Jay_Jay

Hi All and thank you for your feedback. It's always good to get constructive feedback to improve future versions.

I have been running my Cracking Thai Fundamentals programme since 2000. For many years it has been a face to face programme that usually lasts around 16 hours. I run versions in Thai for Thais and in English for English speakers learning Thai. I have also run versions of it for speakers of Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian and Burmese.

The original impetus for the programme came from a director at the Foreign Correspondent's Club wanting a programme for journalists and other members to be able to hit the ground running when it came to learning the Thai language and working in with the Thai culture - and having questions answered that their Thai teachers had traditionally given answers in the vein of "It's just like that" or "You don't need to know". I have a degree in linguistics and have quite a rich background since childhood with many languages including Chinese languages including Mandarin, Cantonese, Middle Chinese and other dialects, Austronesian languages, languages of India including Sanskrit / Pali, Scandinavian languages and Romance languages like Spanish.

There is very little (if anything) about the Thai language that is 'mysterious' or that can't be explained away with a logical and sensible explanation. That was the goal of CTF - to take away the mystery of the language whether it be tones, the writing system, the way meanings are constructed etc, and not only give logical explanations as to WHY they are the way they are, but also to provide exercises and coaching to help learners of Thai get past common obstacles that learners often encounter and help them towards their goal of speaking Thai with a much more natural level of prosody - speaking Thai with more natural rhythms in the language.

The programme developed over 16 years and I have had over 700 people go through the face to face programme since 2000. This isn't my standard work, and I would run only a few workshops a year. The standard price has been 15,000 baht since the early 2000's and hasn't changed since then. Even with that price, I have had people continuing to register and many people have come back several times, getting different things out of it each time. It's important to remember too that people learning Thai aren't just native English speakers. The way I teach a native English speaker is very different from the way I teach a Chinese speaker, Hindi (or other Indian language) speaker, Burmese speaker or Indonesian speaker. Each of those languages have different things within the language that might allow them to get a head start on their Thai. For example - for a person who can write in the script of an Indian language or language that has a Brahmic script will understand the way the tone system and consonant classes are set out along with vowels if Thai is taught directly against their mother tongue's system.

In order to reach more people, it had to go beyond just me in a classroom. I set out a few years ago to look at each part of the face to face programme and try and develop interactive versions - that would enable learners to develop mastery through exercises. Not just watching videos. This is where the online version came in. I originally had it on Jcademy.com. People were asking for real life applications of the things learned during CTF, and so I developed the Thai Bites series, showing how all of those concepts came together in real life. I then teamed up with Glossika based in Taiwan with their Spaced Repetition system and bundled all that together. They have a year's worth of learning there - and that is where the $299 price came from. One off price for everything being bundled together.

I have subsequently pulled back on Jcademy and have moved everything to my own site - http://stujay.com and brought the price down to $9.99 per month for everything (not including Glossika), as I wanted to make it available to everyone who had a copy of the book and vice versa.

Now - the book. There are many things that I couldn't go into detail about in the online course. This is where the book came in. I wanted the book to be a 'book book' - not an e-book, that would sit by the learner throughout their entire 'Thai speaking' life. I wanted it to help lay the right foundation from the get go and then be there to answer any 'head scratching' moments that popped up along the way. Although I wrote the book in English, the readers are from all different language backgrounds, so I have tried to include something in there for everyone. There are things in there that will resound with some people and work for them because of their background and other things won't. That's ok. Hopefully though, there's something in there that can help everyone.

I must note that the book IS NOT your standard language learning book with 'Lesson One - John and Mary at the bus station' etc. It is a book to help lay down 'A Thai Operating System For the Mind' and can (and should) be used in conjunction with all the learning systems that you're already using. I have never used only one resource to learn a language and I don't believe that anyone should (or would).

The problem with the book is that I have over 100 fonts in there of many languages - and many fonts that aren't fonts. They are of scripts that don't have fonts yet, so I have had to include image files to build words up. All of this proved a nightmare for editing. I was lucky enough to have a British born editor who could also edit Thai. The problem was though that his computer didn't have all the fonts and if just one was missing, or one bit of formatting got messed up or character deleted, it flowed on throughout the book and ruined the rest of the book's formatting. The result - he had to do a red-pen edit on a printed manuscript of the book and then I had to tediously go through every single page and try and marry his red-pen edits up with the place in the digital file - within the template supplied by the publisher. I then went back and forth for months with the publisher (in the US) as they had never done a book with this many fonts / this many languages with complex scripts and their system was choking. In the end, I had to make a call - send the book to print with all the edits we did, or wait another several months before it would be ready for print. I didn't have that luxury of time, so I made the call. I hope that the typos and formatting issues don't detract too much from the content and the learning experience. I have created an erratum section on my site so that errors can be logged and will be fixed in future editions if / when they happen.

I'm passionate about languages and learning - and the last thing that I want to do is add negativity to the learning process that could hinder someone else's opportunity to learn.

I hope this has answered any questions as to what the book is about and my motives for writing it along with my other stuff. Like I said in the beginning - thanks for the feedback. All feedback is noted.

Hi All - Hope you don't mind me jumping in here. @timmyp - I hear what you're saying and I agree that this has hit Urban myth status in a lot of languages including Thai. When I mentioned it, it was in regard to the usage of particles. There are some particles in Thai along with pronouns of course - and also the rhythms that they are used that have a very distinct female ring to it. Very heterosexual / masculine Thai men can make use of these in a way to make themselves come of very flirty / playboyish in a 'positive' way, but to do so, there are a lot of dynamics that come into play and it is only done under certain conditions (and when certain people are present... and certain others aren't present). This even extends to being able to use the word 'Kha' ค่ะ as a guy.

What I hear a great deal however are female particles and rhythms used by foreign learners of Thai that are not used in the right context and come across looking / sounding out of place ... or out of the persona that they seem like they want to project.

I don't want to post any specific clips or mention any people's names, as on the whole, these guys have put in a fantastic effort into their language and achieved things that many haven't been able to. The last thing I want to do is discourage people from learning language. This 'female talk' however has often become the subject of discussion amongst my Thai friends when they hear these clips.

Some of the things to listen out for are the use (and overuse) of the 'a' อะ particle tagged onto the end of sentences - both sometimes as just 'a' and sometimes with a 'w' attached to it coming out as หวะ.

For example:

ไม่ชอบอะ mâi cʰɔ̂ à 'I don't like it'

"He/She said that it would go up to 15,000 in January - WOW!"

Could have different meanings depending on context.

This is what Thais call พูดเหน่อๆ 'phut noe noe' ... often attributed to Farang, Luuk Kreung and young girls around Siam that are trying to sound 'inter'. The ช ช้าง moves back in the mouth, along with many other consonant and vowel sounds.

Ask Google Translater, at least it gives you an idea.

http://translate.google.com/#

I agree - I don't think that this kind of stuff should be aired and translated in a public forum. If you've been discreet enough to get her chat records, it would probably be better to be discreet and ask a Thai friend what it means (both semantically and culturally).

I think I saw these books with a few fables somewhere on the web or in real life, but those I'm talking about had really 50 fables in them. I did a search on the web some time ago, and what I found was similar to what you are reporting.

I have been using these for around 10 years now since my days at Dale Carnegie Thailand running an activity 'Bringing Text To Life' for one of the presentation workshops. Depending on what the level of English or Thai is, I will use only English, English + Thai or just Thai with different groups. By acting them out and hamming them up, they're a great tool for foreigners to start to become expressive in Thai, Thais to become more expressive in English ... and everyone to become more expressive in their mother tongues (if their mother tongues are English or Thai). I've also done similar things with the same fables in Chinese with groups in China. The messages in the fables seem to be universal. I made my own Thai compilation from this site - http://www.fungdham.com/fable/fable.html. It wouldn't be too hard to make your own compilation up by translating the title of the fables you want into English and then doing a search to find the English version of the fable and then cut and paste them together into one document.

I have no experience with the Kindle myself, but Stuart Jay Raj did a review of the Kindle vs the Ipad for language learning on his blog that will probably be of interest to you.

As you can see from that post, I love the Kindle and it has been a wonderful tool for language learning. I take it everywhere I go and have it loaded now with over 1000 language books. There is a problem with Dictionaries though - I haven't been able to find many dictionaries that are properly indexed for the Kindle. I do have many dictionaries loaded into my Kindle as PDF files, but they are very cumbersome to jump through. It's much easier to use an app like longdo or one of the other dictionaries on your phone rather than hunt around on the Kindle.

A somewhat free translation:

"I really wanna break/split up with my husband, I am bored out of my mind and I cannot do jacksh*t"

And I sure hope this doesn't bring any bad news as well..

And another loose rendition just for variety:

"I've just gotta split up with my hubbie - I'm fed up - he won't let me do squat"

(said to a lady older than her)

It's a cute effeminate laugh - picture a young girl with her hand cupped sideways over her mouth snickering.

Other variations of online laughing in Thai:

55555 - most common

ฮิฮิๆๆๆๆๆ - similar to อิๆๆๆ

หุหุๆๆๆ - cute female trying to imitate a gruff male laugh

เหอะๆๆ - variation of หุๆๆ

ห้ามจอดรถบริเวณนี้เด็ดขาด ยกเว้นรถรับส่งของ

Give an inch and they'll take a mile. I'd just leave it as straight to the point as possible. Emergency vehicles are a given ... and the sympathy vote / respect for the fact it could be for emergency vehicles probably wouldn't fly in the same way as it might in the west.

You're not going to find a lot in Bangkok. You will find some multi-lingual dictionaries around the place. Mostly in second-hand book-stores. There's one book seller at Jatuchak that has tonnes of books both in many different languages and teaching many different languages, but you have to hunt for them yourself. I will often go there on a weekday (just near the fence on the road that runs up to อ.ต.ก. The books are packed a few rows deep and about 2 meters high.. and are covered in dust, so be prepared to get sweaty and dirty, but I have found some gems.

Another good place in Thailand is the Ramkhamhaeng University bookstore. They have all their own books printed for the various language courses there. I have about 30 books from there covering many ancient and modern Thai languages, Chinese, Russian, Burmese, Khmer, Lao and a few others.

In your normal Thai bookstores like Se-Ed, Kinokuniya etc, you will probably find a few kids books in Thai - Mandarin (Hanzi / Pinyin) - English.

The best place I've found though is China and Hong Kong. There are some fantastic comparative texts in the University bookstores in Beijing, and there's a whole zone in Mongkok (Hong Kong) that specialises in Language / linguistic books. Many of these books are bi and tri-lingual depending on the languages / topics that they're covering. Many of the academic texts are bilingual Chinese - English.

The Chinese books I have on Lao, Urdu, Farsi, Thai, Burmese etc are fantastic - much more detailed and great reading texts compared to many of the English books I have.

If you're looking at learning Burmese, one of the best books I've found can be found at the Chula bookstore at Siam Square - about A4 size, creamy / yellow cover with red writing. It's been much easier learning Burmese through Thai than through English.

If you go into the Muslim communities in Thailand, you can track down many texts teaching Arabic and Jawi / Malay based in Thai. These often have English too, as they've been translated from English texts.

I went on a shopping spree in KL a few months back and picked up about 40 books that are in a mixture of Malay / Jawi Script / Arabic / English. Some have all four, some are just Malay / Jawi / Arabic or Malay / Arabic / English.

I've also managed to acquire several books in mixtures of Burmese / Pwo / Sgaw / Hindi / Nepali / English from different travels ... and different people traveling into those areas.

In Vietnam, I was able to pick up several books that are French / Vietnamese / English and some with Chinese too.

They're hard to find but the hunt is a lot of fun.

Sarang heyo - korean word ="love each other" or "loves" in this context

เถิบหน่อยซิคะ ... works, but it's pretty uncommon. It would be more common as you mentioned to hear ขยับหน่อย or เขยิบหน่อย (Note.. หน่อย not น้อย)

Kokesaat - This is a serious question ... you wouldn't be Dutch by any chance would you? I have noticed this issue with almost all the Dutch people that come through my Thai class. It's a matter of training their ears to really hear the difference between the two - ด and ต / บ and ป, and then start doing exercises to develop the muscle memory.

I knew more than 50 Dutch speaking Thai language students and have never met somebody with this problem.

The Dutch d sounds exactly like ด

And the Dutch t is very close to ต (I say very close because ต is probably a bit more unaspirated)

The Dutch b is exactly like บ.

The Dutch p is very close to the ป.

My experience is that Dutch speaking people have problems with the aspirated sound like ท and พ (which are rather easy for English speaking people).

It was all three of them. There was one student in particular where บ ป and พ were sending him crazy. Thinking about that guy in particular, it was the ป and พ that gave him the most grief.

Kokesaat - This is a serious question ... you wouldn't be Dutch by any chance would you? I have noticed this issue with almost all the Dutch people that come through my Thai class. It's a matter of training their ears to really hear the difference between the two - ด and ต / บ and ป, and then start doing exercises to develop the muscle memory.

Jay_Jay, can you recommend any forums or blogs?

Youtube isn't only great for watching clips, you can also pick up alot of colloquial Thai from reading the comments (which will of course be about the clip you've just watched, aiding comprehension both ways). If the clips are too fast, you can always download them us Realplayer SP and then watch them using VCL media player at a much slower speed. Here's a site with Thai lakorns/soaps with English subtitles, if you can stand it: . If anybody knows where I can find ones with Thai subtitles instead of English, please tell me, as that would be much better for me.

Dubbed foreign films can be good because they almost always have the original sountrack, plus a Thai dubbed one, as well as Thai and English subtitles. Plus they're less than 100B if you choose the older ones. I wouldn't be too reliant on these though, as not only does the dubbed Thai seem a bit unnatural at times, but sometimes the subtitles are paraphrased beyond recognition. I'm not just speaking of differences between the English and Thai here, which is understandable, but the difference between the Thai soundtrack and the Thai subtitles. It's almost as if the people who wrote the subtitles delibirately tried to rephrase everything to make their job more interesting. I bought Madagascar and The Jungle Book 2 thinking kids films would be easier than adult films (plus these both have Mandarin subtitles as well, which is a bonus as I'm also learning Chinese), but the subtitle work is awful in this regard. I've just worked through the Dr Zhivago DVD (mini-series, not the film), which seems to be available everywhere for about 80B, and the subtitles and speech match almost exactly. At 3 and a half hours long, it's pretty good value.

Just google a couple of words like คิๆๆๆๆๆ and you'll find a slew of hits.

For what it's worth, I've idiomatically translted subtitles myself for episodes of my TV Show เหนือชั้น 1000แปลก and made them available on youtube.

Grab some clips and store them on your computer - some news clips, but mindless game shows and variety shows actually make good language specimen fodder. Your ears have to be tuned into the sound blocks first. Not an easy thing to do by yourself in the beginning, as you'll probably be trying to separate every word to analyse what they mean. Find some Thai friends that can sit with you and analyse a few minutes at a time. Ask them what they're saying - what the idioms mean - what are other ways of saying the same thing?

Then when they're not there, practice shadowing what you hear. Just mimic everything you hear - the rhythms, facial expressions, the way they breathe, speech rhythms and little 'tag' words they thrown in on the end. Don't try and separate the words and analyse what they're saying. Just get the language into your body.

If you can read Thai script, another good thing is to get into Thai blogs, web-boards etc and analyse what you see in there. You'll see people typing in 'spoken' Thai - slang, abbreviations, idioms etc. It's a written version of what you really here and even though I don't think the Royal Institute would approve of what you're reading, it let's you get a glimpse into what's really happening out there.

If you do this for a couple of weeks, I think things will start to fall into place.

If I was to express the similar feeling in Thai, I'd probably say ยังอึ้งอยู่เลย - I'm still 'eung' (after the game) ... which is kinda similar. More like gobsmacked, startled, in shock.

'g' is a voiced sound. There is no voiced 'k' sound in Thai. It's an unaspirated 'k' - still closer to the Sanskrit क than 'g' in English. When you hear Thai's making fun on Farang pronouncing Thai, one of the features they pick up on and emphasize is the mispronunciation of ก as 'g'.

It's like the 'k' in 'sky'. Many learners of Thai have to train their ear to it in the beginning and not filter it out as a 'g'. Similar thing happens with many Thai's not being able to hear the difference between 'GOD' and 'GOT' when a native English speaker says them. Many Thais will argue that there is no perceivable difference. To a native speaker however, they are very different.

@Stu

Good lord, what a fascinating piece of work, and many thanks for offering it up free. I've always struggled to understand these concepts 'labial' 'cerebral' and so on, but admittedly I probably have not put enough work in.

My Thai pronunciation is poor - the faster I speak the poorer it becomes, which is frustrating because I am starting to get to a level of fluency where I can speak nearly as fast as I think, but if I go that fast, it sounds like gibberish to all but me!

Given all that, my question is will putting the effort in to get my heard round all this 'palatal' 'labial' stuff really turn my pronunciation into something comprehensible?

After six years of listening input, I don't believe the 'osmosis' method of eventually sounding natural by merely listening is working.

The 'cerebral' aren't there in Thai - you can see what they changed into in the chart. Following in the spirit of the development of Hangeul (Korean writing system), I tried to make the glyphs represent the positions of the mouth.

In my classes, I will have students sit there for 30sec to a minute at a time just focusing on the glyph for the particular part of the mouth and get the placement right - then drill them by pointing to different places in on the chart and having their mouth follow. It's like learning to play a musical instrument. Playing piano, you can get away with messy fingering, but when the pedal hits the metal, bad fingering is going to cause you to jam up and make errors. Tones aren't just pitch - they're throat positions / different articulation variables.

Open some youtube clips of people speaking Thai. Isolate a few phrases at a time and try and copy them - their facial expressions, breathing, emotion etc. Don't try and break down each word that you're saying, or try and pronounce it with the individual tones that you think they're supposed to be and don't try and analyse / break down the exact meaning at first. Just mimic them verbatim.

If you do this for 15 mins everyday I'm sure your fluency / intelligibility will pick up. To test yourself, go and try it out on people that don't know you. If you speak to them and they don't bat an eyelid and just speak normally back to you, you know you're making progress. I find that for many of my students, the people that are closest to them can sometimes be the biggest demotivator in learning. Because they've been there from the 'beginning' of their Thai learning experience, they tend to expect the worst and try and pick up on the slightest mistake... sometimes even when there aren't really mistakes because they're not used to the students NOT making mistakes.

Another good thing to do is to go into Thai web-boards / chat rooms and analyse the way people type in slang ... and try and re-produce it. Better still, sit with a Thai friend and have them read the posts to you. This way, they're forced not to teach you the 'Farang' Thai. You can hear the slang / inflections / idioms in context and start building up a more natural sounding arsenal of sound-bites.

I hope that this can be useful to Thaivisa learners out there and thank you for your suggestions for improving it!

I still think you should consider expanding beyond 5 by 5 when there are extra vargas (e.g. Tamil, Tibetan) or orders (non-Shan Tai scripts - Thai, Lao, Tham; Sinhalese (if you accept the prenasalised order); Cham). Even Devanagari (or to get back to the basic, Brahmi) has two unofficial orders (semivowel and sibilant) in most of the vargas, and it's interesting to compare how Devanagari nukta forms compare to Thai additions. Meanwhile, you forgot the retroflex lateral (LLA - Thai ฬ) - it's used for Vedic Sanskrit as well as Pali, so you can't properly ignore it, even though it fouls up the symmetry.

I hear you Richard. I was torn between being linguistically accurate / comprehensive and providing the basic structure for people that don't have the same love for linguistics that we have so that they can quickly conceptualize it and understand why certain things are the way they are - Consonant Classes etc. When I'm teaching, I like to put the vargas to music / rhythm and programme them into people's subconscious. The asymmetry that ฬ causes doesn't make it impossible, but a little more awkward. I opted to comment on ฬ and other letters like ฃ ฅ once the basic framework is down.

That said, it would be nice to put a full one together

Hi all,

Was just given a heads up on this thread, so thought I might jump in quickly.

The Thai consonant chart that the link has been made to here was actually an extension of another project I was working on last year. I was trying to develop a single system that I could use to teach people who had a grounding in one language that had a writing system based on the Indic sound system, to learn another script within an hour or so.

You can download the original Indic Consonant Compass here:

http://uniscript.org/var/import/Stu%20Jay%...20SE%20Asia.pdf

The following is taken from my original article about the compass:

There were so many languages to choose from. I broke this chart down to 8 scripts that I think would cover a good portion of the globe. The languages / scripts with my reasoning for choosing them are:

Language

Reason

Devanagari

* Devanagari is used to write a slew of Indic languages including Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and has also become the standard that Sanskrit is rendered in – although Sanskrit writings can commonly be found in local scripts like Tamil, Sinhalese, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Balinese etc.

* Given Devanagari's popularity and the fact that it has letters to represent each of the base sounds, I chose it as the base script.

Tamil

* Tamil is not only popular in India, Sri Lanka and other surrounding countries, but it is also very widely spoken in Singapore and Malaysia (even reaching official language status in Singapore)

* Given that I am in Southeast Asia, I wanted to develop this chart in particular to help as bigger cross section of the SE Asian community as possible. I think it would be great if this chart could spur people living in countries where Tamil is prevalent to have a go at learning the script. It will open up a whole new world around them.

* Another reason that I chose Tamil is that it is from the Dravdian stream of languages – and is indeed a very ancient script. You will notice that it's different from the other scripts in the chart in that there are very few base letters. The natural rules that govern how sounds change when preceding / followed by another letter will 'colour' the letter to give it different sounds – Sandhi. – E.g. in English – 'What did you do' is pronounced 'wo dije du' (very rough transliteration without IPA fonts!)

* Tamil is the 'What did you do' version where the others are more the 'wo dije du' versions.

Panjabi

* This is the Gurmukhi script used to write Panjabi. There are many Panjabi speakers all over Southeast Asia, so I thought it would be nice to include this script. In Thailand, there are many Thai born Indians that speak Panjabi at home, but cannot read the Gurmukhi script. Now with this comparison chart, I hope that the links to Thai can be made and again, spur some people that otherwise wouldn't onto learning the script … which will in turn open a new world up in the area of literature, religion, culture and getting in the good-books with Grandma and Grandpa!

Burmese

* Another SE Asian Language. There are fascinating things that happen phonetically with Burmese. I have really been getting into learning Burmese lately and am loving every minute of it. The script is very easy to learn once you have one of the other scripts down – and understanding what's going on phonetically vs. script will go a long way to help you start to get the language 'into your body'.

* There are also many Burmese in Thailand that cannot read or write Thai. Given the right guidance, it shouldn't take more than a few hours for Burmese who have lived in Thailand for any amount of time to start to link the Burmese and Thai Scripts together and open their eyes up to even more of the world around them.

Balinese

* Balinese is a beautiful script… not that the others aren't! Sadly, it's a dying art in Indonesia. While 'Bahasa Daerah' – regional languages are taught in Primary school, I have found very small percentage of people that are really proficient at reading and writing Balinese. Hopefully this will help a resurgence J

* Another reason that I've included both Balinese and Javanese is so that Balinese and Javanese speakers can see the similarities in the scripts! In my humble opinion, the two scripts are basically different fonts of the same script. While Balinese is very fluid and has more of an 'ancient free' feel, Javanese is more 'boxy' and looks more suitable for machine printed media.

Javanese

* I love Javanese – and part of the language of course is the script.

* Apart from that, I have pretty much the same reasoning for including Javanese as I did Balinese.

Thai

* After having taught Thai for many years, the Script still takes the number one position for learners' 'obstacles in learning Thai'. I have put this together as one more aid for demystifying the script and in doing so, helping learners of Thai get over a big hurdle.

* I wrote a post a couple of years ago that was a Fast-track guide for Indians to Learn Thai. This chart could be thought of as an upgrade to that to Indians living, working or looking at coming to Thailand.

* Once you get this structure down in you subconscious, tone rules will become second nature!... it's built into the system!

Khmer

* Being a neighbour to Thailand, much of Thailand's language, culture and customs have flowed from similar streams as Cambodia.

* Just take a look at any temple in Thailand, or on the roof of most Taxis driving around Bangkok, you'll often see Sanskrit and Pali writings in the Mon / Khmer script. Despite this, very few Thais can read the script.

* Just like the tone rules for Thai are part and parcel of this 5x5 structure, so too are the 'consonant classes' of Cambodian. Where the Mid and High classes for Thai are the first and second rows + the 'h', sibilants and base throat, the Cambodian 'oo' and 'oa' classes are broken down almost identically.

* This is my little effort in 'bridging the gap'

The Thai ONLY version of the chart came quite some time after thanks to my friend and student Peter Larsen. Peter is a Danish graphic designer in Bangkok and thought he wanted take the 'noise' out of my original chart and just focus on the Thai. That chart was designed for people who had already been taught through the original complete table and understood the sound structure of Devanagari.

I used the 'Korean Looking Glyphs' as a base writing structure for non-Indic script language speakers. This is taken from my original post explaining why I did it the way I did.

The Cardinal Points of the Mouth

As you read through the brief explanation to each of the following glyphs, place your tongue / mouth in the position and hold it there. Once you can do it for each glyph, move your gaze from one glyph to another at random and practice locking your mouth into the correct position according to the glyph that you're looking at.

Drilling yourself for about 2 minutes like this should be enough to start to develop some long lasting muscle memory.

Gutteral

Palatal

Cerebral

Dental

Labial

Back of the throat

Flattened Tongue on the Roof of the Mouth (Palate)

Rolled Back (Retroflex) Tongue on the Roof of the Mouth

Tongue on Teeth

Lips

대한민국! (Dae Han Min Kuk!)

Now, I know the Korean speakers out there must be thinking "Hmmm… some these symbols seem eerily familiar!".

Koreans are very proud of their writing system 'Han Geul' – 한 글 .. . and so they should be. Developed by King Sejong the Great (1418-1450) in 1444, it is one of the easiest scripts to learn on the planet! (I learned it on a bus ride across Seoul one sunny afternoon in 1996 ).

To add value to learning the Korean alphabet, I suggest spending an extra 10 minutes to learn how to touch type in Korean also. The keys are very logically set out between:

* Left hand: Consonants

* Right hand: Vowels

Each syllable in Han Geul is broken into a beginning (initial) sound, vowel and final sound component (if necessary). The symbols used to represent each of the sounds were based on the various parts of the mouth from which they were produced.

Korea Meets India

I have combined this principle with the basic principle of the Indic Scripts 'Map of the Mouth' logic to develop my own symbols.

It's interesting to note that the sound for 'r' / 'l' in Korean is uncannily similar to many of the symbols used to represent these same sounds in Indic (Brahmi) based scripts that display a 'rolling tongue' in one rendering or another. When I'm learning a new Indic script, this is actually one of the first memory points I will look for – I will peg the similarity or difference of its 'r' sound to the ones that I already know. I can't include all the samples in this text based medium as the fonts probably won't render properly on your computer. You can see them on the main 'Indic Consonant Compass' chart though.

Another shape that is very similar include the 'base voice' symbol which in many scripts is a circular shape of some sort.

The 'y' symbol which in Korean is normally 'two prongs' heading in the vowel direction. In the Indic scripts, the 'y' sound is usual a 2 or 3 pronged shape which I imagine is a representation of the way the tongue interacts with the palate.

Here is a sample:

Comparison of Similar Sound Shapes in Korean, Devanagari, Thai, Tamil and Gurmukhi (Panjabi)

Sound

Korean

Devanagari

Thai

Tamil

Gurmukhi

r

ㄹ

र

ร

ர

ਰ

ya

야

य

ย

ய

ਯ

The Key Actions of the Mouth

Stopped Throat

Aspirated

Voiced

Voiced Aspirated

Nasal

Consonant Starts with the Throat Closed

Throat opens and puffs air or a 'h' sound over the consonant. In some languages, the 'h' isn't as accented as others

Voice Resonates Over the Consonant

Voice Resonates Over the Consonant AND puffs air over the consonant (which opens the throat)

Sound is Directed Through the Nose

Semi Vowel

Sibilant

'H' Aspirate

Voice Base

Not Quite a Consonant Not Quite a Vowel –

Letters in this category are 'fluid' versions where 'full contanct' isn't really made with the 'cardinal point'. Think of it in English – is 'y' REALLY a consonant? (despite what your teachers told you)... or is it a vowel?

'S' Hissing Sound

'H' Sound

Open Throat

Root Symbol that Signifies the Voicebox

Colour Coding

I have also colour coded each category within the sound system to give a colourful representation of the textual glyph. There are 5 base colours that correspond to each of the 5 cardinal points of the mouth (see above).

When comparing the sound shifts from the original base letter to the target language letter, you can either follow the 'glyph' transliterations in the octagon adjacent the target letter, or just look at the colour changes. Getting a visual and emotional representation of these sound shifts through colour is another device that I find really useful in 'embedding' the language within me.

I hope that this can be useful to Thaivisa learners out there and thank you for your suggestions for improving it!

STu.

I agree - Subtitle workshop has become one of the most useful pieces of software for me for both work and learning languages.

I use it to subtitle my Thai shows back into English and re-upload them to youtube - whereas before I would have to burn the subtitles into the actual video, kudos to Youtube for allowing us to now upload the tiny raw SRT text file. Has made life a lot easier.

You can also use subtitle workshop to add a language to the subtitles on a DVD - though the process is a little more complicated.

As far as using it to learn language, I will often use my video camera to tape native-speakers of the language that I'm using - collect a whole lot of samples and then get someone (or the person who spoke) to translate what they said. I then go and lay the translations over the video with subtitle workshop and analyse what they've said against how it's been translated. You can learn a lot about a language that way

Normally in a situation where in English you'd use 'I'm just winding you up' or 'I'm just taking the Mickey out of ya' we'd probably just say แกล้ง

THis has been rolled out in the US for a while now. Not my cup of tea -

http://epic.org/privacy/airtravel/backscatter/