Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

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Getting by With Learning Thai… To get a steady stream of interviews for the Successful Thai Language Learners series I have to contact a lot of people. Some do come via recommendations or walk-ins, but not all. The majority I contact politely decline, stating that they are not successful enough. And that’s when I started [...]

Thai sunflowers don’t follow, they resist the sun… When running around Thailand with K.Pi and K.Ph, a small event will often take over our conversation. As I’m interested in learning about all things Thai, it usually involves a mix of Thai culture, history, and language. In our field before the perfect field adventure, this time [...]

Supermarkets in Thailand… If you are going to live in Thailand, one of the things you will find yourself doing is food shopping. When I first came to Thailand there were no such things as supermarkets. Now they are as ubiquitous as Thailand’s outdoor markets. They may not be as much fun or as exciting [...]

The Tower of Confusion and Smart.fm… The Tower of Confusion discusses language learning. If you have the time, cruise through Edwin’s Learning Tips or see what he has to say about Stuart Jay Raj. In Edwin’s post, The Most Effective Way to Learn Hiragana, I was reminded once again about Smart.fm. One nice thing about [...]

Is that a กัน /gan/ in your pocket?… One thing I like to do as a vocabulary building exercise is when I come across a word that I find is often used paired up with other words (making compounds) I like to see how many different combinations I can come up with. Of course it [...]

How to gain insight into the Thai language from how Thais learn English… Having recently written a book (Tenses for Thais) designed to help native English speakers and Thais who wish to teach English to Thais, I received a friendship invitation from Ms Wentworth, whose roving eyes had detected my work. At her suggestion, I [...]

Watching Educational Thai TV on YouTube… The many ways to learn Thai thrills me. On top of course books and online Thai lessons, there is YouTube, iTunes and all the iProducts (iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch, iPad, etc), recording devices, video software, and… what else? As I no longer have a teenager in the house my [...]

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 [...]