and recognising the characters a lot.
Oh, God!! Your Thai pronunciation is really great.🤭✨
คุณมีความรู้เรื่องภาษา อย่างลื่นไหล เรารู็ไม่ได้เกิดขึ้นเอง มาจากการค้นคว้าอย่างแท้จริง
thanks for the video, as a cantonese speaker, i was intimidated by the thai writing system but your video made me a bit more confident to take that thai course in uni
I’m currently super obsessed with both languages and this video was sooooo helpful thank you so much
As Half Thai-Chinese, I can say Thai is more difficult in wording while Chinese is more difficult in vocab and pinyin. But, TBH, I work as a translator and found out that Thai language is quite difficult to understand when we need to translate into other languages.
this is the smartest youtube video that i've seen in the past 2 years
When you said 'computer' in Thai, it is exactly what Thai accent sounds like. That really amazes me! Never heard any foreigner speak like this before *0*
Where are you from?
Bangkok, Thailand
(was born and live here until now)
@@yueshuang11728 nice to meet you. Are you overseas Chinese?
Greeting from Northern part of Thailand. It's only a few second of watching your VDO I subscribed immediately. Your pronunciation of Thai is really "perfect".
Super interesting! I've learned Chinese and vocab is definitely the hardest part. This made me wanna learn Thai!
omg I’m Thai, I’ve learning Chinese for long but I could say it’s really hard language 😅
I like this video so much it’s such a useful video! Thank you for making this!
btw your Thai accent is really wonderful, that’s really cool 💕
I'm thai, and I think thai is easier, considering chinese letters..are..ahem..too many. I'm also studying chinese so Once u try learning it and understand it bit by bit is more easier then u expected. But yeah I agree with what u said👍 (in the end both languages are TOUGH, so who is gonna learn it DON'T GIVE UP!! U CAN DO IT)
Yes - as a Thai, check out the chart I put up in this clip of the tone comparisons between Thai, lao and Mandarin. This is actually a super useful tool that can be used to switch Thai to any other Tai or Chinese dialect / language.
Great point about the romanization influencing the pronunciation of the word.
knowing Chinese character has advantage both in Korea and especially Japan even if you don’t speak their language. Once in Japan, we got lost and try to ask a Japanese who speak no English or Chinese. We ended writing in Chinese which we somehow manage to understand.
fake news/ they have different meaning when you combine hanzi into japanese 🤢 its called 'false friends'!
@@kaidanalenko5222 true but try to keep it simple when communicating with Japanese Kanji like asking for direction left, right, time and name of places. The most useful is ability to read address and name of places in kanji both Korea and Japan
I'm Laotian. I can speak and read thai fluently. 95% of my books are Thai. Now I'm mastering Chinese. I reckon that I will be completed in the near future 😂☺️⏩☺️⏩😂
Thai and Lao are the same, little difference but it is the same language . Not surprise that your book are thai .
加油! Good luck!
@@cashcash5995 Yes you're correct. But I meant I have so many good books for reading.. a lot of Thai books translate from English.
Thai is better than Lao ( Lao is communist) Lao don't have any good books
@@囧囧囧-w6t thanks 😊😊
@@cashcash5995 oh no it is not the same language! The scripts are different. How can you say it is the same? Then Lanna and Thai also the same? So for me , Laos who can read Thai and mastered it mean they are intelligent,
As a Thai who's learning Vietnamese, and Spanish, I totally agree that Vietnamese is somewhat quite a "piece of cake" for us. The sentence structure is almost identical to Thai and it is not a big hassle to replicate the 6 tones.
Never tried Chinese though, but after watching this video, maybe it's time. :P :P
Woh man you're an incredibly good teacher!
I’m Thai. I can learn many SEA languages easily due to similar grammar structure: Vietnamese, Karen, Khmer and Malay-Indonesian. These have SVO and N+Adj like Thai. Chinese has SVO but adj+N. Burmese is different with SOV like Tibetan, Nepali, Korean and Japanese, etc. Tagalog is more challenging with VSO/VOS and complicated verb morphology.
Do you speak Karen ?
My Karen, I can understand Thai, and I'm learning Chinese
I'm a Filipino. I agree that Tagalog is really challenging because of its complex grammar. Most of SEA languages have similar grammar structure except for Tagalog. What only makes Thai language hard for me is the tones because Tagalog is not a tonal language.
Philippine Languages are indeed hard
Now, its time for you to learn javanese language (the most spoken local language in indonesia), its an Austronesian language (with 3 level speech based on politeness) with brahmic writing systems (called Javanese script/carakan) ✨
*Learning this language will makes you learning 3 language in one language 🤣
@@paduka23 Spoken*
Interesting. I've never attempted to learn Chinese, but I have learned Arabic, Farsi, and some others - including Thai...and for me it has always been necessary to learn reading and writing along with speaking otherwise I never feel sure about what I am saying and thus, won't.
One misconception Chinese beginners often have is that they put more effort on remembering the initials and finals of a character, but ignore the tone. However the tone is actually more important. Many Chinese people also misuse the initials or finals (mixing "s" and "sh" etc.), whereas a misuse of the tone will completely change the meaning of the word.
Dui4
Agreed
I found the beginning in mandarin was much harder than Thai. Used both Chinese and Thai when I worked in Kenya 🇰🇪. Can't wait to join your program one day.
im Chinese, I didn't know what it was like for non Chinese people to read Chinese until I saw Thai
I can speak and write Chinese and I'm learning Thai。 I think Thai is harder than Chinese . IT takes a long time for me to read and after months I can't read fluently yet . because of my poor brain sure ! and not enough exercices. But I find Thai language so beautiful . As you explain Chinese with pin yin system is easier to learn.
Well, I've been speaking both languages since I was born and for me, I feel like I find Chinese harder because it's not written in alphabetical form, and you have to learn both pinyin and the characters. For English words like example "ice cream" in Chinese since you don't have alphabets to spell with, the language created another word for it 冰淇淋 (bing qi lin) and the Thai pronunciation for ice cream is ไอศครีม (I sa cream) and there isn't a big difference from English. If you want a more challenging language I suggest you do Chinese because it has a simplified version (people from mainland China use this) and there's traditional (Mostly Taiwanese uses this) But in the end, this is just a personal opinion.
Man you pronounced mandarin so standard, probably more precise than me as a Chinese native speaker 😂. It’s amazing!
The way you represented places of articulation is really cool!
Stumbled on this vid Stuart and most impressed with your advice. Initially I could not get a handle on spoken Thai at all so I went through the laborious process of learning the alphabet and when I did not understand what was said I asked people to write the word for me. "Bingo" the spoken word really did not correlate (for me) with the everyday spoken Thai as I needed to get my ear tuned in and the structure of general speech!
I think the hardest language is where even Natives have hard time to understand their own languages
German, many people think its easy cause it's kind of similar to English but the grammar is horrible here. I am german and I have a very hard time speaking in good or decent grammar especially writing a little text its literally my nightmare like come on we have 10 different ways on saying "the"
That would be arabic for me
I totally agree with what you say about tones, counting the number of tones and saying one language is harder because it has more tones. If you want to speak any language well you have to learn its intonations whether it’s English or Chinese! Although Standard Thai has 5 tones and “Mandarin” has 4, I’d say the Mandarin Chinese tones are harder to get right. 3 of those 5 Thai tones are level and the rising and falling tones sound like a question mark and exclamation mark. But the Chinese tones aren’t so simple. Also Chinese has tone sandhi or tone harmony, something I never noticed in Thai.
I’ve been learning Japanese for years and I can tell you Japanese is a LOT harder than Thai. The grammar is very different and words have endings or they take inseparable particles that come after them, so to all intents and purposes the particles become word endings.
I never knew “rot” meant “rota” i.e. wheel. I would have assumed a little word like that was native Thai. I did notice that “phaasaa” (language) was similar to Indonesian-Malay “Bahasa” and they both come from Indian.
Re Tai languages, a friend of mine showed me a phone app for Bible missionaries. It reads out the Bible in various languages from across the world, mostly Asian and African languages. There was no Standard Thai, but we scrolled down an immense list and found “Thai Dam” (Black Thai) a language spoken in parts of Vietnam hundreds of miles from Thailand. The phone started reading a Bible book giving genealogies talking about somebody being a father “pho” and having “leuk chaay” (a son) and this person was the son of that person... I was amazed that my basic Thai gave me even a tiny bit of understanding of a language spoken in Vietnam!
PS: Can I ask a question re the FALLING TONES in Thai and “Mandarin”? Can anyone please explain how they differ? They’re not as similar as they look on paper (a line starting high then plunging straight down to low.) I learned some Thai a few years ago but found myself pronouncing the falling tone in a very “Chinese” style, falling abruptly. Whereas in Thai it falls somehow differently... I couldn’t explain what the difference was, which is probably why I kept getting it wrong!
Very good advice. I tried to learn Lao via a course what was set up by an American, and as a result the first part of the course book was set up in American-English romanized Lao. As for an example the word for "no/not" (ບໍ່) was spelled as "baw". Locals often use however "bor" when writing karaoke. I would as a Dutch speaker use bò or boh. Very confusing and better just to learn the Lao writing system directly.
I born in a Hokkien family, speak Hokkien with mixture of Malay and English. I studied at Malay school but pick up Chinese from my mother and sister. I can write my own name and few simple words. But I am feeling more comfortable with Thai. Now I am self-learning about the letters of Thai.
I learned both Chinese and Thai (and Lao script) as an adult and do regular work as a translator. You're right that people learning Thai should just skip romanization. There are so many phonemes that westerners don't have in their first languages.
I disagree with the timing you give for learning Thai script and being able to use them meaningfully. When I studied Thai at a military school (with students who are considered "high" altitude), they spent six weeks on script and pronunciation just to get us off the starting blocks.
People generally ask me which is easier, and my one sentence answer is "Thai is more difficult to speak; learning to read Chinese is a lifetime endeavor."
Yes it took me about a month to read Thai , it took me about 10 years to read chinese fluently
And yes it’s a lifetime endeavour cuz after 7 years I could read 80% and now I’ve been learning for more than 20 years and I read everyday to maintain my reading and will always have to look up 1 or 2 new characters in the dictionary. But I love learning the characters!
I think the trick of N+Adj in Thai language is you must first think of the noun you see or think of. Then put Adj after as an explanation of how that noun looks like.
Example, a big red car = รถสีแดงคันใหญ่ (car +red, big) or รถคันใหญ่สีแดง (car+big, red).
Personally, learning pronunciation with the Thai alphabet is a good beginning because Thai people do like that. We’re trained hard about the tone rules. And we take several years on it when we’re kids. So, Don’t give up and find any passion to learn for. It’s gonna take time, but it’s worth it.
Actually, I’m also Thai. I’m not good at English, but I still keep practicing right now. Hope you understand what I try to suggest. 😃
สุดยอดเลยค่ะ นึกว่าคนไทยกำลังพูดเลยค่ะ ตอนนี้หนุก็กำลังศึกษาภาษาจีนอยู่ค่ะ
Sir, you are incredible. We need more humans like you on this earth.
Haha i love how you threw Vietnamese in there....so true. I kinda heard your Chinese and Thai fusion when you were switching back and forth. This was a great comparison video! Thank you friend. 👍🏽🙏🏼❤️
STOP COUNTING TONES!!! YESSS!!! Finally someone said it.
Also, I hate pinyin for the same reason you said not to learn Thai romanization. At best, pinyin should be training wheels, but people stay with pinyin too long. I actually ended up learning the zhuyin (?) from Taiwan and only use pinyin because it is faster to type.
Exactly, i started learning to read characters since the beginning instead of using pinyin, and it wasn't difficult at all. But i see people who have been learning chinese for 4 years and still struggle reading because they stayed with pinyin for too long 😥
好厲害！เก่งมากเลยครับ ขอแสดงความนับถือละกัน 真的好強 感謝分享專業見解
I think when you learn Thai it’s hard at the beginning. Once you get the basics I think it’s not that hard. This is speaking and listening. I think Thai writing is quite difficult due to the lack of spaces and spelling for language learners could be a problem. Spelling I would say is difficult for new language learners because due to the different alphabets that correspond to similar sounds. An example of this is the “k” sound, we have ข ฃ ค as the alphabet that sounds similar but are inherently different due to the tones. Another aspect that I believe is hard in Thai is the tone of the language used. We have colloquial language that is spoken everyday, polite language, written language and the Thai used when speaking to or about the royal family. Literature in Thailand is also difficult due to the written language. So I would say it’s not too hard to learn Thai, but it’s very hard to get to an advanced level.
As a native speaker of Chinese, I think the grammar of mandarin and Thai are quite similar!!! I mean the structure of sentence is much more easier.
I've learned both. I learned Chinese because it is my heritage language and I learned Thai because i love the culture and want to live in Thailand someday. With Chinese, you do have to rely on rote memorization. Once you nail down the pronunciation with the correct tone, it actually flows nicely. I struggled with Thai, but I think it was because I did not commit myself to rote memory in the same way that I did with Chinese. With Thai, you have to know how to write silent letters in loan words coming from Sanskrit and English. Sometimes, you have multisyllable words where you have a Thai character that is pronounced as final for one syllable and then pronounced again as an initial of the next syllable and the pronunciation of the character varies depending if it's initial or final. Also many characters have the same sound, and you just have to know which one to use. So, there is a certain level of rote memorization that needs to happen with Thai. It's not a purely phonetic situation. That being said, Thai script is fairly predictable if you know all of the rules, and there are a lot. There are consonant classes/tone rules, vowel frames created by mixing vowel components and placing them all around the consonant, differences in pronunciation of consonant symbols depending if they are in initial or final parts of syllables, silent consonants, leading consonants that are silent but make you apply a different set of tone rules, inherent vowels, legal consonant clusters with no vowel in between, unwritten "short a" vowels in clusters which also can impact tones if the second character is sonorant, and then t+r=s sound. Because there are no word breaks, sometimes I don't know if a consonant is in initial or final position of a syllable.
Just spend more time in Thailand, you will make it .....easily. สู้สู้ครับ! it's not that difficult 😁😁
A Thai learning Mandarin here. I struggle with both lol ถ้าเอาจริงเอาจังก็ยากทั้งสองภาษาเลย 每天哭着看书 😂
加油😉
加油，add oil🤪
我在学习汉语。
สู้ๆนะ
as someone whos learning thai, dont be afraid, its actually not really hard and you'll get the hang of it eventually :)
I speak fluent Navajo and I can hear all these tones without trying. Yay for tonal languages!
navajo only has two though.
did you learn it at school or were you spoken to in navajo at home since childhood?
@@gasun1274 We have five. People say we don't have a mid tone but I believe there is.
I spent 7 years in HK before going to live 17 in Thailand. I was already English-French bilungual.
Cantonese is far harder IMHO. I got quite fluent in Thai after 3 years there. And remain so 20 years later. But I still remember quite a lot of Cantonese. Japanese is loads of fun, too ! (My current challenge)
I'm a half Thai half American who learned both English and Thai because my parents each only spoke their main language to me. So my dad would talk to me in , English and my mom would in Thai. I ended up becoming fluent in both. Now I'm also conversational Japanese. Finding out about the cultured of each language is so cool!
how did you learn japanese? i wanna learn as well
@kayyayeare my highschool provided a Japanese class. I also do my own studying. One huge tip is to talk to Japanese people to get how the conversation flows.
You are so amazing 🎉
You can understand deeply in both Thai and Chinese.
I always get asked this question to, and I agree with you. And I'd add that after learning enough Hanzi, expanding your Chinese vocabulary is just so simple as the composition of new words is quite logical. Whereas with Thai, I feel like I'm having to work hard to find a new word's etymological roots to help me remember the word. Do you have any recommendations for something comprehensive regarding Thai etymology? (Thai or English)
Side note-Cool! Vietnamese is my next language...as far as vocabulary in Vietnamese, Thai wouldn't be much help right? I know it's filled with Chinese and sprinkled with French.
You can start with this that I put together a while back - mindkraft.me/sanskrit-and-pali-prefixes-in-thai/
agreed. you can probably guess the meaning of the new words in Chinese, but there isn’t any clue for new Thai words. Over 60% Vietnamese words are imported from Chinese, it’s easier if you speak good chinese
Sanskrit (and it's derivatives Pali and - to lesser extent - Hindi) are absolutely necessary for anyone interested in Thai etymology. Bonus - Sanskrit is SUCH a cool language!
This guy is dope !!!! ( I am native Chinese speaker learning Thai and Vietnamese
Thanx for this stimulating video. You, a falang as simultaneous interpreter Thai - Mandarin and fluent in a few else I guess,.... Rather a feat to write home about. Thanx again.
Hey Stuart, Mandarin is the official language used in the court during medieval period. Chinese being the language used by Chinese encompasses Mandarin and all dialects of different provinces. In China, mandarin is often referred as the Putonghua, while in Taiwan is called the National language 国语。
อยากให้กำลังใจคนที่กำลังเรียนภาษาไทยอยู่ครับ สู้ๆครับ :D
As a native Cantonese speaker knowing Vietnamese, i think Thai is easy for me because the pronunciation of Thai is similar with Cantonese rather than Mandarin and the Thai grammar is similar with Vietnamese.
I'm Thai and I like the text at 9:28 XD
เราก็ชอบค่ะ555(ก็มันเรื่องจริงนี่นะ😂)
15:35 yi2 liang4 che1 哥们注意变调规则，作为量词“一”在去声字前会变调为二声；在非去声字前则变调为四声
作為福建人 是沒有這個變化的，我想中國南方都是這個音 yi1 liang4 che1 如果指所謂的「正宗」的普通話的話，那你說的是對的。
Learn Thai if you want to watch Thai BL Series, or learn Mandarin Chinese if you want to read 耽美小说或者漫画 :))
learn vietnamese to date vietnamese girls✔
Very interesting, and I agree with everything. Funny you mentioned about Chinese ppl may have difficulty with certain Thai sounds - watching my Shanghai wife say the NG & เรือ had me in a fit ( then I slept on the couch that evening ) I didn't follow through with learning Chinese characters ( too time-consuming for me ) so this time around, I am pushing to learn Thai script and I feel that my Thai will surpass my Chinese because of this. Many thanks Stuart.
Yeah - Mandarin speakers have very distinct issues with Thai pronunciation - as opposed to speakers of more Southern Chinese languages like Cantonese and Hokkien. The lack of glottal stop in Mandarin combined with lack of differentiation between long and short vowels gives Chinese speakers of Thai a distinct 'sound'
I just learn characters as I go. A few by noticing I see them all the time, a few by thinking I need them and looking them up. I'm not at a stage to do well with the more abstract ones but I found getting to a stage where you can make pretty useful guesses about what a character either means or sounds like or both started to come much earlier than I would've thought.
I haven't studied Chinese, but I can read, write, and speak Thai. I am from the US, and I have found Thai sentence structure to be SO painful. There are so many things that don't make any sense, and there are many times when I ask a Thai person (who is fluent in English) to help explain why the sentence is structured that way or why they used a given word in a specific position, and often they can offer no explanation lol. It's so defeating...I would really love to be native fluent someday, but I there seems to be quite a roadblock for me at this point...
it's an advantage because Thais then also can't tell you that you're wrong, you can make things up and it is still right
Can you put an example here. I think Thai sentence is pretty easy compare to English.
Thai sentence is easy. You can struct only Subject + verb + Object or Subject + verb only its can make any means. Likes ฉันกินข้าว (I eat rice) ฉันจะซื้อตั๋วเครื่องบิน (I will buy an airplane ticket) ฉันกำลังจะซื้อตั๋วเครื่องบินเดี๋ยวนี้ (I will buying an airplane ticket now) ฉันกำลังซื้อตั๋วเครื่องบินอยู่ตอนนี้ (I just buying airplane ticket right now) etc. And Thai language past or future tense is also easy, just use only word that mean day like “yesterday” = “เมื่อวาน” , future = อนาคต , tomorrow = “พรุ่งนี้” . For example ฉันจะไปงานฉลองวันเกิดเขาพรุ่งนี้ = พรุ่งนี้ฉันจะไปงานฉลองวันเกิดของเขา = “ Tomorrow, I am going to his birthday party.” Or its mean “ I will be his birthday party tomorrow” . Thai meaning to tense of English is up to only the word you use in your sentence you can place the words in any place but its still mean in the same way that is correct. Don’t mind about that much, because if you use its everyday you can be fluently. If you has any question you can typing in this comment by tag me I will help you if I can. (Pardon me, if my english is not well) , from Thai.
The screenshot of the Chinese wechat dialogue is sooooo hilarious lol. I wonder how you find such a dialogue. I'm Chinese and I've tried to learn Thai so many times but always got defeated from learning the alphabet/writing system. I know once I digest the letters I can improve a lot because I found Thai and Chinese have similar grammar and expressions. Still it is just too difficult to remember the letters and the tones.
Love it. I will stick to Thai only lol
You are back!
อยากพูดได้มันทุกภาษาเลยครับ
พยายามค่ะ55555555
Short answer: Chinese requires on average twice as many study hours to learn as Thai (2200 for CHN vs 1100 for THA)
ภาษาจีนยากกว่าค่ะ ต้องจำตัวอักษร
พินอิน ออกเสียงก็ยาก 🤔
It's awesome you mentioned that, because I was working as a multi lingual loan signing agent, offering services in English, ASL, Español, ภาษาไทย, 中文，と日本語。this was great, as with all the languages if I ever got stuck, I could make it through with very little modifications of Spanglish, Japanglish, even Thinglish... However, I would run into speed bumps, trying to use Chinglish. I say speed bumps, because I can't really use the full English word, sometimes... They'll just sit there and stare at me, whenever I would. Thank God they created Google!!! We'd always get through it, without any hard feelings!!! Although sometimes my fluency wasn't to par, I feel that everyone preferred my services over someone who wouldn't even try to speak their language. Because, I would take the extra steps of making sure I had the list of words I would use in my loan documents. Like Sign here, Date Here, Percentage Rates, Balloon Payments, etc. When they're prompt for further explanation, I'd offer using the document translator. Sometimes, when all else would fail, we would call someone.
8:40 Stuart lowkey demonstrates us how friends of benefit cheating works in Chinese
I was wondering if someone's gonna pick up on that WeChat conversation
@@AlexanderKrasnovIsTheMan 😂
Shit, I didn't even notice it. LMAO
This is extremely interesting! thank you very much
I started studying Thai over this past year (after a very short bout maybe 5 years ago) and I will say that it really reminds me of Chinese.
Chinese is highly intimidating to English speakers for its exotic-sounding consonants and vowels, those pesky tones, and the massive library of hanzi characters, but after a bit of practice is surprisingly easy. After a few weeks, you'll be comfortable having very basic conversations, and after a few months, you'll be building vocabulary faster and feeling more at ease with hanzi in general. Sadly, I eventually had to give up Chinese class because of my schedule (I was taking Chinese and Japanese at the same at school --as someone who still lives and works in Japanese, don't even get me started on that bag of worms--, and my last year there was only a single time slot for both), and have forgotten much of it.
When I started studying Thai, it really beat me to a pulp. I started with the alphabet and my ass was kicked even before I bothered thinking about the tones, but after a few days of wondering if I was ever going to get the hang of it, I was looking at some text and it just "clicked." I'm still not the best at tones (I think that map that shows the relation between pronunciation and consonant class could really help me), but it's surprisingly easy now to look at a new Thai word, read it, and use it right out the gate. There are a lot of words with Pali/Sanskrit origins but honestly with the alphabet out of the way I'm not afraid at all.
I'm watching this video just out of curiosity. I congratulate you for this excellent analysis of both languages.
I'm really pleased to see I recognize lots of Chinese characters (because I have learned Japanese). As a native Spanish speaker I can say Thai is kinda easy because I can grammatically filter it through Spanish and sometimes through English (tones are no different than orthographic accents in Spanish and we have lots of words with repeated vowels), writing is not that hard either you just need to train your memory (there are exceptions but you get use to it too). Classifiers are another story but "no pain no gain". I vote for Thai and in top of that I feel really attracted to aesthetics of written Thai.
I'm spaniard and I'm interested in learning Thai, but i thought it was very difficult and completely different. Is Thai pronunciation similar to the Spanish one? 👀
@@emarcostar Si y no. Porque tienen bastantes más vocales y consonantes que nosotros, la dificultad radica más en las excepciones escritas, en los tonos, en que la mayoría de palabras son solo de una sílaba (con tono) y en los clasificadores que nuestra mente occidental no interioriza tan rápidamente, sin embargo te animo a que lo hagas, es una lengua hermosa.
That was a great video Stuart I am wanting to increase learning in both languages based on your video and my interest in both languages I have a small understanding of Chinese and a little of Thai .
.Question ... is it best to learn and focus one at a time or is it "do able" to learn simultaneously ?
Any input on this platform would be appreciated
I glad to hear that people want to learn Thai.
Thai is easy (in my opinion). It is by far the easiest language I've learnt. The tones are really not that hard and neither is the writing system. The hardest part is understanding the hundreds of one syllable words they frequently use in everyday conversations.
When you say one syllable words, do you mean particles that are thrown on the end and peppered through speech, or actual words?
@@StuartJayRaj งงเลย"นะจ๊ะ" บอกว่าง่ายแต่เหมือนยังเข้าไม่ถึงภาษา
For me Spanish was easiest. After six months immersion I was conversational on any topic but not truly fluent. To get to a useful beginner level was even easier in German. That only took me eight days but then progressing further got tougher than with Spanish. Chinese and Thai are taking much longer, but I'm not immersing either.
@@kittenastrophy5951 พูดถึงเราเองเหรอครับ 🧐
@@StuartJayRaj a little bit of both but there aren't that many particles all in all. It's more about the words of Chinese origin as opposed to the longer words of Sanskrit or Pali origins ... The amount of short words kind of threw me at the beginning, they can be easily misunderstood for other very similar sounding words. I would also throw a few syntax problems such as the change of meaning according to where the word ให้ goes in the sentence etc...
At the beginning it can be complicated but I also feel that Thai isn't extraordinarily rich in vocabulary and I have always felt that you can say a lot with very few words and a lot of these words are very often "recycled" or reused to convey different meanings.
Compared to my native language French or the other languages I've learnt (Italian, English, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Chinese and Spanish, I'd say Thai is the easiest. Again, it's my opinion.
Thai people are also very good at repeating and rewording what a learner says back to them which in my case has proved incredibly helpful.
I agree with Stu JR, I would add one thing that comes to mind with regard to Chinese. My major problem was not the tones, i got those down pat pretty quickly. My problem was with breaking the sentence down into individual word units. I am not sure if this is the case in Thai as well, but in Chinese when you link the last syllable of the preceding word to the first syllable of the next word, you very often get a word that makes sense, but that linkage is wrong and you end up with a meaning that is not there. This happened to me all the time while my vocab was not yet very good.