Learn Thai – Rapid Method

Here is the Rapid Method’s Road Map for learning Thai (along with prices):

1.       Watch the Foundation Videos on YouTube.

2.       Try before you buy. Log in or sign up for the (free) trial version of the Rapid Read Thai online course and work through the first few lessons. You’ll learn around 30 of the most common letters in a few hours, after which you can recognize and correctly pronounce (but not necessarily understand) hundreds of basic Thai words.

3.       Learn to Read Thai. Come back and buy the more Rapid Read Thai course (฿10,000). You can do it in a few days, but allow 1-2 months to complete this part of the process. Or if you can make it then attend one of the intensive one-week Rapid Read Thai bootcamps (฿42,000).

When you complete the course you will be able to read this!

You can extend the course by purchasing a collection of supplementary reading material consisting of menus, stories and popular (and often quite obscene) Thai songs. (This collection costs an extra ฿5,000.)

You might want to work through with the help of a Thai tutor so that you can understand the idiomatic expressions and cultural references – and to check your pronunciation as well! It’ll probably take around 30 hours to work through the material with a teacher, one story or song per week, say. (฿9,000 assuming ฿300/hour, paid directly to your tutor).

4.       Learn to Speak Thai through reading. Now that you can read, follow the Everyday Thai for Beginners conversational course (฿7,000). There’s no need to rush this: two one-hour sessions per week over seven months with a private Thai tutor, either face-to-face or online via Skype… (฿18,000 assuming 60 lessons at ฿300/hour, paid directly to your tutor).

5.       Become conversationally fluent. Then if you want to have deeper and more intimate conversations with your friends and (Thai) family then buy the “fluency” course, Sydney Remember (฿7,000). Allow about a year to complete this course, studying two hours per week (฿30,000 assuming 100 lessons at ฿300/hour, paid directly to your tutor).

6.       Learn Business & Commercial Thai. If you also want to be able to talk about business, marketing or commercial issues then get the advanced fluency business course, Top Story (฿7,000). Allow another year, studying the usual leisurely two hours per week, to complete this course (฿30,000 assuming 100 lessons at ฿300/hour, paid directly to your tutor).

7.       Advanced Thai. Finally, you might want to know what’s going on politically and economically in the country: study the News & Media course (฿7,000). Although the words used in newspapers and on the TV and radio are very advanced, there aren’t that many of them and the concepts are always the same: about the government, the opposition, the protesters, murderers, thieves and terrorists, sports stars and TV personalities, floods, fires and the weather in general, etc. It’s a completely different language from colloquial speech, but very easy to become familiar with if you put your mind to it. I’m developing an advanced course based on the book “Doggy-Style Politics” by Chuwit Kamolvisit (ชูวิทย์ กมลวิศิษฎ์), a maverick ex-gangster turned politician in Thailand (฿30,000 assuming 100 lessons at ฿300/hour, paid directly to your tutor)..

The Rapid Method is a process. Less is more. I’ve devised a minimalist approach where you master a small body of essential material, rather than study mountains (and hundreds of hours) of material in the hope that some of it sticks. There’s a lot of ’muscle memory’ involved in order to make speaking and understanding an automatic skill (like driving a car or dancing or karate or playing piano).

But the must first learn to read – even if you don’t understand what you are reading.

Sure, it seems counter-intuitive, but it will really help you to speak clearly and achieve fluency relatively quickly. And you will also find that you can understand what people are saying more clearly too.

Most language schools – if they teach reading at all – focus on the wrong kind of reading, which does not help you to learn to speak Thai. This is why many people think that learning to read isn’t necessary or not particularly useful.

The primary goal of the reading course is just being able to recognize words and sound them out accurately with the correct tones.

It’s just a starting point (but an extremely important one). The two main advantages are that 1) you will be able to speak clearly and accurately in a way that Thai people can easily understand and 2) you’re able to continuously pick up Thai vocabulary and phrases from your environment without having to rely on classes or text books (which only represent Thai in an approximate and often incorrect way).

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The next step is to build up a vocabulary that you can use for recognizing the meanings of sentences and for communicating verbally. The Read Thai course consists of about 500 useful words that you will memorize with an electronic flashcard system called Anki. It takes about 2-3 weeks to work through the reading course by yourself (a total of 16-18 hours) and then about a month (of about 10 minutes per day) to memorize the vocabulary with the mnemonics that I’ve included in each of the flashcards.

The Supplementary Songs and Stories comes with an extra 400-odd words consisting of the vocabulary used in the menus, songs and stories – so allow an extra month to memorize these words as well.

ดินสอ sounds like “dinsaw” = pencil
hint: a loud din is mightier than a saw… a silly play on the pen is mightier than the sword, but it works!
(The word in parenthesis is usually the classifier, as in loaf of bread.)

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Then you will be ready to start on the basic conversational course(point 4. above) called Everyday Thai for Beginners. It’s based on the first-year university program at the University of Washington. This consists of 30 lessons which you work through one per week, with the help of a Thai teacher (two one-hour sessions per week). After 7-8 months, you will be able to have simple conversations in everyday situations (greeting people, asking about their family, going out to eat or watch a movie, etc., buying things, getting around by bus or taxi, dealing with money, etc.) There are about 1,100 words in this course that you will memorize as you work through the lessons.

If you then want to become conversationally fluent, you should study the romance novel Sydney Remember (point 5. above). It’s a wonderful story about a Thai girl from Bangkok going to live with her cousin in Sydney. It’s written in a plain, colloquial style with lots of everyday slang, so that you become familiar with how people speak normally to each other and can subsequently have deeper, more intimate or meaningful conversations with close friends, girlfriends (and her family), lovers, etc.

Just follow the road map above. The most effective way by far to learn to speak and understand Thai is to learn to read first. For one, you will know exactly how to pronounce a word accurately with the correct tone. The phonetic transliterations typically used in textbooks and language classes is mostly wrong and will be almost impossible to unlearn later on. Secondly, you will be able to absorb Thai continuously from your surroundings, simply by reading the street signs, notices and menus.

In the scheme of things you’ll find that your major expense will be with a private Thai tutor and I strongly recommend that you work through the courses one course at a time. Everything is built on what you’ve done previously, so it’s best just to “follow the Yellow Brick Road” and keep on keeping on.