The Thai Language

One of the things I am doing to prepare for Thailand is learning a bit of the local language. Although English is spoken in major tourist areas like Bangkok, I will be living in a rural area where English speakers may not be as common.
Learning Thai presents several challenges. First, Thai has its own alphabet. This is not a major issue in and of itself (being a Classics major I learned the Greek alphabet), except when you look at the number of characters in the Thai alphabet. There are 44-46 consonant characters. Although most of the sounds made by these consonant characters occur in English, there is also the tricky "ng" sound which can start a word (in English "ng" only occurs at the end of a word, e.g. sing; try saying nguu (snake) to see what "ng" is like at the beginning of a word), and "bp" and "dt" which are intermediaries between b and p, and d and t, respectively. Then add 20+ vowel characters, which are short or long, and can be written on either side, both sides, above, or below the consonant to which they refer . . . which is almost enough intimidation to put you off learning Thai entirely! Plus, everyone transliterates Thai differently into Arabic characters, making it hard to learn from websites/books that don't use the same transliteration system.
Another challenge to learning Thai is that the language is tonal, like Chinese. A syllable may be pronounced in one of five tones: middle, high, low, rising (like making a sentence a question in English), or falling (starting high and then going to low). Just as changing the vowel length can change the meaning of the word, changing the tone changes the meaning of a word. For example, you wouldn't want to confuse bpuu (middle; "crab") with bpuu (low; "grandfather"), unless you had a crabby grandfather with a sense of humor. Although there are certain accent marks to indicate tone explicitly for some words, sometimes you have to figure out the tone via vowel and consonant rules (I am not really at this stage yet).
Many of you have expressed an interest in visiting me in Thailand, so why not learn some Thai? Check out http://www.learningthai.com/speak_thai.html
for survival phrases, like mai mee dtung ("I don't have any money") and mai ow phet ("I don't want spicy"). http://www.learningthai.com/speak_thai.html
A native speaker will even say it for you so you can hear the tones! : )