japanrocks said:

You'll have to excuse me. I misread your post. I was reacting because I read "the hardest" instead of "one of the hardest"

I stand by it being very difficult for writing and reading (I've already mentioned that) but learning to speak the language is far easier than, say, mandarin, vietnamese or thai etc for english speakers.

The wording in the article is also: "the five most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and proficiency in reading (for native English speakers who already know other languages), requiring 88 weeks, are: Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, with Japanese being the most difficult"

(I've bolded the text because I've discovered since that my learning of other languages was hindered by my fore-knowledge of Japanese. As other people have found out, adult learning of languages tends to be harder when you move on to your third or fourth or whatever. You brain tends to try to force the language you're learning to fit the patterns of your second language.

The reason I'm being disagreeable with you is I was conversational within three months, and that was not in Japan. Of course I could not read a newspaper because I was unfamiliar with enough kanji to do so, but I still got to the point where we could sit in class and discuss basic philosophy.

Keep in mind I'm not talking about fluency I guess what I'm trying to say is that statements like "the hardest language" or the "five most" or whatever are generalisations and as such I normally ignore them. It's all relative. One man's impossible is another's simple.

In my original post I SHOULD have said "spoken Japanese is easy to learn". I think that's where you've misunderstood me.

That said, I find Fauxie's comment shocks me when he says that he's finding Thai easy to learn. Tonal languages make me go Relativity again, I guess. Congrats Fauxie!

connorhawke said:

We're talking speaking only here though. From what little I do know I don't think reading and writing would be that difficult either (I stopped learning that about 5 years ago purely through laziness and have basically no proficiency), but then I studied Russian, so alien squiggly characters don't frighten me that much.

Except for maybe in the very beginning I never made a conscious effort to learn the tones. I just subconsciously started using the correct ones by copying the way Thais said things. I'm willing to bet I use the wrong tone as much as 50% of the time, but the bottom line is it often just doesn't matter. Ask a Thai about which tone they just used or about what and where the tone changes in a particular word and it'll usually make them stop and think for a while.

In music the melody naturally takes precedence over the tones at times, so how does that work?? Also, with emotional, expressive outbursts even a Thai is hardly going to nail the correct tone every time, so what gives? People don't all have the same pitch to their voice either so how could it be an exact science? The tones are relative to your own basic pitch, but how about when saying a single word in isolation?

The tone used can mean the difference between 4 or 5 completely different meanings while using the same sound/word. Context is so key to Thai that as a lazy foreigner with a good vocabulary who's comfortable with the sound of the language I'm never misunderstood. It does me no credit that I haven't pushed myself more, but I know more than enough to get by. Living here I can't see how some foreigners don't seem to get beyond basic conversational stuff, and never sound comfortable using the language. A core of maybe 30 or 40 words are used over and over in conversation. You hear them everywhere! These are just moved around and put in combination to make most of the short sentences you'll hear a Thai say in a normal day. It shocks me that foreigners can live here so long and can't speak the language, but as I said, I'm lazy in my own way too. Still, I'd say I'm about a year from speaking absolutely fluently at any given moment that I might decide to make that happen. Whether I ever will or not, we'll see. For now I keep my Thai ticking over. Reading and writing is a whole other issue though.

Fauxie said:

Regardless, congrats! I couldn't learn anything in THai heat

Good on you for taking it steps beyond other foreigners

And you should learn the script. It's beautiful!!

I laughed when you were writing about the thirty or forty words the foreigners know and use repeatedly. Reminds me of the pissed Caucasians in Nagoya just saying "hai" and "sugoi" over and over again

Russian!!!!! You're a grammar beast!

connorhawke said:

Oh no, I meant 30 or 40 words that Thais use all the time. If you don't speak a word of Thai but sit down and watch TV for a couple of minutes you'll hear the same short words over and over and start to pick them up. Same as common words in English too, I guess, but it seems even more pronounced here. 'Rice', 'can', 'go', 'eat', 'yes', 'no'... etc.

Are you/we going?... pai mai?
Yes I'm/we're going... pai
Can we go?... pai dai mai?
Yes... dai khrap/dai/pai dai khrap/khrap
(Have you) ever been?... khoei pai?
Yes I've been... khoei (ever lol)

It's so simple! There are usually several ways to answer simple everyday questions. All ways follow the same pattern really. The simplest of these are often one words answers, say repeating the verb or just saying the polite phrase 'khrap' or 'ka', depending on your gender. Most of the time a guy in Bangkok only has to not and say 'khrap'.

And stuff like this:

Are you/we going?... pai reu plao?
No, I'm/we're not going... plao


I love it. Vague though.