How To Learn Thai in 6 Months (And How I Did)

Want to learn Thai and fast? In this article, I will share how I went from having zero Thai language skills to being able to hold a basic conversation in 6 months. I didn’t use a Thai teacher during this process and did everything myself. I now have 2 years of experience learning Thai and I am at an intermediate level. But this article is specifically aimed at beginners who want to learn and learn FAST.

Here’s a video where I roughly cover what I’m talking about in this article if you prefer to watch over reading:

Important First Notes

You’re not going to be perfect. No one ever is. The idea of this article is to get you up to basic speed as quickly as possible, so the learning process can become fun. With Thai, it’s important that you focus on learning the right things first, so you don’t have to undo any of your hard efforts later on.

Once you have these down, you can move on to other topics.

The reason pronunciation and tones are so important is because Thai is a 5 tone language. If you get any of these tones wrong, you can imagine what you’re saying could be completely incorrect. Some people say that Thais can pick up what you’re saying from context, and while this is true in some cases, for the most part, they usually cannot.

I’ve met people who had a much greater vocabulary than me, but because of their pronunciation, no one could understand them. It’s imperative you learn this first before moving on.

Reading helps to solidify this pronunciation and gives you an idea of how the Thai alphabet works. The Latin alphabet is awful for transliteration and (once you learn), you’ll understand that most of the English spellings do not sound anything like their Thai counterparts.

For instance Chatuchak Market – in English we would say the “ch” sound, but in Thai, it’s more of a “g/j” sound.

Now, to pick Thai up in 6 months, you will have to allocate a fair bit of time to your learning. I recommend no less than 2 hours per day as we ramp up the intensity, but you can start with only 30 minutes per day. Wake up early, and do it first thing in the morning with a coffee, it’s a great way to get your brain engaged for the day!

Ok, no we have that out of the way, I’m going to breakdown the exact process you should follow when learning Thai.

• First 30 days – Pimsleur lessons
• Next 10 days – Read Thai in 10 Days (book)
• Final 140 days – Anki vocab, recording videos, comprehensible input, hello talk

In the final 140 days, you will start to ramp up the difficulty setting. The first 40 days are aimed at getting you to be able to speak properly, get down basic sentence structure, and be able to read to a very basic level. This will all become useful when using Anki flashcards, and you will work on these passively by including them in your learning process (shown how below).

30 Days Pimsleur

This is extremely simple, download and pay for a month of Pimsleur. It’s $19.99/month, but it’s the most useful tool I’ve personally used for getting a quick understanding of a language while being able to learn pronunciation and getting you speaking early.

These are 30-minute audio lessons that can be done each day. I would personally recommend sticking to 1, 30-minute lesson per day, but if you have more time you could speed up this process by doing 2 lessons per day. I did this with Mandarin Chinese, and it was more than digestable.

Once you have done this, move onto the next section.

10 Days Learning To Read (It’s Possible)

For these next 10 days, you will solely focus on using a book called – Read Thai in 10 Days. If you follow the lessons, it’s more than possible to learn how to read to a very basic level, which is all you’ll need to begin with. You won’t understand a thing, but you’ll be able to make the sounds, and you’ll begin to understand tones and pronunciation more during this period.

This is exactly what we want, and all we need to progress to the next levels.

140 Days & Beyond

Anki

Anki is a spaced repetition flashcard app. It’s completely free to download and use on computer, and is a great tool for learning. To use Anki properly, you will create flashcard decks, or download pre-made ones online. If you don’t have a lot of time, I would recommend downloading some decks, and adding words you want to learn to these decks over time.

The trick to using Anki is making picture decks.

The typeable box and the fetching of a Google Translate recording can be set up in the Anki settings. I will not cover this in this article, there are many great resources online which will be able to help you, linked below.

• Typeable answer
• Google translate recording
• Native speaker recording source

Since you can read, the above setup, is the best way to learn using Anki. You want to avoid trying to learn the English translation of the words, because it adds an extra layer of thinking to the process when you are trying to translate. We are best at learning languages with visual cues, rather than translations.

For instance, imagine you’re thinking of the world “apple”. Here’s how it might look if you translated:

“whats the word for apple in Thai again… oh yeah! aepburn!”

This adds a layer of thinking to your speech when you want it to flow naturally instead. And, when you learn by pictures, you automatically associate that picture with the word, therefore removing the need for the thought “what was apple in Thai again?”

Additionally, setting your deck up this way, allows you to practice learning to read and type Thai, while learning the pronunciation of a word properly. In this way, you are being incredibly time-efficient and killing 3 birds with 1 stone.

I would also recommend that you will take this a step further, by trying to use the word in a sentence that is related to the situation you are currently in.

For instance, if you are sitting in your living room and the word “cow” comes up, you could say “The cows are outside the house in the field grazing”.

Learning this way, allows you to take vocabulary from passive to active, because you are using the word in context and a real-life situation. It makes you think, and understand how to form sentences using the words, rather than just knowing them from recall, and when you come to recall words in the future, it makes it much easier to do so.

Recording Videos

Recording videos helps to improve your speaking skills, and takes vocabulary you have learned from your passive vocabulary to your active.

To do this, you want to choose a topic that you want to talk about in real-life. Make it something you’re interested in, or something that would be useful for real-life conversations. This could be anything such as a your favourite TV show, what you did on the weekend, what your work is etc. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, just choose one and stick with it until you can fully express yourself.

You will record 5-10 minute videos in which you will only speak in Thai. Don’t worry if you’re terrible at first, you will get better. As you speak, try to keep it all in Thai, but if you really can’t recall a word, say it in your native language, and move on, continuing the conversation in Thai. After you have fully expressed what you want to say (or have run out of things to say)watch the video back, and make a note of the words you forgot. Add these words to your Anki deck, review them quickly now, then re-record and repeat as many times as you can in 30 minutes.

This is a great way to expand your knowledge on a topic. It gets you learning new vocabulary and using it realistically, improving your ability to recall it on the fly. It also forces you to learn and repeat words you’re uncomfortable with over time, because you will review them during your daily Anki practice.

As you continually review these, you will become much better at talking about this topic. Once you have reached a level you are happy with, move on to another topic.

Comprehensible Input

Comprehensible Input is where you listen to materials that are within your level. So, if you are a beginner you will seek out easy and clear content such as children’s shows. Now, if you’re lucky the language you are learning will have a YouTube channel, or a resource online that uses comprehensible input to teach. Luckily for us, when learning Thai, there is a fantastic resource called Comprehensible Thai.

I have personally used this resource to learn Thai and I can attest to its usefulness.

This method not only helps you understand Thai accents, but also helps you to pick up grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure NATURALLY!

What comprehensible input is aimed to do, is to teach you the language in a way a child would naturally acquire language. You do not translate from another language, but rather use pictures, and gestures to help understand the context of what is being spoken about. Then, your brain fills in the gaps. You do not learn grammatical rules, tenses, or spellings using this method, it is simply aimed at naturally acquiring speech.

I would recommend using comprehensible input 30 minutes per day along with the other methods listed above. Once you can understand beginner content quite well, you can start to listen to Podcasts, or music in Thai, and you’ll be able to understand what they’re saying, or at least the context of it without any visual aid.

You’re aiming to understand 70% of the conversation or content you are listening to. Do not try to understand everything, you will not. Just get the rough idea of what someone is trying to say, and with repetition, you will notice improvements over time.

You can either use comprehensible input by watching content, or reading. However, it is not recommended to read until you are at an intermediate level of understanding. This is usually 600 hours of listening (if listening is the only method used to learn the language).

I ONLY used this method for learning Spanish. I am not great yet, but I can understand TV shows and would say I have an intermediate understanding of the language. I have had dreams in Spanish, and I can read, use apps etc. in Spanish (my phone is set to Spanish). I never have to translate the language, and I notice myself listening to conversations and just understand without having the need to think “what’s that word in English?”

It’s good. Use it!

Hello Talk

With Hello Talk, you are looking for a language partner to practice speaking with. After you have completed the Pimsluer courses, I would recommend speaking practice for 1hr per day. The best way to find this practice, specifically for Thai, is Hello Talk. There are thousands of Thai people on here who REALLY want to learn English, so you can strike up a deal. You’ll teach them English for 1 hr, and then they return the favor, teaching you Thai for 1 hr.

Now, you don’t want to find multiple people to practice with. You want to find 1 person, who is extremely committed to learning English.

To find this person, just start sending out mass messages. Create a simple copy/paste message and change the name to the name of the person you’re messaging. I sent out roughly 10 messages per day for a week until I found one person who was committed to learning.

I am still friends with the people I did speaking practice with, and we still talk to this day. We spoke daily for an entire year, and both learned a great deal!

Toggl Track

This is not a learning method, but something that will help you stay organized.

When learning, you’re gonna need somewhere to track all your time. I would recommend Toggl track. It’s completely free (at least for what you’ll need it for), and you can track your time for different projects.

As you can see above, I was working on Portuguese, Spanish and Thai. I was aiming for 500hrs of Spanish that year and a total of 700hrs+ in all languages and I did it! It was nice to hit that goal and see it continually rise each day as I learned more and more.

You don’t need to do this, but I think it’s a great way to get yourself excited about learning and to keep yourself on track with the goals you want to achieve. Set a goal, put in the work, and you’ll see magic happen.

6 Months & Beyond

So, you’ve completed 6 months of learning, can hold a basic conversation, order food and generally get around Thailand. What do you do, to continue progressing?

At this point, you can probably ditch the vocabulary flash card decks, and start to enjoy the learning process a lot more. Watching films, talking with people, playing games and generally enjoying it a lot more.

If you can, try move to Thailand and immerse yourself. This way you will be forced to use the language, read signs and be surrounded by it 24/7. The best way you can move to Thailand is by getting an Educational Visa, and enrolling in a course.

If you have the time and money to do this, this is how you are going to get from basic to advanced level Thai and I would highly recommend you invest. Living in Thailand is also fantastic, it’s warm, people are friendly and it’s relatively cheap.

Good luck on your journey, and if you need any help, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!

wehatethecold

I’m Harry – and I was tired of the same old “10 best places I’ve never been but I’m writing about for some reason” blog posts. So… I’m a young traveller on a mission to travel the world and share my true, unfiltered experience, including all the gristly details. From packing my life into one bag for a year, to traveling Vietnam by motorbike, to sorting out Visas for specific countries – I’ve done it all, am doing it all and only give my advice on things I have done – not regurgitated cr*p from another source *cough* most publications *cough*. So bear with us! This project will take some time to grow, and will take a fair bit of money. But I’m determined to make it the single best source of information about traveling on the internet.