Thai course

[Cpkt8]

Easy Study Thai school in Chiang Mai is no longer around? I went to their website and found Chiang Rai location only.

[JannerBoy]

If looking to learn Thai in Chiang Mai would recommend Lanna Language School; have found them down to Earth and easy to interact with; some of the other places can be a bit to formal and rigid which for me is a turn off.

[Kathiejs]

Easy Study Thai school in Chiang Mai is no longer around? I went to their website and found Chiang Rai location only.

It was there yesterday morning when I went for my lesson!

[Cpkt8]

Easy Study Thai school in Chiang Mai is no longer around? I went to their website and found Chiang Rai location only.

It was there yesterday morning when I went for my lesson!

Went to their website www.easystudythai.com, clicked Chiang Mai location and its Chiang Rai address.

[SooKee]

For what it's worth I took a pretty intense and immersive approach to learning Thai. I crashed a 3 month course in Phuket doing 4 hours per day, 5 days a week at Patong Language School and also did about 6-8 hours private study at home every day. That was for speaking, reading and writing. For me the course was pretty much an essential as it gets you familiarised with Thai grammar, especially around sentence structures etc. After 3 months most of my Thai friends just said better to ditch the course now and pick the language up from socialising with Thais and both learning more Thai and switching from the more formal Bangkok / newsreader Thai to more colloquial. Watching Thai Lakorn, Thai news and listening to Thai music also tunes the ears to picking up rapidly spoken Thai (essential in Southern Thailand).

As for resources I found the school books very good and bought both the Thai > English (that they use to teach their English language students from) and English > Thai versions. 4 of each at 250 baht. Mostly free of mistakes. The school sells them and will post them out. 99% free of mistakes. The below books are also superb (both readily available in LOS. I got mine from an Asia Books branch, about 1,000 baht each, DCO online also stock them):

http://www.amazon.com/Thai-Reference-Grammar-James-Higbie/dp/9748304965

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Thai-James-Higbie/dp/9745241377

I aslo used the Pimsleur 30 session audio Thai course before I started to live in LOS more full time.

Without doubt the absolute best app I use for Thai is called Talking Thai: http://word-in-the-hand.com/thai-dictionary-for-iphone-ipad-ipod-touch/

I now have many other books etc. that are also very useful.

I have also heard that the High Speed Thai DIY course is very good and from what I've seen of their material the reviews sound right: http://www.highspeedthai.com

There are many ways to learn the language and fair play to those that adopt a full DIY approach. For me it's just too unstructured. I've also met a few who haven't made a very good job of going DIY with poor pronunciation and zero grasp of the tones. At least having been to a formal school it get's you into a mindset such that it's easy to structure DIY lessons once you leave the school behind. Either way, the resources I've listed would be useful to anyone I think. I also found that learning to read Thai is much better for nailing pronunciation as there's no mistake how a word should be pronounced. The trouble with Romanised (phonetic / karaoke) Thai is that there's so many versions of it, a real pain once your start acquiring more and more resources as some of the methods they use to distinguish between the various Thai vowels are REALLY obscure and hard to remember.

Edited January 27, 2016 by SooKee

[Trujillo]

I agree. You click on the Chiang Mai link and you get the location for Chiang Rai.

I still have no idea where the CM location might be. If they can't even understand that their website is fk'ed, then you wonder about the seriousness of the rest.

As a former teacher of English as a second language, a student of Mandarin at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, a student of Vietnamese at Ho Chi Minh University and a student of Thai at Payap University, I can recommend classes over flashcards, tapes or one to one.

Some may be able to get something out of this (Rosetta Stone is actually good for something, but they have no intermediate and above levels), but being in a class has many benefits the others do not. One is motivation. Learning on your own it is easy to blow off a day's homework, but when you do that in a classroom setting, you will suffer the embarrassment and guilt of being the lazy dunce of the class. It's natural to want to be part of the team; keeping up with everyone addresses that.