Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Learn Thai by watching TV (the 'TV method')

Lately, I have been trying to put a lot of time into studying Thai. After looking around at a bunch of blogs and websites about language learning I have come across an interesting method for studying Thai (or any language). People have been calling it the 'TV method' which, I think, originally came from this guy's blog. Basically, whatever your target language is, you just watch a bunch of TV shows and movies in that language with no English subtitles or translations of any kind. While using this method, you are encouraged to not even look up new words that you hear or even try to hard to understand them. Instead, you just watch TV and just guess what is going on in the show based on what you see. The theory is, after a good amount of time watching TV (around 300 - 800 hours) a beginner to the language will begin to pick it up naturally. It is a style of "input learning" that aims to mimic the learning of a small child who, doesn't really put any effort into learning his/her native language, but almost accidentally learns simply by watching parents and family memebers do things while they speak. I suppose that the 'TV method' has been influenced by other input learning methods such as the ALG (Automatic Language Growth) method brought to us from the AUA Language Center in Bangkok where foreigners in Thailand can go to learn Thai (naturally). At this school, native Thai speakers stand in front of the class and speak Thai to the students while drawing pictures or acting out whatever they are talking about. People claim that studying this way (after about 1000 hours of class) results in native-like fluency.

I am really interested in the approach to learning Thai that they take at AUA (and you can read more about it here), but since I won't be able to attend class there anytime soon, I have decided to do the next best thing and try out the 'TV method'. There are tons on Thai TV shows online that you can watch for free but the problem is that a lot of the titles of Thai shows (without English subtitles) are written in Thai. So how can beginners to Thai find good Thai shows to watch? To help out people in this situation I am going to start compiling a list of Thai TV shows that I come across into this document of THAI TV SHOWS and I'll try to update it with new shows every week or so with a new blog post. If you find any good shows to watch let me know and I'll add them for sure. welp, see ya later.

3 comments:

  1. Nice blog Josh. Keep up the posting on Thai language learning!

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  2. So, is this really helpful? I mean, how am I supposed to know what they are trying to say without me understanding the language itself?

    Thai Language School

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  3. You are not. You are just supposed to watch an bunch of TV shows and guess (not understand) what they are saying. You just watch and guess what is going on. The theory is that after many hours of watching TV your brain will sort it all out for by itself. Kinda like when a baby learns it's native language, at first they have no idea what anyone is saying and it takes a long time, but eventually they can speak their own language almost by accident.

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