Well I've memorized the tone rules and am now reading, albeit very slowly. Major fun to see progress! I bought a 14-baht mini-romance novel "Victim of the Heart" in Thai and am working my way through that. Literacy is amazing, and I can't suggest strongly enough that farangs learn to read Thai here. I feel like a whole new world is opening up for me now that I'm reading as I go around the city.

Two things: one, the crazy stylistic fonts are driving me nuts. Remember the movie Tom Yam Gung and its poster? How the heck did they get "M" to represent the Dt-- Dtao consonsant in "Dtom"... (i know now so don't bother answering that!) then in Chinatown today I'm trying to read the Chinese-style font... agonizingly slow.

The other is how to deal with long strings of consonants with no vowels separating them. For example today i was trying to make sense out of a string of 8 consonants with no vowels. I'm trying to insert an "o" in there and then wrestly with what tone it is, but... anyway i'm just ranting.

I'm blazing fast with a dictionary with Russian, Serbo-Croatian or Tagalog. Buttttt...... fiance got a giant cross-stitch of Grand Palace and asked me to help translate the Thai for her. I happily said yes, that'll be great dictionary practice. Holy cr@p what frustration soon followed. First word was "namdtaan", a word i already knew without the dictionary: sugar. Made no sense in the context. I eventually found it in the transliterated Thai section as having a second meaning of "brown". That was the ONLY help I was able to give with that translation project. Also it's a small Becker dictionary, not complete... I have a long way to go with learning Thai, and it's going to be more work than I expected..! (having fun though, for the most part )

I have to agree it makes a HUGE difference to living here if you can read the language, it seems impossible to me that more Farang don’t realize how much it can add to the experience. Being able to read Newspapers, Shop signs, Street signs, Menus - even the little “sayings” on the back of trucks and cars - opens a whole new dimension. .

Don’t worry about the stylized fonts etc., it will all come to you very quickly and at a faster pace the more you get into it, before too much longer you’ll even be reading handwriting.

Patrick