Why Thai?

I have blogged as mandarin_student for some time now Mandarin was the first language I selected to learn and is likely to be the language that I will make the most progress with. I wanted however to learn more than one language and experiment with what I have discovered learning Mandarin. I regard my Chinese learning as a moderate success so far. Starting to learn languages so late, with the normal time constraints that most people have and not being based in a country that speaks the language I am reasonably pleased with progress so far, however I feel that with experience and the things I have learned since then further language learning should be much smoother.

Why did I pick Thai for my next language? lots of reasons. I think that each language presents a number of unique challenges but Thai would seem to have many similar aspects to Chinese. I know no Thai so can start from scratch and most importantly the are some interesting language learning methods and linguists directly connected with Thai. I intend to document my thoughts quite extensively over the next eight weeks, and am just catching up with the notes I made over the last couple of days.

My Objective? simply to start the Thai learning process in what to to me seems the best way and make observations about it. The main challenge as with Chinese will be fitting learning in, finding gaps in normal life. I am under no illusions, full time study and study in Thai land would undoubtably be faster for me but there again I think language learning is accessible as a hobby.

I started learning Thai on Saturday 20th March 2010, at that point I knew very little about the language. If I had an opinion at all at that time I would probably have said "it sounds a little like Cantonese?". I guess I would recognize Thai script as Thai script but I might have got fuzzy and said Burmese (what does their writing look like now I come to think about it).

This blog is a place to put my thoughts in enough detail so that it will be clear to me what I did when I revisit it in time to come, I will make it public with an analysis of my conclusions after about eight weeks, I don't need encouragement etc. assuming I don't take a dislike to Thai language for some reason I intend to follow it through.
Let the Thai begin.........

The first phase of this blog is all about the first eight weeks, posts to do with the first eight weeks will have the tag eightweeks. You can also jump straight to the summary of the first eight weeks.