Now that you have downloaded Speak Easy Thai or purchased the CD-ROM, and hopefully had a chance to play with it, I would like to point out some of its features and how they are used. There's too much to show you in one e-mail, so I will spread this over a couple of days so you don't get overwhelmed.

Run Speak Easy Thai now so you can follow along with the instructions here.
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In Speak Easy Thai, the two main ways of learning Thai are the Subjects and Scenarios sections.

When you press the Subjects button, you are presented with a black screen and a drop-down list of the subjects. Many words, but not all, in the dictionary have a specific subject. "Nurse", for example, is clearly a medical word, but "to give" has no subject.

When you click a subject, the black screen changes to a picture indicating the subject you chose. If you choose "<no subject>", the screen stays black.

There are three buttons, marked "Review All Words", "Only Words with Pictures", and "Words with Pictures and Sounds". The last one is in boldface, indicating "start with me".
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There is also an option, marked "Show Phonetics if available". Initially, I added phonetics faithfully to each word in the dictionary. I added about 2500 before I stopped. There are two reasons why I stopped.

First, I come from a British-Canadian family; my mother speaks with a British accent and I speak with a Canadian accent. The phonetics we use are different. For example, she pronounces "draw" and "drawer" identically, as "drore"; I don't. So I realised that the phonetics I was entering were appropriate for me and other North Americans, but inappropriate in many cases for British speakers, including Aussies (who speak a kind of Cockney-accented English), New Zealanders (who mangle all the vowels), South Africans (who are incomprehensible),...

Second, I realised that when I used Speak Easy Thai myself, and the phonetics were shown, my brain automatically focussed on the phonetics, and ignored the Thai. This is not good. The whole point of Speak Easy Thai, and other teaching programs, is to teach Thai, not phonetics.

So I stopped entering phonetics into the dictionary.

I did not remove the ones I had already entered, but I added an option in Speak Easy Thai to turn them off. I urge you to do that. You can try learning words with and without the phonetics, and you will find that when phonetics are shown, you ignore the Thai. Not good.

It is best not to show phonetics so your brain sees the Thai for what it is, a word, in a foreign script. When you hear the word spoken, and see the word presented, your brain builds an association between the pattern of the characters and the sound. The picture helps link this association.
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When you click one of the three buttons on the Subjects selection screen, you are presented with the Vocabulary Review screen, where words are shown one word at a time.

You get a word from the dictionary by pressing the arrow button. Speak Easy Thai queries the dictionary database to get a word with the subject you specified, and with picture and sound, if you asked for them.

If you have downloaded the trial demo version, you won't have all the pictures and sounds. Instead, you will get a diagnostic saying that the picture has not been downloaded yet or the sound is not available. If you donate US$25 to the Multi-Language Dictionary project, you get a password which unlocks the protected files and makes thousands of sound files and images available. Trust me, the program works much better when you have all the images and sounds.

If you click the speaker button, you will hear the word again.

If you click the blue letter button, the word will be spelled out in Thai. This is the real way you learn the alphabet, with the characters in context.
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What we are trying to accomplish here is to force your brain to associate the Thai word with the picture and sound. Most people learn much faster when they see a picture of the word. Hearing the word spoken means you hear the correct tone. Guess what? You don't need to study the tone rules, you just heard the word spoken correctly! Play it again, Sam, press the speaker button. Press it six times, hear the word six times, look at the Thai as you hear the word, look at the picture, too. This is how children learn... associating an action or image with a sound.

When you have reviewed ten or twelve words, stop. Give your brain a rest. Press the Exit button (take the red door), and go back to the Subject selection screen. Now, notice that the Test Yourself button is now enabled. Press it.
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The test screen only tests you on the words you reviewed, not the whole dictionary, which at 39,000 words, is overwhelming. Notice that there are three options shown on this Vocabulary Drill screen. Initially, you will want to see the picture and hear the word spoken, but as you get more knowledgeable in Thai, you can turn these off to make the test harder.

The third option, Play Background Beat, adds a fast backgound rhythm to increase tension. Some people love it, some people hate it; you choose. The idea is to emphasise that there is a short time limit to respond, and time is running out, get a move on!

Press the arrow button to select one of the words you reviewed.

The program chooses to show you the Thai half the time, and the English half the time (randomly). You have 15 seconds to type the other language. Click in the empty box and start typing.
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OK, that's enough for now. Let me just say one thing in closing: This program is designed with a simple, easy to use interface. You can review and learn a few words at a time, you don't need to spend two hours slogging through heavy prose to try and learn this language.

You can run Speak Easy Thai when you have ten minutes, review a few words, then close the program and do something else. It's not drudgery, it's a fun way to learn.

More soon...
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