You sound like one of those lucky people who can just ‘pick up’ a new language as an adult. For most of us, learning a new language as an adult is totally different from the effortless way we acquired our native language as a child. Our brains no longer have the structures required to effortlessly learn new things. For the same reason, someone who first learns to drive a racing car as an adult is unlikely to be anywhere near as good as someone who was competing in kart races at the age of six. After an embarrassingly long period of struggling to learn Thai, I know that no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to progress beyond very simple conversations, and will never be able to understand a Thai news bulletin, let alone a Thai soap opera. By contrast, I found learning to read Thai very easy. After all, you only have to memorise an alphabet, and while it might be somewhat larger than the English alphabet, it’s not as if it’s thousands of Chinese characters. The colossal amount of data you have to memorise in grammatical structures and thousands of words needed to speak fairly competent Thai is hugely more difficult.
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