I seen some almost valid points to cnotinue. The fact that I am not in Thailand I feel is very much hurting what I can offer. But the fact that my children as well as myself are learning Thai may help some. More that could be helpful is my wife. Knowing that many Thai people surely use this site to better their English I can relate some of my wife’s learning mile marker’s.
An update as to what all is going on. I have started or am attempting to start an internet radio station. I just basically got bored with all the lame Thai music on the other stations I used to listen to, so I decided to create a station with my own music. Info and updates are posted in the Thai Music forum here.
Just yesterday my wife was tring to read a commercial on the TV, it was about gardening and the text said, without our fertilizer your garden could get pretty ugly. She looked at me sooo perplexed. I asked her what was wrong. She proceeds to ask how flowers can be ugly and pretty at the same time. I explained that it did not mean beautiful and ugly at the same time, but rather pretty is often used as an adjective to mean something (or even exactly) close to the English word very. She was still very thrown by it.
You see that was something I could never really figure out about Thai. If there is a different meaning behind a word it is very distinguishable through the tone marks associated with the word. If it is not distinguishable the two meanings could not be confused by the context. Something English has severe issues with. I mean you look up a word such as home in the dictionary…wait i will..
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
42 entries found for home. The first 10 are listed below
42 entries for such a simple term. Now when the word home is used in a sentence, how is my wife to know which of the 42 meanings she should translate it to? TRY has 9 entries, GO has 49, SLEEP has 9, TEST has 55 entries. The wonder game of learning English can be far too much of a :head·ache
Pronunciation: ‘he-“dAk
Function: noun
1 : pain in the head
2 : a vexatious or baffling situation or problem
– head·achy
