Easy Thai: An Introduction to the Thai Language (ISBN 0804801592)

Hats Off To Gordon Allison:
I love this book. Mr. Allison is charming, cheerful, and an excellent writer, which is something you don't see every day. While I greatly admire Benjawan Becker's books, she, like David Smyth, has the personality of a potted plant. I admit my sentimental bias: Allison's was the first book I ever read on Thai and I practically ate it. It's full of errors and typos and cruddy printing (I used a magnifying glass extensively) because it is printed in Thailand, which to me in my perverse way made it all the more charming. You want to know Thailand? I don't exaggerate too much when I say this book says it all! This book won't teach you Thai. The title is a joke. But it WILL teach you the script/alphabet. And what other book does that in such a systematic fashion? Believe me: get this book, devour it, and then get Benjawan's beginner book. Avoid everyone else. Smyth is OK, but would be WAY better if he changed his ghastly transliteration (the "r" he puts everywhere, for example, as in "bpairt" for "eight") This makes his book for me unreadable. A brief word on software. There's Benjawan's beginner book written over to CD-ROM and also Matthew Courage's. For the life of me, I can't see how anyone who wasn't a total genius could get to first base on these programs without having learned the alphabet beforehand. The Courage audio quality, BTW, is horrendous. Plus it sounds like they got the cleaning lady (a sort of Thai female Joe Pesci) to do the talking for 500 baht. The male talkers sound like they're about to bolt to the john... Finally, I give the book three stars because of the fraudulant title and all the errors and lame sentences (as the earnest but missing-the-point M.A. chap above points out). Plus, I think the ludicrously high ratings that abound in Amazon (this moronic age we live in) make its rating system meaningless. But three stars are good! Yours in struggle. Hope to see you over drinks in Bangers!

Great Rapid Start! Not a substitute for disciplined study!:
Just wanted to second the review of this book by Pat Hopper. I went through this book in a week or two and couldn't have gotten a better start to reading thai. The best thing about the book is that it starts with the Low Consonants, then the Middle, and then introduces the Common High Class Consonants concurrently with the concept of tone rules. This approach keeps the three classifications of consonants seperate in the students mind as opposed to the student that begins by learning the alphabet in dictionary order. That said, the book is very sketchy, should use the common "AH! AH EE! EE EU! EU" Thai vowel table, and a clear tone table as in David Smyth's "Teach Yourself Thai." For me this book was a great introduction, and now that I'm studying a more disciplined course (similar to one Thai children receive in 1st and 2nd grades) I'm learning at faster rate, and filling in the holes and ambiguity that Easy Thai left me with.

Is there such a thing as Easy Thai?:
The answer to the question in the header definitely is "No, there is no such thing"! So, do not think you will learn much more from this book than sentences like "In Lamphoon there are rice farmers". These sentences are not really the first you would like to know when you plan to visit Thailand. Nevertheless you have to start somewhere, and this book is good as a first acquaintance with the (very complex) Thai language. I used it before I went to Thailand for the very first time, and it did teach me a bit of the Thai alphabet and some basic things like counting (useful in bargaining). The title will always remain misleading, as I know now (after several years of harsh study) that there definitely is no such thing as "Easy Thai"! Neverthless recommended to give learning the Thai language a first try.

Flat-out the worst book on learning Thai I have ever seen:
That's pretty much all I've got to say. You won't learn Thai from this book. You might learn... actually, I have no idea what you'll learn, but whatever it is, it could only be described sarcastically, & it couldn't accurately be denominated 'Thai'.

An astonishing achievement:
First off, the title is a horror. One as a rule avoids language books with the word "Easy". Besides that, the title is seriously wrong. It only teaches one thing, the horrendous Thai alphabet. So the complaint that his sentences are unreal, which they are, is totally beside the point. There's not even "Hello" in here!! But what Allison does teach, he does better than anyone else. I have the Chiang Mai YMCA's book on reading Thai and Sriwalai Ponmanee's 'Writing and Reading Thai' also but I always refer back to Allison's book. But why after re-printing the book 20 years later does he stick with that dumb title?