Jet Language School

[TJM55]

Has anyone ever used Jet language school in Bangkok ?

They are located in the Amarin Plaza Building on Ploenchit Rd.

I'm not sure if their methodology would work for me as they use pictures only for the first level which would be fifty hours of instruction.

Have any of you ever used this methed and does it work ?

Any replies would be appreciated.

[meadish_sweetball]

How exactly do they use the pictures? The teacher shows a picture of a chicken, says ไก่ and you try to repeat? Or is it something more sophisticated than that?

What works for you personally depends on which style of learning you think has worked for you in the past. The method you describe sounds like a 'natural approach' method - these are generally slower and less efficient for people who are used to structured and analytical learning, but can be good if you do not like structured learning and would rather go by intuition.

Natural approaches often try to mimic the learning environment we had as children, but in my personal opinion, it is often unwise to do so.

As infants we are exposed to our mother tongues for an average of one-three years before we start speaking (usually with lots of mistakes and not very clearly).

Further, as adults we have often lost the adaptability and flexibility we had as children (our grey matter is not developing as quickly as it did when we were children) and we also have several fixed 'modules' (neural wirings) in our brain that can be positive OR detrimental to the learning process.

(Negative learning experiences can wire us so we are less receptive because we subconsciously keep telling ourselves 'I cannot do this, I am no good at this', just like positive learning experiences improve our confidence and make us more receptive to similar learning situations in the future. Also, our modules for listening and producing language sounds are tuned in to our native tongues (and possibly any other languages we have learned to speak since). This means we are trying to find the sounds we are used to from our mother tongue in the new language we are acquiring, without listening for what is *actually* there. Then we make shortcuts based on this, which makes us pronounce things incorrectly.

Whatever you do, don't get bogged down in writing Thai with Roman letters, because this is very likely to tempt you to pronounce Thai using the sound values of these letters in your own language/dialect, instead of the actual sounds that correspond to Thai letters.

Unless you introduce the Thai alphabet straight away, you should concentrate on listening to Thai and trying to exactly reproduce the sounds they make. For this, you want an educated native speaker, ideally from the Bangkok or Central Plains region, so you do not pick up unneccessary peculiarities in accent. The Thai spoken on the radio news is what you should aim for at first - this is usually clear and distinct.

[TJM55]

meadish_sweetball

Thanks for the very informative reply.

To start, the teacher shows the picture and says the word and then I repeat the word and try to match the picture with the word for future reference. This is done for the first level which is fifty hours. The next level uses the same concept only using several pictures or more at a time.

From my past limited experience with learning Thai, I think this "natural approach" could possibly be better for me as opposed to the more structured method. I guess I really won't know unless I give it a try. I'm still undecided at this point even though they did give me one free lesson last week.

[meadish_sweetball]

The way I see it - anything you feel works, must be good.

If you have particular problems with a certain sound and the teacher does not succeed in teaching it to you, you may find these descriptions of Thai sounds from Wikipedia useful (their sound description is based on standard US English pronunciation, and the presentation requires basic knowledge about phonetics - do not let this put you off. Ultimately, all the fancy terms are used to describe simple things like the position of your speech organs (lips, teeth and tongue, sometimes going down to your throat as well) when you make a certain sound.

As I said before, remember that the Western letters in a Thai language course or web page that are used to describe a sound can differ from the way you are used to pronounce the sound, depending on your dialect and pronunciation habits. There is something called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that tries to overcome these differences and establish a common set of symbols to be used to describe every human language. Learning a system based on IPA for writing Thai can help for some people, while others think it is a complete waste of time.

The ultimate test of your pronunciation is on native speakers of Thai to see if they can understand you. When they do, you know you are probably doing something right (or they just happen to be very good at decoding).

If they don't understand you, you have to try to identify what you are doing wrong. One important point to stress here is that you have to accept that the very first sentence or two you speak, can be 100% correct and still not understood, because the Thai person expects you to speak English. This happens to the best of Thai learners, especially in environments such as restaurants and pubs where the sound level is already rather high. One strategy to avoid this is to look the person you are addressing in the eye to make sure you catch their attention (smiling can be a good idea too, otherwise you may be perceived as threatening ), and start to speak very slowly and use a phrase you know you can pronounce ok, perhaps "sawad dee khrap", "bpen yangai baang" or "sabaai dee mai khrap". This usually does the trick.

[TJM55]

Meadish_Sweetball,

Thanks for the good information along with the websites.

Some very interesting things to think about for sure.