My Thai language education. When I visited Thailand I studied at a local language school. That was a special school for me because the main point was to not use other languages, only Thai! The first things we were taught were vovels and consonants. Every one in the group had to repeat each one and make compounds of them. The second thing was taught were the tones. There are five tones in Thai language. After we reproduced all this musical tone pracrice with the teacher (music of sounding like a teacher) the most interesting part of the class began (smth ... begin/began). There was a lot of items at the tables so teacher just pointed to each one and said the word. That is pretty easy for simple words and looks like baby learning (gerund?) native languages just point and repeat. Next we began to practice (subject - we, begin to do smth...) more difficult things like relationship between items and people. (to much eggs in one bag...) Then we started describing (past cont.)items: color, size, belonging and so on. Here is a few examples: "This pen is mine", "This is his book", "That Jane's table" and etc. "Air outside(or there is) is hot", "inside is cool (or here is cool)". The most amazing part was a people relashinship and daily phrases. I still remember most of them. The most usefull was: "How to say this in Thai?", "What is this?", "Speak slowly please!" and "Repeat please!". Those magic phrases can easily improve your language if you are not in you country attempting to learn local language. In fact most of thai people were always excited when i was speaking thai with them. I think there are really proud to be THAI! p.s. Our teacher had a trick to let students overcome shyness and speak even if they affraid of mistakes. She said: "Speak mistakes - don't worry, all mistakes are thecher's, not your's". We can always correct our mistakes! Have a nice time learning new languages! I hope you will succeed!