Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

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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 Do-Be-Do-Be-Do system of learning Thai tones… (Apologies to Frank Sinatra) If language were like a song, then the vocabulary and grammar of the language would be the words. The vowels, consonants, syllable stress and sentence intonation in English, and the tones in Thai would be the music. You really have to sing both the [...]

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, [...]

David Smyth updates Teach Yourself Thai … Only a handful of Thai courses are highly thought of, and David Smyth’s Teach Yourself Thai is at the very top of that list. When I asked polyglot Stu Jay Raj which books he’d recommend to students of the Thai language, David’s Teach Yourself Thai was the only [...]

A Sticky Problem… I was reading one of those Thai expat blogs recently when I came across someone discussing the Thai word for “stingy” (seems like his girlfriend uses this word with him often). To add a little humor to his blog he did a direct translation of the Thai word for “stingy”, ขี้เหนียว /kêe-nǐeow/. [...]

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 [...]

The Thai phrases you use most often… Moving to a county with a new foreign language to tackle, I depend on two sure-fire phrases. The first phrase I learn is ‘I don’t understand’. And the second phrase is ‘this does not work’. I also practice my blank stare. Why these three? Ok, I know from [...]

Are you a shy Thai learner?… Back when I was much younger, I’d shrink from meeting new people, and sometimes people I knew. One time, I even burst into tears when a male teacher focused on me too intently in class. But years later, I am no longer what I would consider painfully shy. Now [...]

Active Learning vs Passive Learning… I’ve been learning languages by myself since I was 13. As an experienced self-learner, I came to the conclusion that there is no one best method, but there are some universal principles one can stick to and which I think should be shared for the benefit of those who really [...]

I’m Not Fine, Thank You… From my years of teaching English I have learned that there is a two-line dialog that is ingrained in every student of English, probably in the world. It goes like this: Hello, how are you? Fine thank you, and you? As native speakers of English, we know that there are [...]

Review: The Linguist – How to learn a language… I know who Steve Kaufmann is. Sort of. A couple of times a year I stop by his blog, The Linguist, to see what he’s up to. But until lately I didn’t know the details of his method of choice. The reason? Because LingQ is not [...]

World Cup & Football Thai… Are you following the World Cup on Thai TV? Do you understand what is being said, or are you watching with the sound turned off? For those who are confused and befuddled, or just want to participate verbally, Jo and Jay from Learn Thai Podcast have generously created two fun-filled [...]

Grokking the writing system by doing things youʼre not supposed to… Iʼve seen a lot of posts on this site about how learning the writing system is essential if you want to pronounce Thai correctly (it is) and how itʼs really not that hard (itʼs not), but what seems to be missing is a good [...]

Hugh’s Retired Life in Thailand… Hugh is an industrious individual. No doubt. Besides gardening (yes, I’m envious, very) he’s always working on new and intriguing projects. Although retired, he authors books for the Thai professional market (impressed? I am). And as you all know, he also writes the instructive Thai Language Thai Culture for WLT. [...]