I was able to pick up a lot of Thai during that period, but it was all through mimicking what I heard and witnessing when words were used. I still remembering stories behind most the words I learnt.

I remember when I was in the kitchen one day, a girl came over and I tried telling her there were no eggs. I knew the word for “no” and the word for “eggs”. When I told her, she nodded and said, “No /have/ eggs.” It’s incredible how quickly you can learn and understand the meaning of words like that… Body language also gets incredible far.

I have an issue with Koichi’s R tutorial. I’m a British English native speaker and there is minimal difference in the position I place my tongue in to say an L and a D.. We’re talking millimetres not centimetres. Quarter on an inch would be, what, 10mm/1cm? The more I think about it, the more I overengineer it in my execution, the harder it becomes to be absolutely sure, but I can honestly say that depending on how fast I speak, my tongue tends to hit the same spot for T, D and L – the spot slightly varies, but the T/D is never as far forward as he implies.