I've been living in Thailand now for two and a half years. I have been trying to learn Thai all that time although I’ve only recently started taking lessons.
I don't speak it well at all but I really enjoy it in a weird way and here are my reasons for why I love learning Thai.
It’s such a cool challenge
Can you imagine a language with 44 consonants, some of which have a different sound depending if they're at the beginning or the end of the syllable?
And there are 32 different vowels to learn.
The language isn’t written from left to right like English. Well, it kinda is but the vowel can be sometimes before the consonant, sometimes after the consonant, or underneath it, or on top of it, or around it.
And there's five tones. In Thai, every syllable is either a low, mid, high, rising, or falling tone. There are rules for the tones what are really quite difficult – it depends on the beginning consonant, the ending consonant, whether the vowel is short or long, etc.
I used to speak a little bit of Spanish and Portuguese but it wasn't so much of a challenge. Thai really is a challenge. There are no similar words.
It’s a great mental exercise
I really think it's exercising a different part of my brain. Because at the end of a long day when I'm really mentally tired I can then study Thai for half hour and not feel tired at the end of it.
It's been proved that brain exercise in later life helps stave off the effects of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s.
Other “brain exercises” you could do, for example, are arithmetic, puzzles, computer games, dancing (like salsa), playing a musical instrument, etc.
In Super Brain by Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi they explain how it's always better to mix up your mental activity and I'm sure language learning is a really beneficial mental activity for you.
It helps you understand a culture
When you go traveling you will understand different cultures a little bit better. It helps with your tolerance
You learn about other people and you learn more about yourself.
I do think that learning the language helps you understand the culture more than it would do in if you just use English. I’m not saying "you MUST learn a language" though.
In some ways it’s easy!
The Thai people are one of the best things about learning Thai because they are really patient with language learners.
They will speak to you in Thai if they realize you're learning it, and even if their English is better than your Thai.
If you try to speak bad French in France or bad Portuguese in Portugal, they will automatically reply to you in English and you don't get that in Thailand.
They're very patient and will repeat words and try to help you even if you've mispronounced a word ten times.
It is also quite easy grammatically. It doesn't have multiple word endings for verbs or nouns like Russian has, for example.
The tenses are really easy because you just put an auxiliary word in front of a verb to form a tense. No plurals. And no definite or indefinite articles.
What do you think?
Have I persuaded you to learn Thai? haha!
