Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

Sourcing a Thai language school in Pattaya… On moving to Pattaya one of my first orders of business was to find a decent Thai language school that could fulfill my two main requirements: provide me with a 1 year education visa and be able to teach me to speak Thai competently. While the Education Visa [...]

Learning Thai with Skype language exchange partners… For the past two weeks I’ve been writing about Skype and learning Thai. How to learn Thai via Skype was a brief introduction. I then interviewed my Thai Skype Teacher, Khun Narisa Naropakorn to share how she teaches Thai via Skype. Thai language school Study Thai Online graced [...]

Where to find Skype teachers… Teaching Thai via Skype is a growing industry. And learning languages via Skype is ideal because the students don’t need to be in the same exact location as their teachers. They can reside in the same city (like I do), or live on different continents. Being in different countries means [...]

The magic of learning Thai via Skype… Disclaimer: Having a series about learning Thai via Skype wouldn’t be complete unless I jumped in as well. I know that. But I was a bit leery about sharing my experiences because I didn’t want to swamp Khun Narisa, my Thai Skype teacher. But after hearing that a [...]

Study Thai Online… I am a long-time user of Skype and for many years used Skype-out credit to call friends and relations back in the UK. On the Skype website one day I came across a case study for toniks.com, a UK-based company providing online language lessons using Skype. Some further searching revealed that many [...]

The Polyglot Project: In Their Own Words… I’m a slooooow mover in the mornings. I flop out of bed, stagger stiff-legged and mostly blind to the kitchen, turn on the kettle, and then fix my breakfast while waiting for the water to boil. With pot, cup, and bowl or plate in hand, I point myself [...]

The series: Learning Thai via Skype… Welcome to the first post on learning Thai via Skype. At this point I’m not sure how many posts will be in this series. Originally, I’d planned on just a handful: How to use Skype to learn Thai, my Thai Skype experience, an interview with a Skype teacher, finding [...]

The Teach Yourself Thai Complete draw… again… Well, this is a fun outcome (as well as a fabulous selling point for David Smyth’s new TYT). Last week I wrote a review and announced a draw: Complete Thai: David Smyth Updates Teach Yourself Thai. And I didn’t do it alone, I had help from two fabulous [...]

The Teach Yourself Thai Complete draw… Running a draw can be loads of work, so I aimed to keep this one simple. I went to two fabulous bloggers in the Thai language community, Kaewmala (Thai Women Talks) and Ajarn Pasa (Tweet Yourself Thai) and asked for help. Kaewmala threw numbers into a beautifully coloured bowl, [...]

James Higbie and Essential Thai… From the inception of the Successful Thai Language Learner series, I’ve had my eye on James Higbie. I was patiently tracking Jim down, but he found me first. During our back and forth Jim mentioned that his highly prized Essential Thai is being tidied up for a reprint. And just [...]

Google Translate, the challenge… Over a year ago, Google Translate launched, and the language sites started buzzing at the possibilities. My contributions were Thai Translation: Google Translation & Thai Dictionaries and Google Translates Documents and Email Too and Thai Google Translate: Will Crowdsourcing Work. During it all, Jeff Gray mentioned the below: …the sheer volume [...]

Mindfulness and learning Thai… Reading a recent article by Catherine Wentworth, Learning Thai (for the shy), I hit upon a paragraph that grabbed my attention. She was talking about shy people learning languages but the thing that particularly piqued my interest was her mention of mindfulness in connection with learning Thai – I knew she [...]

Who is Andrew Biggs?… Andrew Biggs, the coolest bald guy in Thailand, is one of those long-time expat curiosities that a chunk of Thai learners know next to nothing about. A part of the reason is because Andrew does not market his talents to expats (he’s an all Thai sort of guy). And (taking a [...]

Reviewing iPhone apps for the Thai learning market… In this series, so far I’ve reviewed Thai Language Phrase Books and Thai Alphabet and Vocabulary apps. So unless you’ve downloaded a Thai dictionary already, this review is for you. You might notice that I included all dictionaries listed as English Thai. And the reason I did [...]