All our Thai Basic Course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $396 and they no longer have the Textbook for Thai Volume I. We sell both Thai Volume I and II with both textbooks and our price is $19.95!

Here is a picture of our Thai Basic Course Cassettes that we mastered using the Tascam Pro Audio equipment below. Double click the images to see a detailed image.

Learn Thai Language

Language Experts agree, our courses are the most complete and thorough self-instructional language course available. Repetition, vocabulary, sentence structure are the building blocks our course utilizes to teach a language. Lots of repetition drills. Dialog drills. Pronunciation drills. Vocabulary. The audio material is from native speakers and the corresponding textbook is your guide. Our Methodology, Guided Imitation, sets the student on a path to a certified level of fluency. We no longer sell our courses in Volume I and Volume II, so there's no up sell for the next level. You will receive the entire course material, on DVD, for the lowest price we can afford to produce, $19.95. Our shipping cost is $5.45 for domestic shipping and $16.45 for international shipping, which is the exact price we pay the U.S. Postal Service to ship priority mail. We do not make money off of shipping, and ship priority mail because it is the fastest and least expensive way to ship. The DVD will play in both a PC or MAC, and the audio can easily be saved to an IPOD or other MP3 device. You will need Adobe Reader to access the PDF textbook.

Our Value Proposition

The Thai Basic Course Volume I and II, as you can see, sells for $330 from NTIS without the textbook for Volume I. NTIS is the United States printing service for audio/visual materials; however, they only sell it on audio cassette as you can see from our screen capture of their shopping cart. We purchased the material from NTIS, as evidenced by the screenshot provided of the original Thai Basic Course Audio Cassettes, and did the remastering work. We had the textbook professionally digitized into a PDF file. And then we spent countless hours remastering the cassette to a digital form, now we are providing this course to you for just 6% of the cost of original material. Only $19.95!

Our Quality Proposition: It's all about the Remastering!

We used Tascam Pro Audio equipment to do the initial digital remastering from cassette to compact disc. Once completed, we converted the compact discs into an uncompressed WAV file. We copied what would have been on Side B of the Cassettes, to the end of Side A, creating one continous file, saving again as a WAV file. We used audio software, like Nero and Audacity, to clean up the audio even more. This multi step process includes converting the mono file to stereo, normalizing the volume across the entire WAV file, removing "clicks and pops", doing a low frequency filter, then a high frequency filter, truncating silences to 3 seconds to ensure the audio is quick to begin and end without dead space, normalized the volume again, and outputting the file as another WAV file. We used an MP3 encoder to convert the WAV file to an MP3 file, and we tagged all files with Subject, Title, Copyright, Volume I, Volume II data.

What does all this mean?

The remastering process and filter work means that silence sounds like silence. And in this case, silence truly is golden. Our product is of unparalleled quality, and we can honestly make the claim that no one has spent more time making these courses sound as good as our courses sound. We have provided significant improvements to the sound quality versus the original masters, and even the material we were selling just a year ago, thanks to current technology. All you have to do is open our files in a sound editor and see that silence is a straight line, not wavy, and this means clarity.

About The Thai Basic Course

Thai Drills are recorded first for listening, then for familiarization through repetition, and finally for participation. During the participation step, when the student performs the required manipulation, his utterances are confirmed on the audio immediately following the space provided for his participation.

Thai Drills are generally in two groups in any unit: a) variation drills on pattern sentences, which provide opportunities for the student to develop flexibility in the use of patterns already memorized, and b) grammar drills, which are intended to provide practice for the student in the operation of the patterns explained in the immediately preceding grammar notes.

The purpose of the Thai Basic Course is to acquaint you with the significant features of the Thai sound system. 'Significant' , as used here refers to those features which distinguish words; for example, in English the words sit and set are distinguished only by the quality of the two vowels) therefore, we can say that vowel quality is significant in English (i.e. if you say sit instead of set, you may be misunderstood.) It is, therefore, important that you learn to hear and produce vowel quality. On the other hand, it doesn't matter whether you pronounce the vowel in hit long or short. You may find it a little harder to understand a Southerner who pronounces hit with a slightly longer vowel than you do, but you will not confuse it with heat, which has different vowel quality. We can see then that vowel quality is significant, but vowel length isn't in English.

The significant features of the Thai sound system referred to here relate to contrasts in pitch contour, length of vowels and diphthongs, aspiration of consonants, and syllable prominence.

In addition to the sound features referred to, you will be taught to read and write the special phonetic transcription which is used in the Thai Basic Course.

Learn Thai 1 - Greeting someone

Learn Thai 2 - Finding out someone's name

Learn Thai 3 - Identifying Objects

Learn Thai 4 - Establishing Identity and Ownership of Objects

Learn Thai 5 - Social Formula

Learn Thai 6 - Mr. Smith meets a Thai in the provinces

Learn Thai 7 - Mr. Smith meets a Thai in the provinces

Learn Thai 8 - Americans at work in Bangkok

Learn Thai 9 - Going to Don Muang to pick up a friend

Learn Thai 10 - Basic episode

Learn Thai 11 - At the language school

Learn Thai 12 - My family

Learn Thai 13 - Telling time

Learn Thai 14 - Directions

Learn Thai 15 - An Interview at Korat

Learn Thai 16 - Directions

Learn Thai 17 - Directions

Learn Thai 18 - An appointment

Learn Thai 19 - Directions to the bathroom

Learn Thai 20 - Basic Episode: Tambon Bangchak

Learn Thai 21 - Planning a trip to the floating market

Learn Thai 22 - An American contacts a Thai friend

Learn Thai 23 - Conversation about length of residence

Learn Thai 24 - Basic Episode, grammar drills, response drills

Learn Thai 25 - Making an Acquaintance

Learn Thai 26 - Discussion of wedding gifts

Learn Thai 27 - Sending for a taxi

Learn Thai 28 - Conversation with a Taxi driver

Learn Thai 29 - Going out to Eat

Learn Thai 30 - A visit to the hospital

Learn Thai 31 - Looking for a place to live

Learn Thai 32 - Renting a house

Learn Thai 33 - Renting a house

Learn Thai 34 - Renting a house

Learn Thai 35 - Review dialog

Learn Thai 36 - Buying clothing

Learn Thai 37 - Buying clothing a jewelry

Learn Thai 38 - Shopping for toilet articles

Learn Thai 39 - Buying fruit

Learn Thai 40 - Banking and shopping trip

About the Thai Language

Thai, formerly called "Siamese" is a member of the Tai family of languages which are spoken by an estimated 70 million people dispersed over a wide area of Asia, from northern Vietnam to northern India.

Thai, with nearly 50 million first-language speakers, is the most important language in the Tai family, which also includes Lao, Shan, and some 15 million speakers in southwestern China. Despite common structural features, even closely related Thai languages are often mutually unintelligible because of phonological and lexical differences. Thai speakers were once thought to have originated from China and migrated southwards, but today the border area between northern Vietnam and China's Guangxi province is regarded as a more likely origin.

Thai is the national language of Thailand. Distinct regional dialects of Thai are spoken in the north, northeast, and south of the country, but the language of the Central Region is regarded as the standard and is used both in schools and for official purposes throughout the country.

Thai is a tonal language, with the meaing of each syllable determined by the pitch at which it is pronounced. Standard Thai has five tones - mid, low, high, rising and falling. Thai has no noun or verb inflections. Thai has a complex pronoun system, which reflects gender, age, social status, the formality of the situation and the degree of intimacy between speakers. Much of the original Thai lexicon is monsyllabic.

Thai differs radically from English and other European languages in being a tone language. In tone languages the meaning of a syllable is determined by the pitch at which it is pronounced. The Thai sound system also includes a small number of consonant and vowel sounds which have no close equivalent in English.