Its4thai, its4free!

[Skilljester]

I've recently started making a bit of effort to learn some Thai since I plan on making many trips to Thailand in the future. I decided to use this site and download the apps to my iPad and iPhone.

 

Ive found it very useful and have spend a couple of days learning the free introductory conversation section quite thoroughly as well as the 6 middle class consonants so it's going ok. There's many more lessons as well but there £2 each.

 

Anyway, if you have an iPod, iPad or iPhone that's jailbroken you can get them all for free by downloading iap cracker from cydia. Also the converse and script apps cost 69p, but again I assume you can get these free from installous (my installous isn't working properly so I just paid it)

 

If you haven't got a jailbroken device I can make an account for you and 'purchase' the additional lessons if you like, then pm the login details.

 

I know it's not everyone's cup of tea but if you want to pay for it up too you.

 

Hope this isn't against forum rules if so please delete, assume its ok as I've seen torrent links for other courses posted and it's basically the same thing.

[Nak Muay]

have u tried l-lingo?

 

i looked at quite a few and tried them but found this one by far the best, its in the style of the rosetta stone language courses. 

 

only paid £10 for full app with 100 or 200 lessons. check out the free version comes with 5 or 6 free lessons

[phuketlover]

I've recently started making a bit of effort to learn some Thai since I plan on making many trips to Thailand in the future. I decided to use this site and download the apps to my iPad and iPhone.

Ive found it very useful and have spend a couple of days learning the free introductory conversation section quite thoroughly as well as the 6 middle class consonants so it's going ok. There's many more lessons as well but there £2 each.

Anyway, if you have an iPod, iPad or iPhone that's jailbroken you can get them all for free by downloading iap cracker from cydia. Also the converse and script apps cost 69p, but again I assume you can get these free from installous (my installous isn't working properly so I just paid it)

If you haven't got a jailbroken device I can make an account for you and 'purchase' the additional lessons if you like, then pm the login details.

I know it's not everyone's cup of tea but if you want to pay for it up too you.

Hope this isn't against forum rules if so please delete, assume its ok as I've seen torrent links for other courses posted and it's basically the same thing.

 

I can only see the paid apps,no inapp purchases. So i get the full version for less than one quid.

[Skilljester]

I can only see the paid apps,no inapp purchases. So i get the full version for less than one quid.

You don't get the full version for less than a quid, you get a 69p app which has introductory conversation and vocab, when your in the app you can purchase further lessons, it's quite extensive and instead of the 2 you get for free there's a further 31 lessons of different categories. That's in the conversational app, the script app has 10 chapters, chapter 1 is free.

 

The full course costs around £90 and has had great reviews by people that have paid the money for it.

 

Thanks for the suggestion of llingo, if it's like Rosetta stone il steer clear for now as an absolute beginner, if heard Rosetta is better for at least a semi intermediate, definitely not me yet. One day

[Rapid Language Learning]

Its4Thai is a great app - and relatively cheap for what you get. Rosetta Stone (or L-Lingo) a waste of time because they've missed the point about using visuals to help you develop a vocabulary. When I first started on Rosetta Stone many years ago, I gave up after a few days it was so boring! Some of the first words include "horse" and "bicycle" - that's probably the first thing I'm going to want to talk about when I arrive in Thailand, I thought.... Many other people I know who tried Rosetta Stone had the same experience.

 

Yes, you can save money by buying cheap or free apps (and Rosetta Stone is by no means cheap) - but wouldn't you rather want to save time and effort instead? If you're the kind of person who can plough through hundreds of hours of material, over and over again, then you'll be very happy with the above products, as well as courses such as HighSpeedThai and LearnThaiPodcast. Avoid the Becker books - which you'll see in every bookshop in Thailand, they're solid and accurate, but dull as dishwater.

 

Try the Rapid Method. It's not cheap, but it's designed for people with busy social/work lives, who only want to spend 10-20 minutes a day on studying another language. It's imperative that you learn to read Thai first, otherwise you'll end up with a mangled "farang" accent and mis-learn most of your words (it's "ped" as in "peddle" for spicy, not "pet" for instance; or "cub" instead of "krup" or "crap"). The conventional way is arduous and unnecessarily complicated. The Rapid Method has eliminated all the non-essentials and uses visual mnemonics to help you remember the conceepts instantly. And once you can read, you can continuously absorb Thai directly from your surroundings, just by paying attention to the street signs and notices, and reading menus...

 

The follow on - conversational - course that I highly recommend is Everyday Thai for Beginners developed and refined over the last 30 years by Wiworn Kesavatana-Dohrs at the University of Washington. It's a first-year university course that uses Thai script only (no phonetic Romanizations), but if you use the 'Rapid' approach (with mnemonics, and focus only on minimalist yet essential vocabulary) in conjunction with "Anki" flash cards, you can be reasonably fluent in speaking everyday Thai within about 7 months (studying no more than 20 minutes per day and working with a private Thai teacher for an hour, twice a week, via Skype).

 

That's it. So far as I can tell, all other courses try to sell you a mountain of material, with hundreds of hours of audio clips and videos. Who's got the time for all that?

 

Nevertheless, I do recommend one high-volume course - those given by AUA. The idea is you just sit and watch & listen to the teacher (usually two) having a conversation in Thai - usually with a lot of miming and drawing so that you get the gist of what's going on just by their antics. After about 600 hours of this, you should be able to understand what they are saying fairly clearly. (Yes, that means attending 2-hour classes every day for a year and a half. But it's only around 120 baht/hour after all.)

 

The AUA approach is great if you just dip into it occasionally for "ear training" and for the sheer enjoyment of listening to and understanding Thai. If you do attend their classes, make sure you insist on joining the classes one level below the one they suggest. The "ALG" theory relies on your struggling to understand the situation. I recommend that you don't struggle - just enjoy and appreciate the lessons at just the right level for you based on your other studies.

 

Try the Rapid Method yourself for free and learn about 30 letters and 100 words in a couple of hours. The full course is £90.

 

By the way, I provided links to reviews on the Women Learn Thai website. They refuse to review - or have anything to do with - the Rapid Method, maybe because they are in partnership with the publishers of the Becker learn Thai books and products. Or maybe because the Rapid Method is so effective, it blows all the others out of the water - and then there'd be nothing else to write about ...

[Nak Muay]

Its4Thai is a great app - and relatively cheap for what you get. Rosetta Stone (or L-Lingo) a waste of time because they've missed the point about using visuals to help you develop a vocabulary. When I first started on Rosetta Stone many years ago, I gave up after a few days it was so boring! Some of the first words include "horse" and "bicycle" - that's probably the first thing I'm going to want to talk about when I arrive in Thailand, I thought.... Many other people I know who tried Rosetta Stone had the same experience.

 

Yes, you can save money by buying cheap or free apps (and Rosetta Stone is by no means cheap) - but wouldn't you rather want to save time and effort instead? If you're the kind of person who can plough through hundreds of hours of material, over and over again, then you'll be very happy with the above products, as well as courses such as HighSpeedThai and LearnThaiPodcast. Avoid the Becker books - which you'll see in every bookshop in Thailand, they're solid and accurate, but dull as dishwater.

 

Try the Rapid Method. It's not cheap, but it's designed for people with busy social/work lives, who only want to spend 10-20 minutes a day on studying another language. It's imperative that you learn to read Thai first, otherwise you'll end up with a mangled "farang" accent and mis-learn most of your words (it's "ped" as in "peddle" for spicy, not "pet" for instance; or "cub" instead of "krup" or "crap"). The conventional way is arduous and unnecessarily complicated. The Rapid Method has eliminated all the non-essentials and uses visual mnemonics to help you remember the conceepts instantly. And once you can read, you can continuously absorb Thai directly from your surroundings, just by paying attention to the street signs and notices, and reading menus...

 

The follow on - conversational - course that I highly recommend is Everyday Thai for Beginners developed and refined over the last 30 years by Wiworn Kesavatana-Dohrs at the University of Washington. It's a first-year university course that uses Thai script only (no phonetic Romanizations), but if you use the 'Rapid' approach (with mnemonics, and focus only on minimalist yet essential vocabulary) in conjunction with "Anki" flash cards, you can be reasonably fluent in speaking everyday Thai within about 7 months (studying no more than 20 minutes per day and working with a private Thai teacher for an hour, twice a week, via Skype).

 

That's it. So far as I can tell, all other courses try to sell you a mountain of material, with hundreds of hours of audio clips and videos. Who's got the time for all that?

 

Nevertheless, I do recommend one high-volume course - those given by AUA. The idea is you just sit and watch & listen to the teacher (usually two) having a conversation in Thai - usually with a lot of miming and drawing so that you get the gist of what's going on just by their antics. After about 600 hours of this, you should be able to understand what they are saying fairly clearly. (Yes, that means attending 2-hour classes every day for a year and a half. But it's only around 120 baht/hour after all.)

 

The AUA approach is great if you just dip into it occasionally for "ear training" and for the sheer enjoyment of listening to and understanding Thai. If you do attend their classes, make sure you insist on joining the classes one level below the one they suggest. The "ALG" theory relies on your struggling to understand the situation. I recommend that you don't struggle - just enjoy and appreciate the lessons at just the right level for you based on your other studies.

 

Try the Rapid Method yourself for free and learn about 30 letters and 100 words in a couple of hours. The full course is £90.

 

By the way, I provided links to reviews on the Women Learn Thai website. They refuse to review - or have anything to do with - the Rapid Method, maybe because they are in partnership with the publishers of the Becker learn Thai books and products. Or maybe because the Rapid Method is so effective, it blows all the others out of the water - and then there'd be nothing else to write about ...

 

 

While what you say may be accurate all of your advice and tips are sadly going to be ignored becasue you are selling a product and promoting it as the best way to learn.

 

Sorry i was really interested in what you were saying till i released it was just a sales pitch.

[Rapid Language Learning]

"Reem" - yes, you can read it as "just" a sales pitch if you want to.

I've done a lot of research in effective ways of learning Thai. I know what's out there. And when I didn't find what I needed, I developed it myself - and now I'm selling it. Stuart (the founder of its4thai) endorsed my approach way back when he first began - I recommend that you learn to read first and then switch off phonetic spellings and only rely on the Thai script when using its4thai.

 

If you take the post as I intended - a researched and tested approach to learning Thai effectively (and, yes, a "plug" for my own product) - then you'll take the time to try it out for yourself before discounting it out of hand.

 

I personally think my method is the most effective, but it doesn't work for everyone. If you buy the Windows version of the thai2english dictionary ($40), it has a section on reading Thai included. (And I highly recommend this dictionary over all others because 1: it has sample sentences and 2: you can create your own word lists for memorizing later on.)

 

You can also read the first chapter of the book Everyday Thai for Beginners (which can be bought from Asia Books for around 600 baht). There are one or two free courses that will teach you how to read, but they're not all that good. There's also a "picture" version of the Thai alphabet (60 Minutes) - which has been "borrowed" without permission by LearnThaiPodcast - but it doesn't really help you to read either.

 

The point I want to make is:

 

Learn to Read First

 

before you start learning to speak or understand Thai. Don't use any system that relies on phonetic Romanization.

 

I'm hoping of course that you'll purchase my Rapid Method for learning to read, but you can also learn just as well using the more conventional approach. (But you will probably struggle a bit because it's unnecessarily complicated and will slow you down when you get to reading texts and understanding the so-called "tones".)

 

But if you rely on phonetics then you are doomed to speak a kind of mangled "farang" version of Thai, which will be very difficult to unlearn. You will say things like "pet" instead "ped" (and even if you say it with a "d", you won't know necessarily to say it like the "d" in "peddle"). It's a lot more you need to know - but if you can read then it's obvious, and no additional explanations or caveats required.

 

Do yourself a favor. Try it! And if it's not for you then follow the other reading programs I suggested above.

 

Please report back on your results and opinions.