Welcome to L3 Thai!
First of all, one of our core principles for language learning is: let your interests guide your learning, not a textbook, vocabulary list or study guide made for you by someone else (though these are of course very useful tools as well!). That being said, if you don’t feel like reading a detailed description of the methodology behind this site, then feel free to either 1) skip to the bottom and read the TLDR or 2) go back to the lesson menu and just get started learning whatever it is you are interested in. For those of you who want to learn about the approach – let’s get started!
1. Get ready for a long road, no matter what – learning a language requires a lot of long term focus. Shooting to just learn the basics is the quickest way to fail. Unless you find yourself in an area where no one around you knows any English at all, the basics of any language are going to be nearly useless aside from being able to show your friends who don’t speak the language you are learning (target language) some fun tricks. It takes quite a bit of time and dedication to get your language skills to a level that will surpass the English level acquired through basic education even in most so-called third-world countries. Accept that it will take most learners a decent amount of time (usually at least 6 months) before you can really navigate your way through life in a new language. Once you reach that point, if you are doing it right, you will feel that while you have accomplished much already, there is still a mountain more to learn. Just stay strapped in, keep calm, don’t get flustered by your bad days, and keep pushing forward.
2. Learn like a child, but with the tools of an adult – children learn to speak their mother tongue through two main practices – 1) massive amounts of spoken input 2) engagement with the language in either a task-based or play-based manner. It is extremely important to listen to the language being spoken as much as you can. While you might not have parents to speak to you in this new language, you can use the internet to access any kind of content you want. You can leverage your understanding of the world and your ability to readily understand the connection between the written language and the spoken language in a way that a young child cannot. So while the child might need2-3 years before they can express themselves in sentences, an adult learner can achieve this much faster. But there are some things you have to watch out for…
3. Isolate fundamental skills – many learners of foreign languages seem to equate learning a foreign language with learning about history: memorize vocabulary and grammar rules like you memorize names and dates. In reality, despite all the discussions about how language and math are in different parts of your brain, the truth is basic vocab and grammar are more comparable to basic arithmetic than random names and dates. If you can’t add or multiply quickly, you are going to find algebra incredibly difficult to grasp conceptually, because your brain will be spending too much time processing the basic arithmetic required to solve an equation.
The same is true for learning a foreign language. Thai pronunciation is an extremely important aspect of the language, and many learners mistakenly think that they should just learn how to say some basic phrases to “get by” and then pick up the pronunciation as they go. From what we have seen over the past 12 years of teaching foreign languages, this is a recipe for burnout at the intermediate level. You arrive at the intermediate level with a very low understanding of the language’s pronunciation and become overwhelmed by the high number of words that look and sound alike.
So what is the solution? Learn skills individually instead of always hoping everything will just sync up over time. When you practice pronunciation, commit 90% of your focus to pronunciation. When you are practicing reading early on, focus 90% on identifying letters, and just let your brain passively process things like meaning or pronunciation in the background. When you are drilling vocab, again, focus on the meaning. Do this in the early stages with the outlook that soon you will have sharpened each of this skills enough that it no longer will feel as overwhelming when you try to put it all together. Sometimes you might start to focus on reading but now you are also drilling your pronunciation (because you have built that skill separately, so gradually combining it with another skill will feel less daunting).
4. Ping-Pong style learning – as stress above, let your interests guide you. However, while doing so try to build up an apparatus in your mind that is always doing a system health check – for example, you might have spent the last two weeks really learning the letters of the Thai abugida (not a true alphabet, we will have a lesson on that later). You basically approximated the sound of each letter using English, your native language, or a combination of both. Now you can start learning vocabulary, right? Well, if you want to, sure, but check in with yourself as you go. Are you sure the Thai letter ก is really just like the g or k that you say in English? Answers to questions like this will be available on this site very soon, as dialing these kinds of things in early sets you on a path to success in a way that “coming back and getting all this later” will fail to do. So, learn what you want, when you want, but always be checking in on the isolated fundamentals from point 3. Are you writing your letters correct, do you have your vowels in order? As you progress to beginner and advanced beginner levels, keep checking in on your skills. Learners who are aware of their weaknesses but do not stress about them tend to do much better than students who are only able to identify their overall skill level. Struggling with listening? Go listen a bunch and then, after a while, come back to your comfort zone of reading and see how that listening practice informs your reading skills. Struggling with vocab? Read more, study some vocab lists, and then come back to your pronunciation to see how learning more words makes you more familiar with the sound system and further reinforces your speaking skills.
5. Accept that Forgetting = Learning – we would not need to work anymore if we got paid every time we heard “I just have such a bad memory”. People who have not learned a language as adults significantly underestimate the tenacity and humility required to do so effectively. Anyone who has learned a language to fluency or near-fluency as an adult knows all too well that forgetting a word 10 times is not uncommon and is, in fact, most likely the norm.
When we start out learning a language, we generally begin with a small amount of words. This ramps up very very quickly though if we intend to actually be able to speak the language within a year. This is, again, why fundamentals in the early stages are so important, because as we progress we will have less and less time to revisit the fundamentals because there is simply so much more to learn.
Once you reach your first milestone as a learner, you will start to learn a much higher volume of words at once, since you should have a basic understanding of the sound system. All of the sudden, you will feel like you can’t remember anything. This is completely normal. Try to become very nuanced in what you mean by “I don’t remember”. If I present you with a word like พัฒนา, and you can’t figure out what it means, try to be as specific as possible. Do you remember ever seeing this word before? Do you remember this words shape but still can’t attach any meaning to it? Do you remember seeing this word and know that is has some abstract meaning but can’t quite place it? These are different levels of remembering, and they are part of the learning process. The more you become in tune with this process, the more you will be able to leverage the process of forgetting and recalling. In those moments of forgetting and recall, you will become used to evaluating similar words, the sounds needed to produce those words, and you will create a comfort zone where forgetting is something you are no longer afraid of.
Learn to use the target language to talk about forgetting. It is a task-based way of engaging with the language that, once you accept the forgetting is part of learning, not the antithesis of it, is also quite fun. You get to engage with the culture of how native speakers transfer their language to you, but in the target language. You are constantly using the language to learn more, so forgetting will no longer be this sign to you that you are a bad learner, but instead should serve to push you forward as you begin to see that not all types of forgetting are the same and you are indeed moving forward even if you are really struggling with your current 100 vocab words.
To summarize:
This will take time. Stay level-headed when the going gets tough and don’t let bad days get you thinking you aren’t cut out to learn this language.
Learn whatever you are curious about, do not wait for people to tell you what to learn. While childlike curiosity is key, we are not children and should not expect to just be able to absorb the language without our own effort. Learn the script, learn the phonetics, learn about adult language learning as a practice. Go all in with the tools you have and sharpen whichever tools feel most useful to you at the time.
Isolate your skills as you build them in the beginning, to allow you to more easily combine them fluidly as you progress.
This will help you monitor your progress and ultimately treat your learning as a project where you diagnose what is wrong with your progress rather than someone from the outside telling you what you need to learn (we are happy to help you get started with this in 1-on-1 lessons, but ultimately you need to build this ability yourself to achieve high-level fluency).
Once you have successfully isolated your fundamental skills, try to keep things interesting and effective by bouncing between skills in a way that allows you to slowly integrate them into a single package.
Finally, accept that to forget and to recall is the learning process. Learning words is not like learning random facts – you have to understand many layers of a word, understand its shape, its sound, its shades of meaning. This will mean both relearning words you thought you already knew as well as having hundreds of words you know you have heard before but can’t recall the meaning of. Or maybe you have a word in mind but can’t exactly remember its sound or shape. This is where the ping-pong mindset will help you to see forgetting and recalling as a powerful engine for your learning rather than a constant hurdle. Forgetting allows us the chance to re-evaluate and re-learn, strengthening our internal connection to the language and slowly building up native intuition.