On one of my visits to Thailand in the late 90s I purchased a Thai language beginner’s book along with the accompanying audio tapes. I studied the book with great diligence and listened to the cassette tapes in my car over and over and over again every day on my way to and from work.
But I soon learned, on subsequent visits to Thailand, that nothing I learned seemed to work. I still couldn’t understand what people were saying and when I tried to speak, no one understood me.
I didn’t know then but subsequently figured out two very important things:
- The Thai language found in most books and lessons bears little resemblance to the Thai language used in every day speech. (This is probably true of most language learning aids.)
- Thai is precisely pronounced. Get it even a little bit wrong and you’re dead.
I also figured out much later that I had made two horrible decisions with respect to my Thai language studies:
- I decided to not learn the Thai script right away but to rely on the romanizations found in almost every book.
- I decided to ignore the tones. Thai is a tonal language. The tones were and are very, very hard for me. I assumed that even if I used the wrong tone, Thai speakers would be able to use context and logic to figure out what I was saying. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
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