Any tips for hearing and speaking tones?

[great mooglie]

I have been studying Thai for only a few months and I looking forward to trying out what I have learned so far during my upcoming trip to Thailand just few days from now.  I have been using the Thai for Beginners book by Benjawan Poomsan Becker along with the CDs and iPad app.  I've also been watching a lot of the Thai instructional videos found on You Tube.  My biggest challenge so far has been hearing and using tones.  For you Thai language veterans are there any tips you can give for how you got around this obstacle if you once had the same problem in the first place?  I understand practice is most likely the first thing, but other than that? I mean how do I know if someone is talking about a horse or a dog?  A snake or a mouse?  A shirt or a mat?  I just can't hear it most of the time.

[cutecutepillow]

Hearing for me has been more complicated than speaking. But I can share some tips about speaking:

For speaking, do not just learn the words and the tones, but absorb them. A word without the correct tone has to sound wrong for you, or out of place, add the words little by little into your vocabulary as you use them, start just with useful words that you use every day: noodles, rice, not spicy, twenty, thirty, fifty, etc, ...

Do not rush learning: If you learn 100 words this week but all of them has the tones wrong, you're not speaking shit, is better to learn 10 words but learn them well.

You don't know the word until you don't learn the tone, that's it, no matter how you put it. If you say the tone wrong, you're saying something completely different or non-existant.

Assume that "pork" is not moo, is not mu, is not muuh, is not mu. Pork is หมู , exactly those sounds and that tone, not any other westernized transliteration. Apply the same principle to all your words.