There seems to be 3 distinct camps as far as expats are concerned when it comes to living in Thailand. There are the people that are seriously gung ho about getting deep in the culture and through a lot of hard work end up becoming close to fluent in Thai. I am not part of this group and likely never will be. Languages just aren't something I have ever been good at and I forget almost all of what I learn pretty close to right after I learned it.
Then there is the camp of people that never bother to learn any of the language and become completely dependent upon their girlfriend or wife and in some situations even their children in order to get them through basic stuff. This can be a rather shocking thing to see because it is kind of cringe to see a grown man (it's almost always men here in Thailand) who cannot say even the most basic things and dont know stuff like right and left, or the numbers 1 through 10. These people have put in zero effort and normally tend to be rather well off and made all of their money before ever moving to Thailand. While not always arrogant about it, this is the group that tends to view almost everything that Thai people do as "stupid" and they can lose their cool rather quickly in social situations.
Thankfully I am not part of this group either.
The last group is the group that I am in and these are the people that have learned basic social conversations to help them out in certain situations and we have just learned phrases and numbers and if anyone gets too fancy with the Thai that they speak back to us we know how to say "I don't understand that" or "please speak slowly my Thai language skills aren't good."
It took me a number of years to get to this point but now I am quite comfortable in social situations provided that I am not the center of attention and someone isn't trying to "one up" me by speaking really fast in a way that is meant to intentionally confuse me.
To me, Thai is extremely complicated and difficult to learn. In high school I did ok with learning Spanish but that is because we essentially use the same alphabet. Thai of course does not use our letters but in some capacity it has been translated to use English letters but this doesn't always convey the complex nature of the language properly and one of the best things I did for myself was learning the alphabet in a very basic sense. There are a lot of letters above, many more than the English alphabet, but the thing is a lot of the letters are very rarely used and some of the letters are not used at all and are just taught for the sake of history.
I think that it is kind of funny that the obsolete or rarely used letters just so happen to be the ones that are the most complicated to write and over the eons a bunch of people probably decided "this one is too complicated, let's just not use it" and over hundreds of years everyone started to see the extreme logic in this and let it go.
ฃ and ฅ have kind of a funny story behind how they stopped being used and it was because when typewriters started being the standard in business correspondence, there wasn't enough keys on the keyboard and Thailand was not equipped to manufacture their own keyboards so someone, somewhere, probably in the Royal Family, had to make a choice about which ones to get rid of. Since these two letters have other letters in the alphabet that sound very similar or exactly the same, they went to the wayside and over the course of many years of typing, the population just got used to them not existing and they never brought them back.
I don't immediately know all Thai letters when I see them, but over time with some homemade flash cards, I managed to get to know them good enough that it helped me to learn words better. I guess I am a visual learner.
I think one of the most important parts of learning Thai is so that you can participate in the market culture, which is where all the best produce and meats are generally found. Some people will attempt to google translate their way through this but one person I know has discovered that many of the Thai people that work at these markets are actually illiterate and cannot read their own language. They also do not have the time to lean in an listen to your phone speak questions to them and will wave you off if you try to insist that they do so. There is also a problem with translation software in that it is frequently very wrong because Thai sentence structure is very different from English sentence structure.
Being able to ask how much something is in a market is really a game changer because now you are most likely going to be given the local price because of a couple of reasons and the main one being that it would be very shameful and a "losing face" sort of situation if a Thai market worker were to tell you a price that other people nearby could understand that was not the real price. Bystanders are unlikely to intervene but the saving face aspect of Thai society is very real and I am yet to hear about anyone getting a bogus price quoted to them when the person has to answer out loud.
While Thai is an extremely complicated language to the point where it is categorized by governments as being a top tier, in terms of difficulty, language, with a little bit of practice you can learn how to recognize all the numbers up to 100,000 pretty easily. There aren't very many situations at a market where you are actually going to need to know any numbers over 100 though.
I have found that I can easily recognize all numbers now and this has been really nice to be able to participate in markets and I can see that the locals kind of appreciate that you have taken the bit of time to learn that part of it. I get smiles from the market ladies because when they see a foreigner I think they kind of expect us to not speak Thai. I DO NOT speak Thai, I know just a bit of it and it is kind of funny when they get so excited thinking I am fluent and then rattle off something to me and I have to let them down by saying that I only speak a little bit of your language, sorry!
I think that these days that a lot of people tend to let their apps do all the thinking for them and this is a real shame. Who would have thought that technology would actually encourage all of us to be dumber? When I first moved here, translation software was in its infancy and didn't really work, so we had to learn at least SOME of the language.
I have no notion of ever becoming fluent in this language and I do admire when certain people are. But at the same time I am also kind of irked by people that have been here 2,3, 4 times or more longer that I have and outside of hello and thank you they don't know how to say anything at all.
I may end up living here for the rest of my life if things go as well for me as I am hoping they will and maybe one day I will buckle down and actually really seriously learn the language. The days of the bogus language centers are kind of behind us now because the government shut down those visa scams... now the only schools that remain are universities and heavily regulated real schools that MUST genuinely teach you the language or your visa gets revoked. I don't need the visa at the moment because i have a real job and a real work-permit, but the idea of going back to college to have a real curriculum and truly take on learning Thai fully is something that kind of excites me.
In the meantime though I am kind of happy that I learned as much as I have and bit by bit I learn a few words here and there.
It will likely be a very long road to fluency and maybe it will never happen. I do know one thing though, I am at least going to try!