Learning basic Thai is quite simple - you cover the basic food items, numbers and common touristy words. Things get difficult when you decide to read/write.
Working with the Thai government can be a bit of a pain - forms must be filled in Thai only.
Agree with the characters. Although it’s not super hard to learn (my non-Thai wife learnt the characters pretty quickly), I wish we officially have something like pinyin.
Fun fact: written Thai in Latin characters is unofficially called ‘karaoke’ [1].
Thai is an abuguida, descended from Brahmi just like most of the rest of the South and South-East Asian scripts. It's probably the one with the most additional stuff to consider, but fundamentally it's the same kind of script.
Polly: ?????????? ?????????? ????????????????
You: I don't speak Thai well. Can you speak more slowly and can you write in Latin script, please?
Polly: ?????????? ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????
I actually didn't know this word either, so it was good vocab. Thai's abugida is pretty complicated, but once you memorize the rules, there's not too many spelling exceptions, and a lot of words are pronounced about as as you'd expect.
If you're looking for something more phonetic possible as a stepping stone, Lao, despite having less content to consume, is much, much easier to learn where the abugidas look about the same if you squint; you could look at Lao as simplified Thai (with a 6th tone). Lao had a spelling reform recently that dropped all the duplicate letters for Pali/Sanskrit words, there's no implied vowel (and they change form less), there's no ??????? (??), and the final consonants are normalized to the sound it makes. Lao and Thai are asymmetrically intelligible where Lao people understand Thai but not the other way around. That said, the Northeastern Thai dialect, ?????, is almost identical with small dialectal differences. Grammatically they are the same so anything you learn in one will almost certainly transfer to the other with just a different vocabulary set for common words (to do, to work, I, you, man, woman, etc.).
It's so great to see people learning Thai! For both you and parent, if you haven't found this already, this website does a good job of giving accurate English definitions for Thai words, along with sample sentences from Thai sources: http://thai-language.com/id/133751 (this is the entry for '?????') There's also a mobile app, which is even easier to use than the site.
Single data point anecdote: an acquaintance from Kansas met and married a Thai woman there and they moved to Thailand. Unlikely that he would have previously ever considered learning Thai as a second language, but he's trying hard to learn it now.
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