I’ve decided to have another attempt at learning Thai, so for the last week have been heading into town every day for 3 hours at “Duke Language School“. Whether it will be more successful than last time remains to be seen ! With lessons every day this is more intensive, and hopefully I will retain more and not forget it 🙂

The teaching style is completely different, what their brochure calls “edutainment”. There is a lot of role playing and games to practice what we learn. After teaching us numbers and classifiers (types of things, used for counting in Thai) they set up a ‘shop” and gave us play money and items to buy and sell.

After learning directions, how to get around town and use public transport they set up a map on the floor so that we could get around from one place to another as the teachers called out directions.

At the last school we started with 13 pupils to one teacher, here we had 8 and 2 teachers so that’s obviously a better ratio. Even better as one guy seems to have dropped out already…

Before we would get used to the teacher’s voice and her tonal range, but now with the two teachers you also get to hear 2 different voices saying the same words slightly different which is a good thing as Thai is a tonal language. There is also another class running at the same time so sometimes the teachers swap over and give us even more listening practice.

In the classroom the teachers try to avoid using English whenever possible, relying on charades and repeating simple Thai to get the meaning across. While I can understand the method sometimes a bit of explanation in English would be nice 🙂

While it is still too early to know how much will sink in, from the first week I would put Duke Language School on the list of anybody wanting to learn Thai here in Bangkok.