On the main menu, click the Scenarios button.

You will see a series of buttons, each labeled with a common situation, such as "Renting a Car", "In School", etc. There is also an option at the bottom left to show or hide phonetics, and a Test Yourself button that is not enabled.

Press one of the scenario buttons.
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Notice that the Test Yourself button is now enabled. Go ahead and press it.

You will see the Multiple Choice screen, and Thai words will begin filling the boxes on the left. The words will be spoken as they pop into the boxes.

These are all words from the scenario you just looked at. The test is to see how good your word recognition is. After all five words are shown, five English words are shown on the right. These are randomly selected from the scenario, too, except that one English word matches one of the Thai words.

You have 15 seconds to match the Thai with the English. Click inside one of the Thai boxes, and then click inside the matching English box. There is only one matching pair.

You can click the speaker button to hear the word spoken again, if necessary, but time is running out!

You can make the test more exciting by turning on the rhythmic background beat. And you can make it harder by turning off the pronunciation of the Thai words. In that case, all the Thai words appear at once, there is no delay as they are not spoken.

Sanook, mai?

Click the arrow button to get another batch of Thai words from the same scenario.

When you've had enough, click the exit button, and you will go back to the scenario selection screen. Try another scenario, or click the exit button to go back to the main menu.
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We've now talked about the 1 chili items on the main menu, now we're into the two chili stuff, which means these things are harder.

Initially, you might want to look at these, but if you are just beginning to learn Thai, don't get serious with these until you've made some progress.
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Like several other languages, Thai makes words by combining other words. We do this in English, with words like "doghouse", "boathouse", "cathouse", etc. In this example, "house" is the root word; the other words are modifiers.

Thai takes this to an extreme, much more so than English.

For example, there is no word for "hospital"; instead, you say "place nurse". There is no word for "school"; you say "place learn". There is no word for "garage"; you say "place motor".

There are thousands of Thai words that are basically a root word plus a modifier. When you press the Common Roots button, you are presented with a simple screen that allows you to select a root word.

Try selecting "bird" as an example. The program requests the dictionary database server to find all words that begin with "bird" in Thai. As it searches, it shows the number of words found so far. We do this because some words, like "place", have almost a thousand entries in the dictionary, so it takes a while to find them all. Also, we make this a dynamic search, rather than a static list, because we make updates to the dictionary frequently.

Be warned that many, or most, of the words retrieved will not have a sound file or picture. This is because there are over 39,000 words in the dictionary, but only 5000 or so have pictures and sounds. This will change with time, so run Web Update occasionally to get the latest updates.

Because there are no sounds or pictures for most of the words, this makes learning harder for novices. This is why this section has two challis.
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This section allows you to select words from the dictionary by type of word: noun, verb, classifier, etc., and by subject. A classifier is a group word. [The grammar book has a good explanation of classifiers and how you use them.]

If you press the button labeled Show Word Counts, you will see a chart showing the number of words by subject and part of speech.

Click on the tab for the part of speech you want to learn, and then choose a particular subject, all subjects, or no subject. Note that there might be no words for the combination you chose, such as "animal adverbs". Also there might be many words for a particular selection, but only a few might have a picture and sound.
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OK, think you're progressing well? Time to show your stuff. In the tone practice section, we have a list of 200 pairs of common words that sound very much the same. Some have a different tone, and some have a different consonant, such as T in one case and DT in another.

Click the arrow button to hear a pair of words spoken. Press the speaker button to hear a word again.

When you have reviewed several words, press the Test Yourself button. You will hear one of the words you reviewed spoken, just click in the upper or lower box to indicate which word it is. Simple, eh?
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Press the Grammar Book button on the main screen, and the Thai grammar eBook will open in a browser window. This is a complete, 350 page book, with several interesting appendices, including phonetic dictionaries. Everything you ever wanted to know about Thai is here.

Note that the phonetics used in this book are generally based on British pronunciation, not North American pronunciation.

Make sure you check out the sections on time, classifiers, and personal pronouns, as a minimum.
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We've put together a few notes on Thailand and Thai culture, which you can read by pressing the Country Notes button on the main screen. You should at least check out the sections on Education (so you understand how the school system works), Measurements (Thailand doesn't use the metric system), and time (which is based on bells, like the old British navy system).

If you press the Play Anthem button, you will hear the Thai national anthem (instrumental only, no words).
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By default, Speak Easy Thai uses English. However, if you purchased the CD-ROM, or downloaded the other dictionaries, and you speak another language than English, you can tell Speak Easy Thai to use your language. The non-English dictionaries are in various stages of completion; volunteers around the world are (slowly) sending words to update them. If you want to volunteer to enter some words, every extra word helps.

If a non-English language is selected as the preferred language, when Speak Easy Thai needs to get a word from the dictionary, it first tries your language. If it finds the word, it displays it; if the Thai word has not been translated to your language yet, it will show the English word. It shows a flag icon indicating which language is being used.
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That's it, no more to tell.

We hope you enjoy using Speak Easy Thai.
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