Thai Master
For the past seven weeks I’ve been attending adult ed classes in Thai at BCAE, mostly to see if I could build up enough of a knowledge of the language to be able to travel in Thailand outside the cities. Since Asian languages are very difficult for Americans, I thought it’d also be interesting intellectual challenge. And at $150 for seven sessions of nearly one-on-one instruction, the price couldn’t be beat.
In the end, I think I confirmed my self-perception as someone who picks up languages and pronunciation quickly. Actually, I found Thai pretty easy, since its grammar and sentence structure is very straightforward. I did have to pay extra attention to pronunciation, since Thai, like Chinese, is a highly tonal language. And thankfully we only studied conversational speech, since reading and writing the Thai alphabet looks like an immense challenge.
There’s still some debate about whether there’ll be a “level two” class or not. If so, I’ll certainly join it, since we’re just reaching the point where we have enough vocabulary to start conducting pretty open conversations. Although I haven’t heard anything about level two yet.
If it is not offered, I’m not likely to drop $200 on language learning software, and I imagine that in the absence of anyone to practise with, what Thai I’ve learned will fade away, as happened with all my other language skills (French, German, Russian, and ASL). But at least it’ll be there to call upon if I ever do think about visiting Southeast Asia.