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Cracking Thai Fundamentals: A Thai Operating System for your Mind
Stuart Jay Raj has developed a suite of hand and body signs, glyphs, colourful stories and exercises that will help learners of Thai lay down a new linguistic and cultural operating system for their mind and body. Rather than awkwardly superimpose a new language over the top of the pre-existing non-Thai sound and meaning system of your mother tongue, Cracking Thai Fundamentals will teach you to think about language, culture and meanings, produce meanings, speak, read and react in Thai in a way that much more resembles the way Thais think about and produce their language themselves.
- GenresNonfiction
648 pages, Paperback
First published July 9, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 27, 2017
While I enjoyed going through this book and I can relate to Raj's passion for all things language, there were many, many things about the book that annoyed me. I can mostly summarize them as 1) needs an editor, 2) should have been an ebook 3) a perceived arrogance due to inappropriate style and 4) extensive use of pseudo-linguistics. Details follow.
1) Raj did the whole book by himself and unfortunately it shows. There were lots of typos and some font problems (characters appearing as squares); the book is way longer than it needs to be (almost 650 pages) and would have been better condensed; the figures are not numbered and references to them are often misplaced ("the list/figure below" when it was actually several pages previous); reference pronunciations are not given for North American English (and my Australian isn't good enough to always understand what sound he means); he outlines his complete recommended order for learning the Thai consonants but then presents them in a different order; these consonants are then presented in the form of a huge info dump. The book would have been greatly improved if he had just added one-page overviews for the letters (or groups of letters) in the way that he believes is easiest to understand (I did see some good charts in miniature). Since the book treats the Thai orthography so extensively, it also would have been nice to see handwriting samples and a little more explanation of Thai numbers. Overall, it still feels like a rough draft in many ways. It needs condensing and rewriting.
2) The style and contents of the book are entirely unsuitable to paper formatting. The style makes it feel like a series of blog posts; it liberally references online material, much of which would have been fantastic had he taken the time to convert it to a proper print form (especially the consonant compass); it includes lots of pasted screenshots, many of which are difficult to make out because the book is black and white; the formatting and low-quality printing do not justify a 33 dollar price tag; the book provides pages for tracing characters, but the book is so thick and unwieldy that it is difficult to do without completely folding back the binding and then finding a large book to support the page while you write on it.
3) Raj is an accomplished hobbyist, and quite linguistically talented, but he seems to be unacquainted with proper style, which makes the text often come across as less than humble. (Most gratingly he falsely implies an expertise in articulatory phonetics, but that's for the next section). Among the style sins are citing himself in an inspirational quote in a header, using his own face portrait where a generic picture would have done better, and generally not humbling down his abilities as a polyglot. I can't imagine that the people he is hired to teach have extensive experience in all of Malaysian, Mandarin/Cantonese/Middle Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Burmese, Korean, Sanskrit and Hindi (if they did they wouldn't need him). The text needs to do adjust to more realistic expectations of its audience.
4) Though the author is a polyglot, he is not a linguist, let alone an articulatory or theoretical phonetician, and he unfortunately appears to present himself as one. If you are a linguist then reading this book will drive you crazy. He uses IPA throughout but then for some reason says that linguists use a question mark to signify a glottal stop; this is very unfortunate because now there is a three-way ambiguity between a font problem, a question mark, and a glottal stop. He refers constantly to the actions of the very vague "throat" for all aspects of the phonology when a more precise description would be much more helpful. There are many other problems that I have since forgotten, but the most egregious to me is his folk account of tonogenesis. The reader is told to pronounce "car" with and without strong aspiration and to listen to what happens to the tone. When I tried it I found that aspiration made the tone higher, since more air was flowing through my vocal chords. This is the same principle as with any wind instrument. If you blow harder, you get a higher note. The author then tells the reader that the *opposite* occurs because the 'h' sound opens the "throat". This would be extra confusing for a student because aspiration is associated with higher tones in Thai later in the book. A cursory Google search for "tonogenesis" brings up a study showing the same results with aspirated/unaspirated words among American English speakers, as well as more complete discussions of Thai tonogenesis, which actually occurred in relation to other types of phonation (breathy/creaky voice, etc.). There is another point in the book where he claims that articulating an 'n' pulls the "throat" upwards. This is all bad. It's okay to use physical metaphors or mnemonics for associating different sounds, but claiming such a simplistic explanation of tonogenesis as fact is unacceptable. This is linguistic quackery, like a book on culture claiming that Germans follow rules so strictly because they have such a logical language.
Whew. Now that I'm done ranting, I will say that I did enjoy the book. There are some nuggets of great learning and teaching ideas. I will not forget his mnemonics for determining the tone of a syllable, which are much better than the simple flow-chart you get on Wikipedia. He has lots of interesting things to say about the culture and language, and especially about aspects of the Thai writing system and its relationship with other forms of writing. He is clearly very passionate about what he writes. By the end of the book, it really felt like a very excited person had just talked for a long time about a deep subject they were passionate about, and I really just wanted them to stop and take a breath, gather their thoughts, and then simplify. If he had an editor, they would have made him do that.
I found it funny that Raj says that appendices are always his favorite part of a language book. When I started reading his, I thought, "this *is* good!" The appendices were awesome and contained mostly unexpected bonus info. A word list to elicit all of the tones of a local dialect is a fantastic idea! The Tinglish section was quite fun as well.
1) Raj did the whole book by himself and unfortunately it shows. There were lots of typos and some font problems (characters appearing as squares); the book is way longer than it needs to be (almost 650 pages) and would have been better condensed; the figures are not numbered and references to them are often misplaced ("the list/figure below" when it was actually several pages previous); reference pronunciations are not given for North American English (and my Australian isn't good enough to always understand what sound he means); he outlines his complete recommended order for learning the Thai consonants but then presents them in a different order; these consonants are then presented in the form of a huge info dump. The book would have been greatly improved if he had just added one-page overviews for the letters (or groups of letters) in the way that he believes is easiest to understand (I did see some good charts in miniature). Since the book treats the Thai orthography so extensively, it also would have been nice to see handwriting samples and a little more explanation of Thai numbers. Overall, it still feels like a rough draft in many ways. It needs condensing and rewriting.
2) The style and contents of the book are entirely unsuitable to paper formatting. The style makes it feel like a series of blog posts; it liberally references online material, much of which would have been fantastic had he taken the time to convert it to a proper print form (especially the consonant compass); it includes lots of pasted screenshots, many of which are difficult to make out because the book is black and white; the formatting and low-quality printing do not justify a 33 dollar price tag; the book provides pages for tracing characters, but the book is so thick and unwieldy that it is difficult to do without completely folding back the binding and then finding a large book to support the page while you write on it.
3) Raj is an accomplished hobbyist, and quite linguistically talented, but he seems to be unacquainted with proper style, which makes the text often come across as less than humble. (Most gratingly he falsely implies an expertise in articulatory phonetics, but that's for the next section). Among the style sins are citing himself in an inspirational quote in a header, using his own face portrait where a generic picture would have done better, and generally not humbling down his abilities as a polyglot. I can't imagine that the people he is hired to teach have extensive experience in all of Malaysian, Mandarin/Cantonese/Middle Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Burmese, Korean, Sanskrit and Hindi (if they did they wouldn't need him). The text needs to do adjust to more realistic expectations of its audience.
4) Though the author is a polyglot, he is not a linguist, let alone an articulatory or theoretical phonetician, and he unfortunately appears to present himself as one. If you are a linguist then reading this book will drive you crazy. He uses IPA throughout but then for some reason says that linguists use a question mark to signify a glottal stop; this is very unfortunate because now there is a three-way ambiguity between a font problem, a question mark, and a glottal stop. He refers constantly to the actions of the very vague "throat" for all aspects of the phonology when a more precise description would be much more helpful. There are many other problems that I have since forgotten, but the most egregious to me is his folk account of tonogenesis. The reader is told to pronounce "car" with and without strong aspiration and to listen to what happens to the tone. When I tried it I found that aspiration made the tone higher, since more air was flowing through my vocal chords. This is the same principle as with any wind instrument. If you blow harder, you get a higher note. The author then tells the reader that the *opposite* occurs because the 'h' sound opens the "throat". This would be extra confusing for a student because aspiration is associated with higher tones in Thai later in the book. A cursory Google search for "tonogenesis" brings up a study showing the same results with aspirated/unaspirated words among American English speakers, as well as more complete discussions of Thai tonogenesis, which actually occurred in relation to other types of phonation (breathy/creaky voice, etc.). There is another point in the book where he claims that articulating an 'n' pulls the "throat" upwards. This is all bad. It's okay to use physical metaphors or mnemonics for associating different sounds, but claiming such a simplistic explanation of tonogenesis as fact is unacceptable. This is linguistic quackery, like a book on culture claiming that Germans follow rules so strictly because they have such a logical language.
Whew. Now that I'm done ranting, I will say that I did enjoy the book. There are some nuggets of great learning and teaching ideas. I will not forget his mnemonics for determining the tone of a syllable, which are much better than the simple flow-chart you get on Wikipedia. He has lots of interesting things to say about the culture and language, and especially about aspects of the Thai writing system and its relationship with other forms of writing. He is clearly very passionate about what he writes. By the end of the book, it really felt like a very excited person had just talked for a long time about a deep subject they were passionate about, and I really just wanted them to stop and take a breath, gather their thoughts, and then simplify. If he had an editor, they would have made him do that.
I found it funny that Raj says that appendices are always his favorite part of a language book. When I started reading his, I thought, "this *is* good!" The appendices were awesome and contained mostly unexpected bonus info. A word list to elicit all of the tones of a local dialect is a fantastic idea! The Tinglish section was quite fun as well.
May 26, 2025
Really good insight and tools. Did what it said and changed the way I think about the Thai language. Desperately needs an editor, though. The content is 5 stars, lack of editing brings it down, unfortunately. Would love to see an updated edition!
December 25, 2019
I do not understand why this book has such high ratings. It's badly written, badly edited, badly organized and overly verbose. The information looks good on the surface, but once you start to dig in there's really not much there.
The parts on the writing system and its relation to Sanskrit are very good, however, and greatly helpful for learning the alphabet. These parts, better organized and edited, would make a great little five-star book of around 50 pages or so. As it stands, I can't give this more than two.
The parts on the writing system and its relation to Sanskrit are very good, however, and greatly helpful for learning the alphabet. These parts, better organized and edited, would make a great little five-star book of around 50 pages or so. As it stands, I can't give this more than two.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews