Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

Tip Number 1: Take your time, enjoy your studies…
“Why does it have to be sooooooo hard?”
“Why does it have to take sooooooo long?”
Maybe we need a little attitude adjustment…? Maybe we need to listen more carefully…? Most of us do have nearly excellent hearing skills for normal conversational volume… BUT, most of us have [...]

Talking Thai on the telephone…
It probably took me ten years before I could understand anything anyone said on the telephone here in Thailand. It’s not the language. My wife had the same problem in English when she got to America. It is just really hard dealing with a disembodied voice and not seeing the person [...]

How you YOU learn languages?…
Much depends on your own understanding of your own skills in “learning how to learn” for yourself… That is, are you aware of your own learning “style”?

Do you know how you learn fastest/ easiest in most subjects?
Are you a visual or auditory or kinesthetic learner, or what kind [...]

A trusted native speaker is essential….
You may have noticed by now that learning Thai takes real effort and discipline. No two ways about it. Expect to put in long hours tweaking your pronunciation, expanding your vocabulary, solidifying your grasp on the grammar.
One of the best — and most necessary — language resources you have is [...]

Tips and suggestions needed…
Last week I received an email asking for help:
Question: I’m currently an exchange student living in Thailand. I’ve had an issue where I can’t seem to learn any more Thai, and when I try my minds strays and I get tired very quickly. I was just wondering, do you have tips to [...]

Ten steps to learning Thai…
Note: This is dedicated to people like Catherine Wentworth who are working their patooties off trying to grasp this outlandishly difficult language. Good luck to you all.
When I started learning Thai I was told that it was one of the hardest for an English speaker to learn. That was 40 years [...]

This Thai learning Thai…
Unfortunately there was no mystical transference or osmosis of language from mother to womb. So I am an American born woman who is ironically half Thai and half Chinese. Ironically because my ethnic makeup is very Thai, something I learned when I moved here as an adult. There are many Thai-Chinese in [...]

Talking about the weather…
What better way to break the ice and start a conversation than to talk about the weather? I know it is a bit cliché-ish but, hey, it works. And in Thailand, the sentence, “The rainy season sure is late this year” is a much better conversation starter than “What’s your sign?” [...]

Sloppy love overcomes the rain…
Rak Bpon Bpon is a sweet love song about a guy living on the street. He dreams of finding love, but from experience he knows that pretty women will not give him the time of day. Finally, he finds someone closer to his heart. A woman just like him.
Note: This is [...]

Loan words by any other name…
A long while ago I did a research paper that got published in Passa, the Chulalongkorn Linguistics publication, about the frequency of English loan words in Thai. Borrowing words from English has been going on for a while. At that time I was under the opinion that words got borrowed [...]