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Not Telling
These are all books I’ve used from cover-to-cover and argue that there is no equivalent among English books. They are books that you wouldn’t just buy on a whim because they are expensive (about 650 baht for this book below).
*The best vocabulary builder there is*
‘Ima sugu hanseru taigo tangoshu’ (published by Toshin Books)
[and in English it says] ‘Oral communication training series’
今すぐ話せるタイ語単語集 (東進ブックス)
(available at Kinokuniya Central World)
Under 5 sections, it introduces the basic 2,000 words. Now, other books do this, but this one, for virtually every word, offers an example sentence. …And the whole book is on CD.
Here is the front cover:
And here is a sample page from the Politics/Economics/Society section of the Thai audio:
(there is no annoying Japanese audio)
29 Track_29.mp3 2.28MB
8 downloadsYou can see that the sentences offered are quite interesting, not simply “My name is Bob”. I learnt several grammar points and expressions from the book. But it’s beauty is you can learn each word in context and repeatedly hear words rarely spoken, but often read--‘ constitution’, ‘coup’, ‘civilisation’ etc.
Okay, so there is no English translation, so it will be a lot of hard work for anyone below Advanced Beginner level. But persistence would be rewarded.
It has all the professionalism that is typical of the Japanese publishers. The Thai is all written in Thai, there is a romanic transliteration for it and the sentence on the audio, so any non-Japanese/non-Thai reader can read it.
On the rare occasions where there is no sentence, a picture is used instead.
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I will do more posts but this is my big recommendation for vocab building. My copy is well thumbed.
