Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

You are browsing the archives of 2009 September.

Thai language resource: thai-language.com… You all know Glenn Slayden from an earlier interview: Interviewing Successful Thai Language Learners: Glenn Slayden. Today I’m writing a brief overview of his site, thai-language.com. Mission Statement: The mission of thai-language.com is to offer English speakers the highest-quality non-commercial Thai language resource on the web. Our discussion forums, dictionary, and [...]

Two of the most common words of all… In any language, a tiny handful of words make up a disproportionate percentage of the sentences you write or speak. It’s a mathematical law, actually. In the British National Corpus, a collection of 100 million words of written and spoken English, more than 6% is taken up [...]

Chiangmai University Open Courseware… TCU’s Open Thai Courseware: What a brilliant find by Kokesat, a member of the ThaiVisa Thai language forum! Quoting SoftWater: I don’t think I’m overstating the case (?) when I say this is the BEST beginners material I have ever seen. This is going to be my first recommendation to anyone [...]

Interviewing Successful Thai Language Learners… Name: Larry Daks Nationality: American Age: Sixty and quite a few years plus. Sex: Male Location: Reston, Virginia (located about twenty miles from Washington, DC) Profession: Retired, U.S. diplomat, currently a consultant, focused almost entirely on eduction and cultural initiatives involving China. Website: NA (although you can check out my [...]

Let’s get down to it… English and Thai take rather different approaches to personal pronouns. In English, there’s a small set of words we use in most situations: I, we, you, he, she, they, it. In the object case there are a few that change: me, us, him, her. Unless you’re reading Shakespeare or the [...]

Presenting… Chris Baker… Disclaimer: I don’t advise anyone to replicate this method. I’ve never had a single Thai lesson. By the time I started to learn Thai, I was already 30. I was conscious of having been trained by the British schooling system to learn languages (French, German, Russian) which I could never really use. [...]

The free FSI Thai lessons… If you have been anywhere near WLT’s extensive resource page, Learn Thai for FREE, then you’ll know all about the fantastic Thai lessons created by the Foreign Service Institute. And ever since I’ve known about the FSI Thai course, I’ve wanted to change that drat transliteration (karaoke Thai) into proper [...]

Thai kitty cartoons… It’s already September, which means I totally forgot to post cartoons for the month of August. Apologies, as the Thai YouTube Cartoon: Little Leader Geo series was grand. A huge thanks goes to Simon for alerting me about the first-class cartoon series at thaicatcartoon.com (รู้รักภาษาไทย). There are 180 cartoons for download. All [...]

Language thinking gets you everywhere… When speaking a new language, it’s tough to kick the impulse to translate what you want to say from your mother tongue. When you’re first learning, you’re thinking of each sentence in English first. This can result in some pretty tortured Thai. As you continue to improve, your speech patterns [...]

Meeting successful language learners… One of the many pluses with hosting the Successful Thai Language Learners series is meeting talented (and generous) Thai speakers. For instance, take Hugh Long of www.retire2thailand.com. Hugh was yesterday’s Successful Thai Language Learner. In the middle of our back and forth, Hugh released a triple package of free: Advanced Thai [...]

Interviewing Successful Thai Language Learners… Name: Hugh Leong Nationality: U.S.A. Age range: 60+ Sex: Male Location: Chiang Mai, Thailand Profession: Currently retired and author of the series Professional English for Thailand (Hotel, Office, Hospital, Banking), Silkworm Books; write A Retiring Attitude, a retirement column for Chiang Mai City Life magazine; had careers as a Peace [...]

Photography courses in Bangkok… Several months back I did an interview for my buddy Amy: Like Photography? Take a Class in Bangkok! And since I had a fantastic time during the photography courses mentioned in the interview (and learned a lot too), when Bangkok Photo School’s November schedule was announced, I thought I’d give you [...]

The Thais have nicknames too… This week I’ll give you a break from my normal spiel on the linguistic nuts and bolts of the Thai language and do something a bit lighter. If you’ve spent any amount of time in Thailand, you’re bound to have noticed that Thais have very colorful nicknames. Common Thai nicknames [...]

Interviewing Successful Thai Language Learners… Name: Terry Fredrickson Nationality: American Age range: 60+ Sex: Male Location: Bangkok Profession: Head of educational services for the Bangkok Post Website: Read Bangkok Post Twitter: @terryfrd What is your Thai level? Fluent. Do you speak more street Thai, Issan Thai, or professional Thai? Professional Thai, street Thai, Issan Thai [...]