"I think you need to play more white notes ..." - Asking a native speaker with no understanding of phonology to critique your speaking of their language is akin to asking a non musician to critique your piano playing. Our mother tongue is like a familiar old song it's 'in' you and you feel it emotionally, and we KNOW how to tell the difference between the 'original' version versus a Karaoke knock-off version - ... or when someone's singing 'Ken Lee' when they're trying to sing Mariah Carey's 'Can't Live'.

The advice you finally get from a native speaker however might often be as useful as a non musician suggesting that "I think you need to play more white notes". What does that even mean?

Paddy from Thai Talk with Paddy has been gracious enough to permit me to put this analysis of his Thai out in the spirit of helping other learners of Thai. I was prompted to do it after he recently put a clip out asking Thais to critique his Thai as he was doing Vox Pops on the streets of Sydney with Thais - only to receive responses that were as useful as 'You need to play more white notes' - they weren't really putting their finger on things that would actually help him improve his Thai.

0:00 Introduction
0:24 Paddy Introduction to original Video
1:46 Speaking เหน่อ 'ner' and The stages of 'compliments' for a Thai learner
4:53 Paddy Speaking Thai Montage from Original Clip - Straight
6:35 Understanding Thai Vowels
7:44 Understanding Thai Consonants vs. English Consonants
11:11 Beginning of Analysis going through Paddy's Speech Excerpts
26:48 Recap of key areas addressed in speech analysis

There are a couple of things in there that I missed in the final edit of the clip - I actually did an entirely different analysis, but realised I didn't turn my mic on. I thought I'd included a couple of other important points already but turns out that they were in the original clip.

5:40 Paddy says พูดคล่อง 'speak fluently' - you notice that the glotallisation isn't there at all on the word พูด 'speak' resulting in the ด becoming a fully annunciated, voiced final 'd' which doesn't exist in Thai and runs into the initial of the next word. You can see it clearly in the spectogram.

6:14 He says ไม่ต้องกลัวผิด - 'you don't need to worry about (speaking) incorrectly (making mistakes' - you'd probably say พูดผิด - but the thing to note here is on the word phìt ผิด - his tone is way high (closer to Isaan rendering of a short dead high class).

6:24 He says ได้ยิน dâi yin 'could hear' , but the ด changes into almost a ต 'dt' rendering it a different word. Some basic drills over the span of a day could clear all of this up.

Interactive Indic / Thai Consonant Compass - https://mindkraft.me/consonant-compass/
Here's Paddy's Original Clip    • I Asked Random Thai People to Critiqu...  

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