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Message: [QUOTE="uconndoit, post: 2733501, member: 782"] I have had experience learning Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Vietnamese and now Thai - with varying methods and degrees of success. My wife recently signed on for another 4 years here in Bangkok so I've been taking lessons for the past 2 months - 3 hours each weekday - and I'll be doing 3 more months. Plus of course I get as much practice as I want for free - just by going about my business in daily life. I've already been here for 4 years and before taking lessons I knew almost nothing. Just didn't need it and didn't want to invest the time since I didn't ever know if I would be here much longer. I assume you can't spend 3 hours a day in class for 5 months -- so short of that I would say take formal structured lessons (online or whatever) to get the fundamentals and a feel for the language. You really need that foundation to build from. Otherwise it becomes a matter of rote learning of phrases - that's a recipe for failure. I go back to an example of when I was working in Portugal. I had a foundation of 6 years of studying French with advanced grammar (not the US public crap language schooling either - but rather at a private school in Italy with an older hardcore French woman teacher) plus an ear for romance languages gained from 3 years living in Italy as a kid. Even so, after 1.5 years in Lisbon I still spoke almost no Portuguese -- because I was never forced to. Then work sent me to Madrid where they spoke almost no English. I learned Spanish in a hurry -- because otherwise I couldn't do basic things. When I returned to Lisbon I decided to take lessons - after I got that foundation it got easier to learn since I could build from it. The confidence was a big factor too - that let me practice more and more and it just snowballs from there. So, in my opinion, the best recipe for learning a new language is: a solid foundation + necessity [/QUOTE]

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