  We study effects of a thermal-quark mass and Landau damping of quarks on the
chiral phase transition and its soft modes at finite temperature. For this
purpose we employ a simple model with the quark propagator obtained in the hard
thermal loop approximation. We show that the chiral phase transition is second
order even if quark have a finite thermal mass, and the thermal mass suppresses
the chiral condensate. We argue that mesonic spectra have a large width due to
scattering between gluons and quarks, and the van Hove singularity at
threshold.
