Introduction

Welcome to Read Thai in 2 Weeks, the first and most important course in the Learn Thai Inner Circle program!  I hope you are excited about learning Thai.

Despite what you may have been told your entire life,  your parents, teachers or whoever were all wrong.  You CAN learn Thai or any language.  You are not tone deaf.  You are not bad at learning languages.

You may (ok, you definitely will) have moments where you get frustrated or upset when you come across something that seems difficult or confusing in that moment.  Sometimes you’ll click 2 sounds which you KNOW are different and you won’t be able to hear the difference yet.  This is all normal and part of the fun.  You brain can’t instantly process a sound that it’s never made or noticed before.  What you will find is that once you can start to make some of those new sounds yourself, your brain (and ear) will have a MUCH easier time with the sounds.

If and when you get stressed out, just take a break and try again later or spend the rest of the session reviewing previous material to get your mind off whatever arbitrary sound or concept was confusing you.  As long as you work on this a bit every day and follow the instructions I’ve laid out, you will succeed.   Every sound/tone/concept that feels impossible today, will get easier with a bit of practice.

Keep a Study Log:

Keeping track of the time you spend studying is an extremely powerful accountability and progress tracking tool.

It’s optional, but once it becomes part of your routine and you have some data, you’ll find it incredibly helpful.

📋 How to Use the Study Session Tracker

To get started:

1. Open the Study Session Tracker by clicking the link below.
2. Go to File > Make a Copy in Google Sheets. (This will allow you to save an editable version in your own Google Drive.)
3. Start tracking your study progress by recording:
   • The date and time spent on each lesson.
   • Any notes, questions, or problems to review later.

👉 Open the Study Session Tracker (Don’t forget to click FILE–>Make a Copy) 

When you finish this course a few weeks from now, if you send me this sheet along with your tales of success, we will both be very happy.

Path to Success:  

You don’t need to be a genius or even a good student to learn a language.  You just need to have (or muster) enough discipline to build and maintain a study routine that lasts until you’ve built up some momentum.

Do NOT skip around clicking every lesson or jump ahead.  The ORDER of the lessons is extremely important.   If you get confused and email me for help, the first thing I’m going to do is look at your activity log shake my head if I see that you’ve jumped around aimlessly.

EVERY concept introduced is not just important, it is necessary.  I’ve condensed everything you need to know into about 50 lessons.  Some lessons are short and may feel easy, but don’t rush through them.

Read the lessons more than once.  Do the drills more than once.  Every couple of days, go back through any lessons you feel shaky on.

MARK the lessons as you grow comfortable with them.  At the bottom of each lesson are buttons.  These allow to change the background color of the lesson in the menu.  The buttons are: NEW, LEARNING and KNOWN.  It’s up to you to decide what those means to you, but I would recommend LEARNING to mean you have spent some time on it, but aren’t completely confident yet.  KNOWN doesn’t have to mean “mastered,” but you’ll want to feel confident enough with that lesson that you don’t need to rush back into it anytime soon.

Email me when you get stuck.  I’m always here to help, but read the lesson a couple of times first.  I’ve done this a long time and the answer to your question (if you need to know at this point) is probably already in there.

What Happens at the End?

By the time you reach the drills at the end of this course, you should be able to sound out nearly any Thai word and work out what tone it should be. It will be a little slow at first and you may not know what the words mean yet, and that’s ok. At this point, when you pronounce something incorrectly, you will be aware of it so you can work on fixing it.

Soon, you will be able to distinguish the initial consonants in the following words:

• ป้า , บ้า and ผ้า

Expect to put in at least 2 weeks to have a general understanding of how everything works, but don’t worry if it takes a bit longer. I recommend aiming to complete as much as you can in the first 2 weeks because it’s a realistic goal to aim for. If it ends up taking you 3 weeks to complete the course and you can still read Thai at the end, it doesn’t really matter.

Once you’ve begun to get a feel for how the tone rules work and are reasonably proficient with being able to sound out all the vowels and consonants, you’ll be miles ahead of everyone who hasn’t. Too many people skip the alphabet because it’s too different and seems to be too difficult. They don’t understand how huge of a mistake that is.

Sometimes you’ll need to go over a lesson a couple times in order to completely understand it. This is normal. You also may need to go back over some lessons in the past because you forgot some important point. Below is a sample study plan.

Sample Plan of Attack:

Go at your own pace, but to significantly increase your chances of success, I recommend a minimum of 30 minutes of study each day as well as 10+ minutes of additional review.  Ideally, this review happens at another point in the day at not right before or after the study session.

• Day 1:
  • Learn the Middle Class consonants and their KEYWORDS
  • Learn the Middle Class Story – Say it Out Loud to yourself
  • Learn the First Vowel and how it attaches to the 7 Middle Class Consonants
• Day 2:
  • Review Day 1!!
  • Core Concept: Hard vs Soft Endings
    • Hard Endings
    • The BASIN is Special
    • Soft Endings
• Day 3: 
  • Invisible Vowels – Not all vowels are written.
  • First Tone Mark. – Tone rules require lots of practice.  Memorizing won’t help.  You MUST drill the rules.
  • A Pile of Vowels  – Time to pile on some more vowels so we can really get some good practice going.

Important Notes to Remember:

• Don’t move on if you are confused and don’t jump around randomly. The order is very important. Each lesson assumes you have begun to grasp everything above it.
• Review: spend a few minutes reviewing everything you’ve studied over the past 2-3 days before moving on to new stuff. Even 5 minutes will make a huge difference.  Even those lessons that feel quick and easy are worth another glance 1-3 days later to see if you still remember.
• Based on all my years teaching this material, what seems to bring the highest chance of success is touching base with the materials every day for a few weeks.  All the new concepts will need to connect together and spreading this out over months is not a very good idea.  Your brain needs enough time and exposure to start connecting all the little dots together so that eventually all the rules and things you’ve studied fall away from your conscious mind and things start becoming automatic.

Now go forth and learn some Thai and try to have some fun!