How Much Time Do/did You Spend Learning Thai?

[pop3]

I thought the same as you in the early stages, I was thinking of these tone's all the time but if I where you I woulden't worry too much at this stage, the Thais will get the drift of what your saying on the rest of your conversation, the tone will improve as time goes by. hopefully !

[Judge]

I have lived up North for 16 years and when I first came here I went to AUA for the first 3 books; twice for each book, but I've never studied at all, just attended classes, clowned around and got what I picked up without really trying.

I can get across most things in Thai somehow, but using inexact words, and I can't hear most of the tones to this day. I can't understand fast speech or TV or movies. However, the truth is that I seem to speak and understand Thai a little, or a lot better than most of the farangs that came when I did, or later, even if they devoted a lot of time to it.

There are a few people up North who are really good, Joe Cummings, The Golden Triangle Rider, Big German Raymond, Adjan Larry and Adjan Mel from CMU and some others. People who have studied their butts off for years, but otherwise, I'm about as good as you are going to get without working at it very hard for many years, so, mellow out and don't get too serious about the whole thing!

[merlin1]

For the average person, I don't there are any shortcuts to learning Thai.  It takes time and effort.   Take a course of some kind as this will force you to study it outside of class.  I took a basic class in Canada once a week and started with flashcards then.  Later I took a more intensive course in a US university for a summer.  Even after that, I was more or less hopeless and unable to carry much of a conversation. 

You need to speak and study daily.  I would say 30 minutes a day with flashcards or reviewing new words minimum plus any kind of conversational gambits you can muster with people you meet along the way.    Watching TV and listening to radio is a plus as well although not that important in the early going.

If you're serious about busting out of the farang language funk, this is usually what is required.   I don't include the gifted types who seem to pick up language in their sleep.   I envy those people a lot.  Well, actually, I hate them.  

Good advice, merlin1. "the farang language funk" is an apt way of putting it.

I've made up so many flashcards it's becoming a storage problem!

Yeah, I had the same problem with these enormous wads of flashcards lying around.

One thing I did after a while was to condense the words I had learned onto new flashcards containing groups of words. This way you can keep the newer, more challenging vocabulary on single cards and once you've learned them, then they go to a five- or ten-word card.

Even better if you can categorize them into logical word families according to situations or likeness.

For a more logical left brained learner like myself, I found flashcards really helpful.