ศาลาชุมนุม

[DebinMelbourne]

Hi everyone,
My blind son, 23yo, would like to learn Thai in advance of our family trip to Thailand in a year's time. He knows no Thai, but has an ear for languages. Given he is blind, all learning will be done aurally and I am not going to try and get stuff Brailled.

Do you all have any suggestions for the best audio method of learning Thai, which doesn't rely much on an accompanying text. Naturally it is for speaking and listening only, not writing.

Cheers and thanks,
Deb

[daฟาน]

I think of 2 things...

the standard CDs from Thai For Beginners and other books. Vocabularies, Conversations, Sentences
They do rely on texts of course but they are fine without it as well, if you ask me.

2nd would be Anki IF someone creates the Decks for him.
possible: Native Language Audio Definition, Thai Audio Vocabulary/Sentence. It is easy to swap them so he will have two options:
a) He hears the English sound and gotta say the Thai by himself. Then he presses space and the Thai Audio file will be played and he will hear the native Thai speaker.
b) He will hear Thai first and gotta think of the meaning. Pressing Space will let him hear the English Audio.

As I said, someone has to create this Deck first. So you do need the Thai and English Audio Files. (English could be fine by TTS - for example google's free text to speech software, but you still will need to create a deck, every vocabulary and get the sounds)

If he gets better, he could try to speak with Thai people over Skype or other programs for free. Or maybe you could even let him interact with a Thai language teacher through skype - some offer there service here in this Forum for a moderate price.

my thoughts so far (:
it might be harder, but definitely not impossible!

edit:
I once met a guy at the muay thai that always stated that he only uses the pimsleur audio files while running. His Thai was pretty good, that also might be an option!

I just thought about a nice one: In Flight Thai
They state "you don't have to read or write anything" in the first sound file.
I've listened to it a bit right now. First the say the sentence english and then you hear it in Thai from a female and a male speaker. Then you have a big gap to repeat it yourself.
My thoughts: It's nice, especially if he just wants to study Thai for the vacation. If he seriously wants to study Thai, I would recommend Thai for Beginners in addition with Anki.

[Farrung]

Greetings

I'm looking for pretty much the same thing because I like to learn Thai by listening while I'm doing other things and so far the only resource I've found that allows me to do that is Pimsleur Thai. There are 30 lessons that cover the basics by saying a sentence in English followed by the Thai translation, should be all your son needs to prepare for a holiday.

If you come across any other audio resource that don't require you to follow the audio with a book (which is a really frustrating way to study I recon) I would really appreciate it if you could let me know about it.

Regards Farrung