For the past year or so I\u2019ve been blogging on beginner and intermediate subjects, assuming everyone is up to speed. For the next month of blog posts I will give an introduction targeted mainly at the ultra-beginners. I will lay out my advice and explain the very very basics.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Reality<\/strong><\/p>\n The other day I saw a website selling a book, for only $10, that promises you will \u2018learn the Thai alphabet in just 60 minutes\u2019. You do not need to look hard to find a \u201cLearn X Language in only two weeks!\u201d book.<\/p>\n Hey, if you believe that, you deserve to have your money taken from you lol . . .<\/p>\n Learning Thai, or any language beyond the beginner level, isn\u2019t something you can do in two weeks, or barely even two years. Learning another language is a huge investment in time and effort – it could even take a decade or more to reach a level where you can casually discuss philosophy and politics without giving the listener (or yourself) a headache.<\/p>\n Speaking a foreign language is not binary, either. Fluency is not something you either have or you don\u2019t \u2013 there is a large grey area in between beginner and native. To be \u2018conversationally fluent\u2019 is not the same as \u2018natively fluent\u2019, for example. If you\u2019re an English speaker and then learn Spanish and French, you can claim (brag?) that you speak three different languages. But that can\u2019t compare to an English speaker who learns both Hindi and Chinese \u2013 an exponentially harder task.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Why learn Thai?<\/strong><\/p>\n Good question. I get asked that all the time and the answer is never really that simple. The average person in the world learns to speak four languages:<\/p>\n 1) the language of their parents<\/p>\n 2) the language(s) of their home country<\/p>\n 3) the language of the country they are residing in<\/p>\n 4) the \u2018international\u2019 language (ie English)<\/p>\n For example, let\u2019s say your parents are Chinese and your entire family moved to live in Italy. You\u2019re likely to speak Chinese, Italian, and English. If your Chinese parents are from Hong Kong, you might even speak both Mandarin and Cantonese, meaning four languages. But it\u2019s all out of necessity – there are good reasons to learn each language and many opportunities to practice.<\/p>\n For the typical American, that likely means English across the board. There just isn\u2019t any compelling need or reason to learn another language other than English. Except as a hobby, of course. And in Thailand, Thais speak enough rudimentary English that you can get by without learning to speak Thai. So why learn?<\/p>\n With no strong motivations, it\u2019s not easy to learn something difficult. If you find yourself in this situation, you should spend time to ask yourself all the reasons you\u2019d like to learn Thai: for fun, for your Thai significant other, to make life easier for you here, to make local friends, to show off, to flirt, etc. And whenever you feel like giving up, or feel too lazy to continue, remind yourself all the reasons of why you started.<\/p>\n to be continued . . .\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the past year or so I\u2019ve been blogging on beginner and intermediate subjects, assuming everyone is up to speed. For the next month of blog posts I will give an introduction targeted mainly at the ultra-beginners. I will lay out my advice and explain the very very basics.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[10208],"tags":[964,7465,10177],"class_list":["post-1151","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-beginner","tag-introduction","tag-learn","tag-thai"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1155,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions\/1155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}