Tonal or not to nal, that is the question...

Thai is a "tonal language" as most of south-east asian languages for that matter and about half of the world languages if I'm correct. This means that you'll have 5 different ways in Thai to pronounce the sound "Mai" for example. There is a middle tone, a low tone, a falling one, a high one and a rising one. The falling for example would sound like a complaint (as if you said: whyyyy… is that happening to meeee!!) and the rising tone sounds like a more proper question mark (why?). The Tones in Thai are not exactly easy but they are also far to be hard! Actually what makes Thai such an easy language beside its super-easy grammar (or lack of it) is its tonal form. Why? Because thanks to that most of highly used thai words are monosyllabic. Thus for each new word you'd have to learn there is only one sound and syllable instead of several ones as in Indonesian, for example, supposedly one of the easiest language out there (not tonal). Also The pronunciation is fairly simple and straightforward so as you try to say simple words most people will understand you and repeat them also in a comprehensive way what is much harder with vietnamese which is also a very easy language with, on the contrary, one of the hardest tones and pronunciation you could imagine!! After one month of daily study of the vietnamese language last january I could not get close to what I achieved within only 2 weeks and with much less effort in Thailand. Why? Because of 2 main reasons I suppose. Because my Vietnamese language method wasn't straightforward enough with its tedious 63 lessons and also because speaking to people was more challenging. Even when they could understand me and expected me to have a fairly good knowledge of the language I just couldn't understand much of what they answered back. Therefore I had very little practise and just spoke a couple of minutes a day hoping for a break-through in my understanding. I studied hard but hardly got any reward out of it. Obviously something was going quite wrong even though I thought at the time that everything was fine since I could definitely not expect to be able to communicate myself after one month, left alone 2 weeks. Well, as good I thought my method (Assimil, le vietnamien sans peine) was actually it wasn't. It could have been on the long run but most people have very little patience and if they don't get what they want quite instantly they won't stick around. A method has to be efficient right at the beginning or people won't use it! Now, of course, the tones and pronunciation made it harder too but my intuition tells me that with the right method even the hardest languages with the most incomprehensible/reproducible accents, sounds and tones can be pretty easily handled! It's all a question of organisation, on the paper/LCD screen and into the brain but we'll get back to that later...