It’s no secret that my Thai is embarrassingly bad. I mean, I can get through the day without using English and can usually get my idea across in broken Thai, but after 12 years it should be much better. To put it in perspective, if I met a guy in Canada who had lived there for 12 years and spoke English at the same level I speak Thai, I’d think he was retarded. I could blame it on the fact that every job I’ve had has used English as its operational language, or that every Thai friend I have speaks near-native English, but that would be disingenuous. Fact is, I’ve always been too lazy and/or too busy to really attack it; I have no one to blame but myself. However, recently I’ve decided to get back on the horse and start improving things, and turned to my friend Brett to help me out. Online, he’s better known as the guy behind Learn Thai from a White Guy.

I’ve known Brett for a few years now and he’s one of those guys that inspires you to learn. Not because he spouts some Tony Robbins pseudo-psychology but because the dude taught himself Thai, and when you ask how, he’s totally nonchalant about it. “I just did it. You can too, it’s easy.” After years of fielding questions like this, he finally decided to get his system down on paper and put it together as an e-book, which you can buy for $47 on his website here. No, I’m not getting a cut of anything – I just like his system and thought others might benefit from picking it up.

A surprisingly accurate caricature.

A surprisingly accurate caricature.

First thing’s first – it’s important to keep your expectations in check – this isn’t some super-secret shortcut to learning Thai like how Neo learned Kung Fu in The Matrix. It still takes repetition, practice and hard work, and it still takes repetition, practice and hard work. And while Brett’s website says you can “learn to read Thai in two weeks” you have to understand the context of “read” – you won’t be picking up some historical Thai literature and flipping through it on your lunch break. But if you stick to the system and practice, you should be able to get a pretty good idea of how the Thai alphabet fits together and be able to pronounce – if not understand – signs, headlines, titles, etc, which is a skill that many foreigners never pick up.

What I like about Brett’s system is that uses mnemonics to plant letters in your head, which is useful for me. Here’s how he teaches you the middle class letters:

Learning the middle class letters.

Learning the middle class letters.

There’s a little bit more on the page than just that simple paragraph, but after seeing it put like that, bam, I finally had a somewhat elegant structure in my head for remembering the middle class letters instead of just forcing them into the deep corners of my brain.

Another thing I like about Brett’s book is that it’s funny and relatable to a foreigner. The tone is friendly and laid back, and there’s a distinct lack of pretension or stuffiness. Here’s a paragraph on the mai ek, the first tone mark.

chapter 6

Damn you, tone rules, always messing up my pronunciation flava.

The “deck” Brett talks about above is a deck of flashcards called Anki (from the Japanese word for memorize, not to be confused with Enki, the Sumerian god of mischief and creation, but we all knew that). The cards are organized into decks that focus on one particular chapter of his book, as you see below. Used in tandem with each chapter, they are a very powerful tool in helping you to memorize the details of the chapter you’re reading.

anki

Anyway, I’m not a perfect case for the book because I’ve been here long enough that I can sort of read Thai and speak it okay, but going over the drills has sure helped me solidify the tone rules and provide me with an easier way to remember the letters than I was using before. If you want to do some self-guided learning, head over to Brett’s site here to check it out.