Just when you think you might be done with a word, it pops up on you again. In Part 2 (and don’t forget about Part 1) I thought I had covered all of the ground that ได้ /dâi/ has to offer; we learned about “can/be able to,” ”might be able to,” and a bunch of expressions.

But alas there is at least one more, and coverage of this very important utility word would be incomplete if not mentioned.

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Dear Diary...

My wife and I recently took a trip to see friends and family, which required a long car drive. The CD player wasn’t working, so we decided to spend some time working on my Thai language skills. She first gave me a few travel-related vocabulary words, quizzed me on them, and then told me to make up some sentences using the new words and related to our current travels.

I did pretty well for about a hour before I started to hit the brain overload level. (Practicing Thai while trying to navigate through multiple states using a GPS is not the easiest thing in the world, just so you know.) When we got finished our practice session I was feeling rather confident. I had done pretty well, had been luckily able to memorize the 20 or so vocabulary words my wife threw out at me, and I could finally speak some sentences that didn’t sound like a four year-old was speaking.

And then my wife said to me, “You should keep a journal.”

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Carabao - The Man

Some people suggest that the best way to learn a language is by listening, similar to the way a child learns a language: listening first, then mimicking and speaking, then reading, and then writing. There are many within the language-learning community who think listening above all is the best method. There are even a few who proffer that when taking on a new language you should do nothing but listen for upwards of 300 hours first, and then start to think about speaking, reading, and writing.

Me? I didn’t start that way, but many of the people I currently study with did and their speaking skills are much better than mine. Our teacher always tells us to “sing a song, sing a song.” I can relate to that notion since I’m a musician, and yet I find myself listening a lot less than analyzing and memorizing.

When I read an article called Learn Any Language By Treating it as Music in which the profiled polyglot — Susanna Zaraysky — suggests that we should put down the word and tone charts and lists and just listen the same way we listen to music, my interest piqued. Can I make more progress by doing less book work and more active listening?

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