Learning and Maintaining 10+ Languages

(Edit – this is 2 days old; I just forgot to post it)

Today is my last day in Korea, and I have to admit, I didn’t achieve the things I’d planned on. I had a lot of bad luck, tbh.

1)    Kakaotalk, the Korean Whatsapp that almost everyone here uses exclusively, didn’t work for me because of new restrictions against foreigners. Some foreigners have been able to get it to work, but after a couple hours of trying stuff suggested to me online, I gave up.

2)    The sim card that I purchased in advance was unable to give/receive phone calls or messages.

3)    Creating new Kakaotalk or Line (Japanese Whatsapp used by some people) accounts was impossible, because phone message confirmation is required, and as mentioned before, I couldn’t receive them.

4)    I couldn’t find any of the big language exchange meetings, which I depend on for meeting new partners to meet one-on-one with. They used to be listed in Meetup.com. In fact, many are still listed there, but I went to 3 different meeting locations at the appropriate time and there were no meetings. So I gave up on them.

5)    The language exchange websites that I’ve used in the past are really bad now. I was using 5 of them, and sent out literally hundreds of requests for exchanges, and only wound up with 2 language partners. I also had my friend from before, so 3 total. They are good partners, but not able to do the volume of exchanges that I was hoping for. I did about 15 exchanges; normal is around 50.

6)    The computer chair in my room is quite uncomfortable, preventing me from doing too much studying.

7)    The room is a bit depressing. It’s ground floor, but it may as well be a basement, judging from how the few windows are so covered up for privacy/noise insulation. It’s a nice little room, just depressing.

8)    I got very sick one of my first nights. I woke up in the middle of the night with terrible nausea, similar to how I felt when I had amoebas in the Philippines one year ago, and spent about an hour on the bathroom floor. I recovered quickly; it clearly wasn’t amoebas, but it really scared me.

So those are my excuses. I wanted to do a hard 100hr+ spurt, but ended up doing less than 50. The good news is that my level hasn’t dropped much, if any, since the last time I was here. So even though I clearly need to do a long hard Korean spurt, I’m not going to change the order that I’ve been planning on. It will still be German, Italian, Japanese, then finally Korean. German, Italian and Japanese all have very clear, achievable goals imo. But when I get to Korean, in addition to freshening up my conversation, I’m going to really attack listening, and try some intensive listening tricks I’ve heard of.

I want to be able to watch (listen to) K-dramas effortlessly. Using some tool like Migaku or Language Reactor, I’ll watch the first episode of a drama line by line. If I don’t understand it, I’ll check the Korean subtitles, and if I still don’t understand, I’ll check the English subtitles. I may harvest unknown sentences for anki; I haven’t decided yet. I’ll do this for a fixed amount of time, or fixed amount of anki cards, every day. At the end of each episode, I’ll discuss it with a teacher who has seen it before. I’ll do this until I finish the K-drama, then start another one if necessary.

Tomorrow I go to Thailand, where I start my final German spurt. It will be warm. There will be sunlight. There will be lots of people eager to meet me. Wish me luck!

Terrible luck, especially the bout of ill-health. But it seems the other languages are going well, and there will be other trips to Korea. Hang in there!

After spending two months here, tomorrow is my last day in Thailand. This leg of my trip went much better than the last one. I accomplished most of what I was shooting for, spent time with old and new friends, went swimming a lot, enjoyed the local food, and had tons of fun in general.

I ended my eight month German spurt today, after my 103rd lesson. This only translates to roughly 93 hours of conversation, since about 20 of these lessons were half-hour. I was shooting for 100 hours of conversation, so I almost made it. I’m still B1ish imo, although noticeably better than I was before Thailand. I feel I’m lacking too much vocabulary to consider myself B2. And I’m still improving my word-endings; it’s been a struggle, but considering the progress I’ve been making recently, I think if I were to put in another 50 hours or so they would be quite good. The rest of my grammar is in pretty good shape. Anyway, I will put German on hold with the rest of my languages, and see how it goes. I will start out putting it in the rotation twice. In other words, there are 11 languages, but German gets put in twice, so the rotation is 12 days, every language gets reviewed once in the rotation except German, which is reviewed twice in the rotation, or once every 6 days. Final stats on the German spurt: 8 months, 750 hours, roughly B1.5.

Tomorrow night I fly to Tanzania to start my third leg of the trip. I’ll be there for one month. I’ll visit the school at least once, and travel a bit around the country. I’ll stay in Arusha the first two weeks, but have no set plan for the rest of the time. I’ll go to Zanzibar at some point, and maybe make some new friends and visit some areas where I’ve never been.

I plan on only reviewing my languages from now until I go back home at the end of April. That’s a three month rest, and my brain could sure use it. The idea of only spending a couple hours on them every morning sounds really appealing to me. I remember the old days when I used to consider an hour a day an almost insurmountable chore. My how things have changed!

I am finally back home from my 6 month annual trip, and it feels good. In my last post, I talked about reviewing one language per day over the course of my 1 month in Tanzania and 2 months in the Philippines. But I only did it for 2 weeks in Tanzania, and 2 weeks in the Philippines. The rest of the time, I just did my Anki cards in the morning (about 30 min). This was due to poor internet, and me wanting a break. I feel nicely rested now, and ready to start Italian.

Here is my rough plan for Italian:

1st month

Alphabet/pronunciation

Pimsleur

Italianpod 101 (background noise only)

2nd - 6th months

Conversation

Read and Listen

Language Transfer Italian/Teach Yourself Italian

Watch videos/series

Actually, I have already started. I study/review pronunciation daily using the tool I made here. I’m on Pimsleur lesson 4, and I play italianpod101 when I walk. 

I watch some Italian Netflix too. For example, Lidia Poët, a sexy female lawyer in the days before females were allowed to do such work, who does her own detective work too. I don’t understand well without subtitles, but that’s to be expected at this point.

I’ll probably start Language Transfer early, just so I have grammar a better grammar base before beginning conversation.

This is, in theory, my last language, so it’s an exciting time!

I’ve reached a bit of a milestone in Italian, so I though I’d post about it. Regarding the old list, I finished the Alphabet/pronunciation step, and continue to listen to Italianpod 101 when I do my walks, every other day. Even though it was supposed to be in the second month, I started watching videos/series already. My comprehension isn’t great, but that’s normal at this stage. I also started reading/listening. It was a rough start, but now I’m up to about 30 min/day, and it’s surprisingly smooth. More on that later.

And surprisingly enough, I got interested in grammar and finished Language Transfer already. It was only an introductory course; 45 lessons, or about 7 hours total audio. I did 5 lessons per day, so it took 9 days. It was somewhat challenging, but very well put together, so I got a lot out of it. I would listen to a lesson, answer as well as I could, and write down the things that I wanted to review later in Anki. I got most answers right, but still want to review a lot of stuff in Anki. What a superb free resource; it makes me consider creating something similar. Being an introductory course, it lacks some important stuff – like the imperative. But it’s a great start. My next step, grammar wise, will be Teach Yourself.

All this time I’ve been doing Pimsleur, but today I decided to stop for the same reason I stopped Pimsleur German. The language they use is too formal and not colloquial. They use the formal form of you (lei) 100% of the time, for example. Of course, they will eventually get to the informal (tu). But I, along with most people, will use the informal almost all the time, so I want to start with it. I’d prefer starting with tu 100% of the time, then add in lei later. I’d even accept 50/50, but 100% lei is ridiculous.

Pimsleur is great for pronunciation, chunking, and preparing one to speak, but I think I’ve gotten enough out of it. No need to learn a bunch of stuff that I will not use. I wouldn’t be wasting my time, but it wouldn’t be the best use of it either. So what will I do instead? Build islands. This is a concept explained in How to Improve your Foreign Language Immediately. Basically, I’ll write and memorize little monologues for many separate topics.

The more such monologues the speaker knows, the more such “island” are available when the need arises, the easier it is for him/her to speak/swim. In essence, even a native speaker has a number of such islands. These are the speeches in which the speaker sounds more effective and articulate than usual. These are stories which, as the result of much repetition, are more polished and impressive. These are formulas for expressing certain positions or conceptions about which the speaker has thought and spoken often. These are the speaker’s speeches, lectures, “opening lines”, and remnants from earlier training. The use of such islands helps the native speaker to express him/herself more precisely and eloquently. If islands can be so helpful to native speakers, what can we conclude about foreign speakers? For the foreign speaker, an island is salvation: it provides a chance for improving communication contact, it affords a desirable break, it attracts the attention of the native speaker. I would say that the confidence of the foreigner in speaking is directly dependent upon the number of islands he/she has in his/her command. It is not possible to overstate the communicative value or importance of islands for speech.

Actually, I’ll start out by memorizing single sentences. I’ll make a list of sentence I think I’ll use often, memorize them, and review them daily until they are automatic. I’m not going to put these in Anki – I’ll benefit by the context of leaving them in list form and reviewing them all every day. I’ll post them so native speakers can correct them. I think audio would be helpful, so I may post them as a tool on my website, since I can add audio to them there. Eventually I’ll grow these single sentences into longer monologues, or islands. It may have to wait until I start conversation though; I haven’t decided yet.

This is the new routine I’ll start tomorrow, some of which is continuation of what I’ve already been doing:

1)    Anki reviews.

2)    Write out 10 sentences that I will need for my conversation classes per day, memorize them, review the old ones. These range from really simple stuff (How do you say X in Italian, etc.) to more personalized stuff (I don’t like to dive, but I like to snorkel, etc.).

3)    Read passages that have audio for 60 min out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text. Put 20 words per day from the reading into Anki, and start reviewing them the next day. I’ve been using Learn Italian with Lucrezia for this, since it’s comprehensible and has real subtitles in YouTube (not auto-generated).

After 5 days or so, I’ll probably have enough sentences, so number 2 above will become Teach Yourself. A week or two after that, the sentences will probably be really solid, so it will be time to start conversation. I’m thinking that will be around June 1, exactly 1 month after starting. That’s early – I messed up by starting too early with German, but I don’t think that’s going to be an issue with Italian; I seem to be making pretty fast progress.

I hit another milestone, and it’s a big one – did my first conversation on italki! It went well; much better than my first German (my last language) one. I decided to do 30 min lessons for a week or so, then increase it to 60 minutes. I got 25 anki notes in that 30 min, so I’m glad it wasn’t any longer. One nice thing about Italian is that, for me, the vocabulary is familiar enough so that drilling whole sentences is sufficient. I rarely feel the need to break out single words. Anyway, I didn’t embarrass myself too bad. I only used google a few times, and I understood most of what the teacher said.

My grammar was pretty good too, and that old theory about only needing 6 of the 21 “tenses” for the majority of colloquial speech seems to be holding up. The short list I was given by a helpful native was:

Presente semplice (mangio, bevo, ecc...)

Passato prossimo (Ho mangiato, ho bevuto)

Stare + gerundio (sto mangiando, sto bevendo)

Imperativo (mangia! bevi!)

Condizionale presente (mangerei, berrei)

Imperfetto (mangiavo, bevevo)

I used the first 3 frequently. I don’t know, but didn’t need, the 3rd and 4th. I don’t know but needed the 6th, so I studied it right after the class.

About a week ago I was in somewhat of a panic over grammar. I had finished creating all my conversation-primer sentences, which turned out to be 40, and wanted to start TY. Well, TY Italian is crap – one of the worst textbooks I’ve ever used. It covered very little, had way too much English, too much formal register, lot’s of mistakes, etc. So I did some serious searching for textbooks/grammars. I read a ton of reviews on Amazon and Reddit, then checked out any free samples I could get my hands on. I eliminated all of the English based ones. There was one that sounded good, recommended by Lucrezia; GP. Grammatica pratica della lingua italiana. Livello A1-C1: Grammatica - for English Speakers. But I couldn’t take a look at it, and there is no e-book version. Other than that, the best English based one I could find was Italian made Simple. The content was really good, although quite heavy (too much vocab imo). But it’s really dense; they split the page vertically and write in two columns. There is no e-book, but I was looking at a pdf, and it moves really slowly. The other thing is that it’s from 1960. The runner up was Complete Italian Step-by-Step. Fully functional e-book, so I thought I’d struck gold, but it turns out they took an older version, chopped it up and made it into an e-book. It’s basically a very dry grammar with some exercises inserted in strategic places. It’s probably ok to function as a grammar, but I find it difficult to work through those types of text books. I checked out 5 or 6 more of the most popular English based books, but won’t bother to list them here.

Now if you’re looking for a good, free, English based Italian text book, and don’t mind that most of it’s exercises are based on audio and video (also free), then you might want to check out WellesleyX: Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (2023-2024). But I don’t want to be juggling audio and video in my text books. I get enough audio and video elsewhere; I just want good, digestible grammar.

The reason I eliminated all the English based books is that I discovered I can handle monolingual ones, and they are much better overall. I can do this because I completed Language Transfer and have done a fair amount of reading already. So I’d recommend this to others that are in the same boat. The first ones I checked out are the ones they always recommend on Reddit. Nuovissimo Progetto Italiano and Nuovo Espresso are both designed for classroom, are heavily dependent on audio/video, and don’t have normal e-books. Nuovo Espresso claims to have an e-book, but I’ve heard that it is only accessible on their site, and only for 1 month. Anyway, I want a self-study text book that doesn’t have audio/video, so I checked out some more of Lucrezia’s suggestions.

I was able to check out Parla e Scrivi, Grammatica pratica della lingua italiana and Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana. Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana looked good, but there was no e-book and the pdf I was looking at was really slow. So I had to choose between the other two, which were pretty much exactly what I was looking for. No official e-books, but the pdfs I checked out moved fast enough. I selected Parla e Scrivi, maybe because it was the first one Lucrezia recommended.

The only other thing I wanted to mention here was that my reading has improved a lot. I can now tolerate reading any subtitles I want to import from Youtube. By that I mean, I know enough of the vocabulary so it doesn’t burn me out to read it. Keep in mind that I’m using a reading tool, which gives me a great advantage. But this has made it possible to read a lot more variety; a lot more stuff that interests me. Another thing that really helps is that I can put sloppy auto-generated subs into Chat GPT and make them much more readable by adding punctuation and capitalization without changing any words.

In closing, here is my current daily routine:
1) Anki reviews.

2) 30 min conversation class (soon to increase to 60)

3) Watch Netflix series during breakfast

4) Review my 40 conversation-starter sentences (this will be dropped before the end of the month)

5) Read passages that have audio for 60 min out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text.

6) 30-60 min textbook

7) Listen to pod101 if I walk. Watch Netflix/YouTube 30-60 min.

Today I broke the 10 hours of conversation barrier. My first 5 lessons were 30 min each, and today was my 8th one hour lesson, so I have a total of 10.5 hours. I rate my teachers in my own little spreadsheet, because I use a lot of them and I’d hate to lose track of the ones I like the most. I use a 3 star system. 3 stars = repeat, 2 stars = maybe, 1 star = never again. I’m finding Italian teachers to be above average for my purposes, compared to other languages. Seven 3s, five 2s and only one 1(she’s an over-corrector who has done a lot of travelling and doesn’t like developing countries).

I consider the first 10 hours to be an important milestone, because it’s the hardest period of language learning for me, and I just want to get through it. It’s such an awkward feeling sometimes. All that struggling, and long pauses. But Italian wasn’t that bad, and needless to say, I’m much better now than I was in the first lesson. After my 11th lesson, I felt like I’d leveled up, but I held off on declaring myself A1-ish until today. I feel like my true level is actually A2-ish, but I need to catch up with my conversation. I’m guessing another 20 hours or so to get there.

Textbook wise, I decided to make a switch to the nicer Una Grammatica Italiana per Tutti. It’s a great book. My only complaint is that it has some vague exercises, meaning there can be more than one answer, but only about 10% of the time, so not a show stopper. My previous choice had more issues in addition to vague exercises: it was a bit hard to look at, used more vocabulary, had more mistakes, and even introduced some grammar points in the exercises. Still a relatively good text though, which tells you something about the quality of textbooks in general. Anyway, I’m on Lesson 19 of 67 in the new textbook. It’s going to be more time consuming than I thought – probably about 1 hour per lesson. That’s the biggest change to my daily routine, which is now:

1) 30-45 min Anki reviews.

2) 30-60 min read passages that have audio out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text.

3) 60 min conversation class. Curate a list of words/sentences for the next day's Anki reviews.

(60 min listen to audio stripped from easy youtube vlogs if I walk.)

(30 min watch Netflix series during lunch.)

4) 60 min textbook.

(30 min watch Netflix/YouTube videos.)

It amounts to about 3 hrs of full concentration study, with up to an additional 2 hrs of partial attention listening/watching (in parentheses above)

Yay, I finally received my paper textbook from Amazon – first paper book purchase of any kind in many years! I still use the pdf to study with, but I wanted to do the right thing and purchase this excellent book (no kindle version available). I haven’t been making as much progress with it as I’d hoped for, because I’ve only been doing about 30 min/day. I’m on lesson 33 of 67, and that’s after skipping 5 lessons on the future tense (I’ll learn the future in the future). I looked through the table of contents and confirmed that the six basic tenses I posted about earlier are covered, plus two additional tenses.

I just hit 20 hours of conversation, and I’ve decided to start considering myself to be around A2. Two of my last three teachers, without any prompting, have told me I’m at “a good intermediate level”. I don’t kid myself – I know I’m not B1 yet. But I’m confident that I’m no longer A1, which is nice because some teachers refuse to teach students below A2. Italian italki tutors aren’t as picky as German ones though; there are more Germans that wouldn’t teach below B1 than Italians that won’t teach below A2. Not sure why, but I suspect it’s based on demand.

I had an intense teacher today. Harsh corrections, even though I asked her to keep it to a minimum. I complained, and she eased off a bit. Then we got stuck on a question she asked. I said something like “I review all of my languages” and she asked “why do you say ‘my’ languages?” I asked if it was wrong, because I actually had a German teacher who said it was a bit unnatural. However she said it was correct, but she wanted to know what I meant by “my” languages. We went back and forth a couple times:

Is it wrong?

No?

Why are you asking me if it’s not wrong?

Because I don’t know what you mean.

Is it wrong?

Etc., etc.

Finally, she elaborated that by saying “my” languages, I’m implying that I’ve already studied them. And I said of course I have; I’d thought that was obvious, but I guess it wasn’t. Maybe she heard my long list of languages and assumed it was a wish list or something. Then she listed her languages, three European plus Chinese, and I said “Really – did you live in China?” She said no, she’d learned it at Uni, and I was thinking to myself “yeah, right” because I’ve heard that before. Then she said she wanted to speak a little Chinese with me. I told her I didn’t want to get confused, but she could ask me again at the end of the hour. When we finally did speak it, I was pleasantly surprised at how good she was, especially her pronunciation (she pronounced United States (mei3guo2) as mei2guo2, but that was the only obvious error). She was surprised with my level too (we are both around B2 imo), and finally looked at the levels listed on my profile and was like “wow”. So the conversation ended on a positive note.

I hit 40 hours of conversation today. This is double the number at which I declared A2, so I thought there might be a chance that today would be B1 day, but I don’t think I’m there yet. I feel close though – maybe at the 50 hour mark, which was my original low-end prediction. I’ve had 2 or 3 teachers tell me I’m B1 without any prodding, not that I’m keeping track. I had one say I was B2; maybe looking for more bookings?

But I also had one very negative, seemingly depressed teacher tell me I wasn’t A2, but I wasn’t B1 either. I think she meant I was on the way to B1, but when I see it written down it makes me think – A1??? That teacher was strange. 100% twenty-questions teaching style, never cracked a smile or said anything positive. I tried to turn it into a conversation once, asking if she could swim, and she said “yes, at the Olympic level” and quickly tried to change the subject. But I asked her about it again, and she explained that her swim instructor was trying to get her to qualify for the Olympics but she didn’t make it for some reason. Maybe that’s why she’s so depressed. She also said italki is her only job.

I’m on lesson 52 of 67 in my textbook. It will be nice to finally finish it. I’ll probably go through it again, and then try to focus on the daily grammar point in my conversations. I going to make more of an effort to push grammar into my speech than I’ve done in the past.

I study Italian 9 out of every 10 days, and I also review one my other languages every day. I wrote this in another post:

I've been learning Italian for 2 months. I speak 11 other foreign languages, and 9 of them have not been impacted in the slightest during this period. My two newest languages, German 1 year and Portuguese 3 years, have been impacted. I review these languages once every 10 days. German, which is pretty different from Italian, was not impacted too severely. In fact, the impact seems to have worn off already. Portuguese on the other hand, which is very similar to Italian, was devastated. My low B2 sunk to a low A2, as I struggled to pull out Portuguese words instead of Italian word in my Portuguese conversation classes. However, the worst seems to be over, and I'm speeding up recovery by cutting the time between reviews in half. I feel I'm approaching B1 again and improving quickly.

This is still the case today, as I approach three months; my German feels stable at B1, and even though I cut the period for Portuguese in half, conversations feel A2. Experience tells me things will improve as my Italian gets better, but I have no doubts about needing to do another Portuguese spurt. German too. B1 is not good enough.

My daily routine hasn’t changed much, but some times have decreased.

1) 30-45 min Anki reviews.

2) 30 min read passages that have audio out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text.

3) 60 min conversation class. Curate a list of words/sentences for the next day's Anki reviews.

(60 min listen to audio stripped from easy youtube vlogs if I walk.)

(30 min watch Netflix series during lunch.)

4) 30 min textbook.

(30 min watch Netflix/YouTube videos.)

Items in parentheses optional.

I’m hoping the 50 hour mark = around B1 and 100 hour mark = around B2. That would get me to around B2 in September. Since Portuguese is on an accelerated schedule, I hope it will be in good enough condition to leave it on maintenance while I brutally attack Japanese reading. I’d love to finish the Japanese spurt during my 6 months of travels. Then I’ll go after Portuguese and German before doing what I hope is my final long spurt in Korean. I want to have all 12 of my foreign languages beaten into B2+ condition before I turn 70. Then I’ll just review one language per day and enjoy them.

Big milestone – B1! Ok, it’s not official, I didn’t take a test or anything, but this is what happened. The day after my last post I had easily the best conversation so far. My teacher was fantastic (the first “3” I’ve had in a while), which made a big difference. At the end of the class she was talking about how great my level was after only three months. So I asked, and she said B2. Definitely an exaggeration, but that made me think hard about it, and I knew that I was no longer A2. The next three days in a row, despite not having the best teachers (all 2’s), I still felt B1-ish. And one other teacher told me I was B1. So I changed my level in italki and such. Here are my hours of conversation:

A1 - 10 hrs

A2 – 20 hrs

B1 – 42 hrs

I’m now hoping to reach B2 at around 80 hours. I’ve been studying exactly 3 months, and I have 3 months left at home (I travel 6 months per year, starting in early November). So you might think that I’m cutting it close; 42 hours in the first 3 months, leaving 38 hours in the second 3 months. But actually I didn’t converse in the first month, so if I continue at my current rate I could reach my goal around the first of October, despite what I wrote in my last post.

I’m on my 60th of 67 lessons in my Textbook now. I skipped 2 or 3 more lessons because they were really bad. This textbook is one of the best I’ve used in any language, but there have been several lessons now that were way below the level of the majority. The only thing I can think of is maybe they were written by some associate professor. There are two authors, but they each claim responsibility for about half the chapters. There are only 6 or 7 bad ones, so I’m thinking someone “helped” one of them. Why are they bad? Poorly explained grammar points, more vague exercises (having many possible answers) than usual, and a higher bar for vocabulary. Not fun. But tomorrow I begin the only “Big Six” tense that I haven’t learned –il condizionale (8 lessons total). 

Speaking of grammar, one of the things I’ve done differently this time is to tell my tutors to go easy on corrections, rather than tell them not to correct me. Some do what I ask, but most don’t. Today’s tutor was particularly brutal. She stopped me two or three times before I broke down and told her “If you’re going to correct me, just do it quickly with no further explanation. I study grammar on my own, and I know every mistake you point out. If I don’t understand something, I’ll ask you about it.” The very next correction she stopped me and gave me an explanation, and this time in English! Sigh. If I had hair I’d be pulling it out. But she realized what she had done, giggled an apology, and it went better after that. And what I said is true – I knew what I did wrong as soon as she pointed it out in every case, and often before, literally as the words are coming out of my mouth. I refuse to slow down during a real conversation though, because that’s worse than having bad grammar. The errors decrease with practice ime, as long as I keep studying grammar and the other facets of the language outside of conversation.

I understand 99% of what my tutors say. It frustrates me when they underestimate my comprehension. I need to tell some to speak faster, and stop repeating and typing out words they think I don’t understand. This is just weird – I swear I’m not displaying my puzzled face to anyone. Maybe it’s because I still don’t speak well, or that I had A2 in my profile for so long. But that being said, I misunderstood something today in a pretty funny way. She said “ti capita di avere.... ?” and I was like “What? Can you repeat that?” and after she did, I said “Can you write that?” Then I said “The English translation makes no sense. You are saying ‘do you understand to have…’ And she laughed and said “No. It’s not capire (to understand); it’s capitare (to happen)!” I said oops, and we continued. But in my defense I don’t even know that verb passively, and it sounds a lot like capire. :lol:

I finished up my 100 hours of conversation spurt in Italian. I’m happy with the results. I feel like I’m roughly B2, but I never learned the subjunctive so I assume I’d fail a B2 test. I’ll eventually come back to Italian, to learn the subjunctive and further hone my skills. I feel the spurt was long enough so that Italian won’t disappear on me, like Portuguese.

Speaking of Portuguese, I finally got tired of having A2 conversations in it, so I dropped it completely. Italian put the nails in the coffin. This is the first time I’ve dropped a language in over 10 years. German, which is newer, survived the same abuse that killed Portuguese, and I assume this was due to it being different enough from Italian.

My German has weakened noticeably though, so what I plan to do next is another German spurt. My first spurt went for six months over a seven-month period (I skipped a month in there). I compare this with my solid six-month spurt in Italian, which is an easier language for me, and am not surprised that my German level is noticeably lower. This time I want to go until I feel B2ish. I’m going to have at least four months during my travels where I’ll be able to hit it hard, and possibly as many as six months.

After that, if my Italian still feels strong, it will be time to do a multi-month spurt in Portuguese. I really want to hit it out of the ballpark this time. At that point, I’ll have stabilized all my European languages, and it will be time to fill two big holes in my other languages. First will be a Japanese reading spurt. I’ve never been a great Japanese reader, but I think if I follow the method I used for Mandarin, I’ll be able to improve significantly in 500 hours or less. Then comes Korean, and this will be a long one. I think a multi-month spurt in conversation, followed by a lot of listening practing.

From here on out, even for Asian languages, I’ll be following some lessons learned from my last three European languages believe it or not. I learned Thai and Japanese, one right after the other, early on in my language learning journey. This gave me a lot of insights into which learning techniques worked well and which didn’t. After that, I became eager to point out weak techniques to people who only learned European languages, in a sincere desire to help people. Unfortunately, I failed to consider the advantages that learning “simpler” languages had for trying out new techniques. My attitude was that I wouldn’t learn anything groundbreaking from them, because every technique works with easy languages. But after three in a row (Portuguese, German and Italian) I can honestly say I’ve improved my learning method considerably. For example:

1)  I make a concerted effort to speak colloquially now; much more so than previously. To be clear, I don’t necessarily mean “slangy”. I mean that I want to talk like natives really talk. This point drives some of the other points below. It was easy to experiment with this for easy languages, prove to myself it could be done and that I preferred the results over what I was doing before.

2)  I add audio to all my flashcards now, and fail myself when my pronunciation is off. It’s another colloquial thing – I want to sound more like a native. This tech has been around for a long time, but working on easier languages made me feel more free to experiment with it.  

3)  I build pronunciation tools when I start a new language. Similar to point 2.

4)  The ratio of Youtube videos to other listening activities has increased significantly. With easy languages, I was able to feel things becoming more comprehensible. With hard languages, the changes are less detectible and I never really considered that these videos could be more helpful than other sources. Plus, there are a lot more suitable videos available for easy (more studied in this case) languages.  

5)  For reading, I’m gradually switching all my languages over to reading primarily subtitles. I find them to be more colloquial, interesting and often more comprehensible. Now, I like to read, and if I was just learning one language, I’d read a lot of pop fiction too, but I don’t have the time to do that with 12 languages, and it’s not my primary objective either. Learning easy languages makes me more open to doing all the “fun” stuff, and subtitles are fun for me. Plus I get to use my reading tool.  

There’s more, but I think I’ve made my point. I want to keep all my languages colloquial and up to date.

Wow, it’s been 6 months since my last post here! A lot has happened. I was in the Philippines for 2 months, then came here to Thailand for the remaining 4 months of my annual 6 month trip. During the Philippines, and the first 2 months of Thailand, I did a pretty intensive German spurt, as planned. It was successful, although I still don’t feel comfortable calling myself B2. And after a total of 4 months, I got tired of the spurt and decided to try something different. I asked myself:

To learn Isaan or not?

I’m in Thailand now. I’ve been coming here annually for 22 years, staying an average of three months at a time, which means I’ve spent over five years of my life here. I learned the basics of Thai before my second trip here, and now I speak the language quite well (B2ish). I reached this level over 10 years ago, and haven’t tried to improve anymore. If you speak Thai, you can communicate with everyone here. There are some minor languages, or dialects, too. Minor language speakers speak them amongst themselves, but in addition tend to speak native or near native Thai. And of course, English is not that uncommon. Given this info, and the fact that Thai was so hard for me to learn, it’s always been hard to justify learning Isaan.

Thailand can be divided into four major regions—the north, northeast (also known as Isaan), center, and south (southern peninsula). Pattaya, where I normally stay, is in the center, but there are so many native Isaan speakers here, I’m tempted to learn at least a little of it. For example, when I go into a bar or restaurant here and talk to a hostess, chances are very high that she’s Isaan. I have two more months left here, and just finished a four month spurt in German because I didn’t feel like extending it to six months. So I figured, “Only two months left? No time to lose!!!”

But Isaan is hard for reasons I’m not used to – lack of resources and lack of a standard writing system. Lack of resources you probably understand, but the lack of a standard writing system requires some explanation. First, a bit of history. The Lao kingdoms were under Siamese control when Siam (Thailand) was forced to cede territories east of the Mekong River to French Indochina in the Franco-Siamese War of 1893. That split the Lao people into two groups, what would become Isaan and Lao. From that point on, the languages began to diverge. Isaan is a dialect of Lao, but it is not the same as Standard Lao. I bring this up because I often hear the suggestion “Just learn Lao, and then you’ll speak perfect Isaan”. No. Even though there is no standard script for Isaan, they use Thai script when they write, not Lao. There are many Isaan words that come from Thai and don’t exist in Lao, and many words in Lao that don’t exist in Isaan. Oh yeah, and the tones are different. There are 5+ dialects of Isaan, and a lot of tone variation. There are several different dialects of Lao too. It’s a lack of standardization nightmare.

Going deeper into the tone issue. Standard Thai (ST) has five tones, and some dialects of Isaan have five tones, including the Khon Kaen dialect, which some think of as Standard Isaan (SI). ST and SI both have mid, low, high, falling and rising tones. Although these tones have the same names, they have slightly different contours. For example, the ST high tone starts a bit above the middle then rises, and the SI high tone is just a high flat tone. So that’s one thing to keep in mind when you are reading Isaan using Thai script; if it signals a high tone, you just use the SI hi tone rather than ST. Simple enough to remember, right?

But here’s the funny part.   “Have you eaten yet?” in English is กินข้าวหรือยัง in Thai

a)    Isaan speakers normally say it like this กิ่นเข่าแล่วบอ (low, low, falling, mid tones)

b)    But write it like this กินข้าวแล้วบ่อ (mid, falling, high, low tones)

If they write it like b), how do they know to pronounce it like a)? It turns out that they use Lao tone rules to read Thai script. So when the words are cognates, which is the case 80-90% of the time, they just leave the script as it’s written in Thai, but pronounce the tones differently because they are using Lao tone rules. They do this with consonants too, but let’s not go there yet. So initially I thought I should learn the Lao tone rules in order to correctly pronounce text when I read Isaan. Although this sounds complicated, it gets worse. I know of two sources that explain how to make Isaan tones out of Thai text. They contradict each other, and they contradict what I’m hearing in real life. So I’m not in a hurry to learn those rules.

As I said before, there is no SI writing system. I think a mixture of a) and b) is most common, which makes it really hard for a learner to figure out which tone is used. So even though most native Isaan speakers prefer to see Thai cognates spelled the same as Thai, per b) above, I prefer learning material spelled per a). There aren’t very many materials like this, so I started a YouTube Channel and I’ve pledged to make 100 videos. More later.

So the questions was how to proceed without resources. I wanted to do what I always do: have daily conversation classes, and during class write down everything I wanted to say but couldn’t, as well as everything the teacher said but I couldn’t understand. After class, I would curate a list of unknown words and phrases, memorize it, put it in Anki, and start doing reps the next day before class. This method gives me great results. The problem was I was essentially A0. Normally I do one to three months of beginner stuff before starting conversations, but there was no beginner stuff that was appropriate for that step. So I decided I needed to memorize 50 sentences before starting conversation. These were of the type “Can you repeat that?” “Please write that down” “How do you say X in Isaan” “I’m from Seattle” etc. I did this for both German and Italian, and it really helped, so I gambled that these sentences, along with my firm grasp of Thai, would be enough to start 100% conversation classes.

When I tried to create the 50 sentences though, I was once again reminded how problematic the lack of resources was. No Google Translate, no online dictionary and no TTS. So I placed an ad on Upwork to have someone translate and make recordings for the sentences. No bites. But I got lucky, and found an italki Thai teacher from Isaan who was willing to translate/record them. So she did it, and I was super happy, and even put them here so others could use them. Then I asked her to make recordings of a simple list of syllables, in both Thai and Isaan. I designed these to be sort of like minimal pair drills, but to compare the tones of the two languages. She quickly agreed, but her recordings were quite inconsistent. I pointed this out, and wasted a lot of both of our time and energy exchanging notes with her trying to explain the problem.

Me: If I play the recordings for five different syllables with high tones in a row (ก๊า, ดู๊, โจ๊, ดี๊, ไป๊), I expect to hear the same tone in all of them. I don’t when I listen to yours.

Her: We don’t have some of those words in Isaan, so I had to pronounce them differently.

Me: They aren’t words, they are just fake syllables I’m using to compare tones.

Her: No response.

Etc.

I should have demanded some money back, but it took me almost an hour to pay her previously (had to do a physical deposit into her bank account), and I just decided I wasn’t going to make her do that for the relatively small amount of money. But I had the sentences, and that was enough!

So I thought. But I posted a link to the sentences on Reddit, asking people what they thought, and after a bunch of pretty polite comments, and minor criticisms of the text (I told her to use method a), came a not-so-polite post about the sentences being a mixture of Thai and Isaan, amongst other things which I won’t bother getting into. But he was right about the weak Isaan. My beautifully manicured, specially crafted Isaan sentences had lots of obvious Thai words where Isaan belonged, especially pronouns. Pronouns are the most blatant differences between the two languages, even though they are both pro-drop. My defense is that I hadn’t started studying anything when I checked her translations, but by the time he pointed it out, the errors were glaring even to me.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I’d already memorized the sentences by then, and began conversations while trying to remember to swap out the Thai words on the fly. It worked. I had my eighth 30 minute conversation today, and I’m A2ish. More to come…

First, I’ll give you an update on my studies. My level is still A2, but improving at a decent pace. I’ve done 18 online 100% Isaan conversation classes. The first 10 were 30 min, and now I do 60 min classes, so I have 13 hours total under my belt. Actually I don’t wear a belt, but who’s watching? My original goal was to hit 30 hours before I left, but even though I’m trying to do a class per day, time is a bit tight. I need 17 hours in about 25 days, but after subtracting the travel days, cleaning days and Chinese days, I’ll only make it if I take every single opportunity I have. 25 hours total is more realistic.

My daily routine is Anki reps, writing five lines of Anki answers in my notebook, a tiny bit of reading and listening, the class, curating the list of new items after class, memorizing them and loading them into Anki. I should be doing a lot more reading and listening, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, but there is no need for grammar study. Thai grammar is very easy, and Isaan grammar is almost exactly the same.

Before I get to the main reason for this post, I just wanted to mention something really cool that happened today. There is a YouTube Thai teacher who also makes a lot of Isaan teaching videos. The videos are all English, except for the new Isaan phrases she teaches. This is pretty typical of Isaan teaching videos, and the same goes for YT teachers teaching native Thai speakers Isaan by overusing the Thai language. These videos are nice to have, but they are of limited use imo for the following reasons. 1) They are mostly in English/Thai 2) If I want to say sentence X, how does watching these videos lead to that? No clear path. That being said, the videos are fun for beginners, and they are very popular judging from the number of likes. But I want comprehensible input. I want videos where people are talking normally about everyday situations, and I want accurate subtitles. Anyway, I saw how nicely produced this teacher’s videos were, and thought “Why not just offer to pay her for comprehensible input videos per my description?” So I contacted her via email, offered to pay her a per video price which, based on my experience, is a fair rate, for up to 100 videos. I’d have her post them on her own website and reap any benefit off of them that she possibly could, as long as I get to keep copies and have a forever license to use them. Win-win, I thought. No answer.

So I decided to get freelancers from Upwork and a few other places to make videos for me, and put them in my own channel, since I’ve done this successfully for three other languages. I have about 25 ten minute videos so far. I’m trying to finish all 100 by the end of May. It’s going well, but it’s not without its challenges.

Anyway, I was on italki the other day, looking for more Isaan teachers (it’s not a language there, so I message Thai teachers), when I saw the same famous YouTuber. She’s expensive, but I figured “why not?” I booked a lesson, and that lesson was 10 hours ago. Before the lesson, I toyed with the idea of telling her who I was, and asking her why she never responded, showing her the Channel, etc. But in the end, I chickened out and decided to just try to have a good conversation. I was a bit nervous before the lesson, but for some reason not at all during it. It was the best conversation I’ve had so far. I was smooth, and I caught her code switching to Thai as often as she caught me. It was fun, but just price alone keeps me from wanting to do it again. I’ve got several good conversation teachers now who code switch less.

So meandering back to the main reason for this post – subtitles. Ouch. First, I think we all know that FB auto-subs aren’t great. FB leaves out punctuation, sometimes even words and sentences, and often has messed up timing (a word or sentence appearing long before or after it is spoken). It’s even worse for lesser known languages like Thai, and Isaan isn’t Thai so you can imagine the magnitude of discrepancies.  

It became apparent right from the start that the people making the videos were incapable of fixing the subtitles. So I hired a dedicated subtitle editor. First time ever. She did a good job of fixing all the issues listed above, plus another issue specific to switching Thai to Isaan, changing a handful of consonants. For example, เรา (raao) in Thai is spelled/pronounced เฮา (haao) in Isaan. So that was all fine and dandy, but now let’s talk about tones.

Remember:
a)    Isaan speakers normally say it like this กิ่นเข่าแล่วบอ (low, low, falling, mid tones)

b)    But write it like this กินข้าวแล้วบ่อ (mid, falling, high, low tones)

As I said in an earlier post, I wanted materials that used method a). So my instructions to my subtitle editor were to do it that way. And she asked if I wanted to ignore the variations in the “accents” of the various video creators, and always use the same tone for a given word, or if I wanted her to spell it as she heard it. I told her to spell it as she heard it. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Subtitles that match each speaker exactly. Bad choice.

Even though she fixed all the other issues very nicely, her tones were all over the place. And by that I mean, she was not making them consistently match the speaker. Nor was she using consistent standardized tones. So there was that issue, and when redditors confirmed my fears, I tried to figure out what to do. It took me a long time to test and recruit this person, and I didn’t want to go through that again. So I basically just told her what the problem was, and to try to do a better job. To make a long story short, that failed too, but it didn’t matter.

I’d been reading this one passage in my reading tool, the subtitles for a single video, for five days, when it suddenly occurred to me that my slow progress was due to the parsing being absolutely terrible, and the reason the parsing was bad was Google usually doesn’t recognize Isaan cognates as the same word in Thai. In other words, it needs me to use method b).

This sucks on many levels, but to be honest, having tones (poorly) written as the speaker produced them was not helping me get a clear grasp on the tones anyway. They kept on changing, so I couldn’t get used to them. Standardizing them would be better, but that wouldn’t work with my reading tool. If I don’t want big clumps of unparsed words, I need b).

So I gave my subtitle editor new instructions. She worked so incredibly slow, the switch isn’t going to be as bad as it could have been. It turns out one of my video creators can actually fix subtitles too, and she understood right away what I was after, so there is hope. Things are looking up.

When I read, I’m just going to have to learn the theoretical transformations for converting Thai to Isaan tones. There’s no escaping it now. I’ll probably create a table showing what these rules are, and prioritizing the most drastic changes. More on tones later; there is a lot to unwrap.

Ok, I got curious about transforming Thai tones to Isaan, and decided to go ahead and make a table. Here is the result, and it’s good news: (edit - the correct table is 2 posts down)

Memorize these five transformations, and you’re good. Class ข and ค signify high and low class respectively. To explain the table in a bookish way, looking at the first row, “change a Thai high class consonant live syllable with a long vowel and a rising tone to a low tone”. But of course it’s much easier to memorize “change ขี้ to ขี่”, with the understanding that they represent all similar syllables.

The reason I called this good news is that remembering only 5 rules, or a total of 10 syllables, isn’t very difficult, and motivates me to become diligent about applying them in conversation. And it’s a great reduction from the full list of 20. Yes, this is a simplification that I made, and I will explain my logic for doing this. Here is the full list, which is supported by SLT (Speak Like a Thai volume 5) and my personal experience:

Green (7) are syllables that stay the same, blue (5) are important enough to memorize, white (8) aren’t. My reason for dropping the white ones? There are four dead syllables with short vowels, and their tones tend to be swallowed up in normal speech. And the other four are switching between mid and low tones, which are not different enough for me to be concerned about. Of course, the most technically correct thing to do is memorize all the white ones too, but I think for most of us the five blue ones is the most realistic solution.

Having clear rules for converting Thai tones to Isaan tones has really helped me in conversations. I’m not saying that I get everything right instantly, but having that solid base to fall back on reduces my tone confusion. I hit 18 hours of conversation today, and the last 3 classes were great. Today I had my first “Lao” class, meaning the Teacher was from Laos and doesn’t profess to speak Isaan. She calls herself C2 in Thai, and she agreed to write any notes I requested using Thai script rather than Lao. She struggled a bit, but with todays tech I was easily able to fix the text after class. Even though the class was 60 min long, there were only 2 words that were “pure” Lao, one of which was a twisted cognate: swimming pool in Lao สระลอยน้ำ (pool float water); in Thai สระว่ายน้ำ (pool swim water). ลอย means “float” in Thai too, but nobody says สระลอยน้ำ in Thai or Isaan, hence the “twisted” cognate.

Regarding Lao script, I think many centuries ago they hired the same Scribe who invented Thai script, but they were short on cash, so they got him really, really drunk first. What’s this based on? เข้าใจ vs ເຂົ້າໃຈ. Understand (I hope Lao people have a good sense of humor)? I won’t be learning the script anytime soon, but I think I’ll start using LO for a language code, since Isaan doesn’t have one. And I appear to communicate in the Laos based Lao dialects as well as the Thai based ones (strong A2), so why not? 

I got asked a question along the lines of “Are you going to just learn one dialect so you can only speak with those speakers?” The answer is, I’m going to speak Isaan by speaking Thai, incorporating the 10-20% of the words that aren’t cognates, and using the 5 tone conversion rules that I listed in my previous post on all words that come out of my mouth. I’m not going to laser focus on a specific dialect. I won’t sound exactly like any single dialect, but my guess I’ll be closest to SI (standard Isaan, Khon Kaen dialect). I’ll be understood by all Lao dialect speakers, but some dialects will be easier for me to understand than others. Here is a list of the major Lao dialects:

On the list, Central, Eastern, Southern and Western Isaan seem to be pretty easy to understand. Same with Southern Lao. I struggle a bit with Northern Isaan though; they seem to use additional tones, and I have to ask them to repeat more often. They are also more picky about how I talk, correcting my tones occasionally. The other 5 dialects, I don’t know yet. But even in the case of Northern, it’s not that hard to understand, so I don’t think I’m getting into a situation where I’m going to be limited.

Two posts ago I mentioned that we needed to switch to method b) subtitles in my YouTube channel. That’s turned out to be a very good move. The reading tool is recognizing cognates much better now. Unknown words per video are now about half what they were with method a); we went from 200+ to 100+ on the average. Reading just got easier. I read half a subtitle file today, whereas before I was only reading about 1/5 per day. The funny thing is, I’m mostly improving my Thai. New words are almost always cognates. I have to remind myself that I never really was a great Thai reader. Here is a post I made three years ago:

wrote:

According to the stats in the reading tool, here are my approximate average percentages of unknown unique words after I finish reading a passage:

Spanish 5%

French 5%

Portuguese 7%

Tagalog 10%

Swahili 15%

Russian 15%

Thai 15%

Korean 15%

Japanese 25%

Mandarin 35%

Keep in mind that these stats would look much better if they were for non-unique words. That is because a few hundred very common words, which I already know, make up a majority of the words in a passage, and are repeated many times.

Since then, I’ve fixed my Mandarin reading, and knocked it down to about 10%. I have plans to do the same with Japanese next year. But Korean and Thai are nothing to be proud of. So thinking that I’m just going to be able to rip through Isaan reading like I’m ripping through conversation is wishful. It’s probably going to take 2 hrs per day for 3 months, or something like that, to fix Thai/Isaan reading permanently. It’s definitely not happening during this spurt. 

But I still plan to maintain this language like all my other languages when I return home and end my spurt. I should be B1 by then, and want to try to stick it in my normal line up and combine it with Thai. That should be interesting.

First a quick update. I’m at 23 hrs of conversation (28 lessons) and still a strong A2 imo. I’ve now had 5 different Lao teachers, 4 of which were from Vientiane. They aren’t really more difficult to talk to than Isaan speakers now, and the nice thing is they code switch with Thai much less. I’ve learned a few more “pure” Lao words, which I make zero effort to memorize, haha. But they are still pretty rare. I got a strange complaint from my Lao teacher today. She said Thai speakers that take classes from her can read Lao, so she was a bit flustered that I wanted her to use Thai script. She made it sound like it’s pretty easy, and now I feel a bit guilty for not learning it. I’m sticking to my guns though, because I feel reading Lao script would take away time from reading/writing the way most Isaan speakers read/write.

I’ve been reading my homegrown subtitles consistently, and that’s helping me improve. It’s also prompted me to take a deeper look at the 5 tone conversion rules I mentioned in a previous post, and jumping right to the conclusion, here is my revised tone conversion table:

How did I get there? Glad you asked. Hearing quite a few native speakers say มา, instead of the expected ม้า, made me decide to do a survey of one video from each of the represented provinces on my channel. There are five. I wanted to confirm that the conversions I was using were correct. I also decided to note any surprising tones produced. This is in no way exhaustive; I only listened to a few minutes of each speaker. Nor is it scientific; just my single point best effort to recognize tones. But here is the data:

So 4 of my 5 rules seemed to be confirmed. I wrote out all the มา results because there was a lot of variation, and in the end decided that มา is as common as ม้า, so I’m going to treat it like it’s unchanging and stop intentionally converting it to a high tone. Cat’s tones were all over the place, and I wonder if it’s because she was practically whispering in the only video she made for us. I’ve decided not to consider her results. The “misc” observations are interesting. I think they just reflect the way that word is pronounced, either by that specific person or in that specific province. But I don’t feel like any of them merit a new, universal Isaan tone conversion rule because I didn’t find a convincing pattern. A minor point, but the other thing I decided to change in the table was using ข้าว instead of ขี้ as the model word for the first rule, because ข้าว means “rice” or “food” and is one of the most obvious clues to which language you are using. That and the fact that ขี้ means “poop” in isolation.

Here’s what happened. I was talking to Kikenyoy yesterday afternoon, and we both agreed that if I didn’t get out of my room more often in my last week here I might have some regrets. So last night around 8 o’clock I went on a bar tour. I was looking for a place that wasn’t too loud and had someone attractive to talk to. The first place was pretty good. I found a cute hostess from Udon (an Isaan province) and she really wanted to speak Isaan with me. I bought her a couple of drinks, but after about 30 min she told me she had a date later on, and I decided to take my leave. Right across the street there was young lady in a bikini who twisted my arm into buying her a drink. She told me she was from Burriram (also in Isaan) and I agreed. But after I bought the drink, she claimed she didn’t speak Isaan and she was serious. I don’t remember her reason, but I spoke Thai with her and left after she finished. Again, across the street, I saw someone who looked friendly and she turned out to be from Ubon (you guessed it, Isaan). And this was funny – she wanted me to stop speaking Isaan, so every Isaan word I said she yelled out the Thai word, and every non-cognate Thai word she said I yelled out the Isaan word we were laughing and having a good time, but it got old eventually and I left. On the way back to my condo, two persuasive individuals pulled me into a club where there certainly wasn’t any pole dancing going on. I kept them drinking, because they were both chatting me up in Isaan. Eventually I said goodbye, got home and crashed.

Today I took a 60 min lesson from a new teacher, from Maha Sarakam. It’s the same province as one of my favorite other Isaan teachers, and I’d clearly levelled up. I don’t know what had gotten into me, but my brain was definitely running on all eight cylinders (or is it four?). Then I remembered the previous night, and it struck me: Wow! I’m intermediate! After 32 lessons (27hrs total), I now feel comfortable using that label.

My learning spurt came to an end today, so here is a summary. In 2 months I went from zero to around B1. I spent about 200 hours, more if you count random conversations with locals. 29 hours of that was conversation classes with online teachers (ten 30min classes and twenty-four 60min classes). Hour 30 was supposed to be today, but my teacher cancelled last minute.

In this time I also had native speakers create 50 ten minute videos, with accurate soft subtitles, free for the world to use on youtube. The remaining are in work, and I won't stop until there are 100.

As mentioned before, I'm going to maintain this language. I think it will hold its own over the next six to nine months that I won't be in Thailand. But even if it doesn't, I now have all the resources and a solid method to fall back on when I'm actually back in Thailand. For these reasons, I think it would be difficult not to continue to improve over the years.

I now have two full days in Thailand with no scheduled classes of any kind. Time to take a mini vacation from my vacation.