For me, learning a language offers a much-needed insight into a new country, and I personally believe you can never truly understand a new culture unless you learn the language. So when I first settled down in Thailand about 2 years ago, this was one of my top priorities. But you don’t necessarily have to enroll in a Thai language class if you don’t have the money or time.

Let me tell you how you can get a free language tutor while teaching yourself in the comfort of a restaurant on your own time.

1. Get Your Supplies

The first thing you’re going to need is a Thai language book (imagine that) and some flash cards. Now, I found it impossible to find flash cards as we know them in the states—those sturdy index cards—so I had to improvise. If you go to the nearest Tesco Lotus and wander around like a lost farang until you find the stationary section, they usually have a convenient little box of colored paper.

They look like post-it notes except they aren’t actually sticky.
Take these little cards and your book back to your guesthouse, sit down, and do a little reading about Thai language and how it works. Now, you can’t really learn just from the book because it’s a tonal language, but the book will give you a good sense of what to expect.

Pick the 10 most important words—meaning the 10 you think are vital for you to know at this point, and make card for them. The English word on one side and the Thai on the other.

2. Get Your Teacher

Now you need to find your teacher (or teachers). This is how I did it. I was staying in Lamai on Koh Samui, and it’s a bit of a girlie bar area. Not really my thing, but I did find one bar/restaurant combination that had a movie projector and played 2 movies every evening.

This became my daily hangout for eating and watching movies, and I got to know everyone there really well, partly because of language studies.

Here’s the thing about Thai restaurants. Any time you go to a restaurant here, you’ll notice that they usually have more restaurant staff than customers. They’ll have about 3 people eating and then 5 or 6 employees standing around talking or watching TV.

So it’s easy to get these people to help you and they have plenty of time. Just sit down at the bar and show them your cards—they’ll be very pleased you’re learning their language. And in fact, if you just break them out and start studying, they’ll get pretty curious.

I found that one of the girls was always willing to help me. I would hold up my 10 words and have them pronounce them for me so I could hear the sounds, and then I’d repeat it, making an effort to memorize. Then they would go back to work (or watching TV), and when I felt I had all 10 words memorized, they would come back and test me.

3. Make a Plan

The trick is to add 10 more words or phrases to your vocabulary everyday (if that’s too ambitious, try 5). I found that if I memorized about 5 words and 5 phrases, after a while I really started understanding the structure of the sentences.

The stack grows pretty quick, and I’d have them test me each day, so what I did was I would go through my stack everyday while studying and any words that had become second nature or “common sense” to me, I would pile up and give to the girls (since they were interested in learning more English too). That’s another thing—you can actually test them while they’re testing you to make it beneficial to everyone.

With 10 new words in your vocabulary every single day, you’ll really gain some ground quickly. It will take a while to make sense of how they go together, but as long as you’re willing to try and use it everywhere—at the store, at the bars, at the markets—you’ll find your comprehension getting better, and people will love you for the effort.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJNrs4z_Pn0[/youtube]
This plan might not be ideal for everyone, but if you find yourself in Thailand without the time and money for proper school, it does work great and really gets you out there meeting people. Within a few months people were convinced I’d been in Thailand for years, and when I finally did get around to taking a proper course, it took a bit of convincing for my teacher to believe I hadn’t take a class before.

So there you have it—free Thai language. Chok dee khrab!