Andrea,

I notice that may hastily typed original response had quite a few errors in
it. Sorry.

I think that your Thai friend is lucky to have a friend like you. Still she
has to do most of the learning on her own. It is just less stressful that
way, and the listening is more intense.

One thing that I have found is that words are learned most easily from
meaningful contexts. A context, one that we find interesting, constitutes a
stickier connection for a word or phrase. I think it involves our episodic
memory. The more things we can associate with a word, the better. Even then,
words stick in our brains based on a timetable that we cannot control. Some
fall into place right away, and others resist all attempts to remember them.

Providing unsolicited "similar words" , or even unrelated sample sentences
of phrases, has never worked for me. I find them a distraction. I believe
you have to earn your words and phrases through lots of listening and
reading.

Good luck.




-- 
Steve Kaufmann
www.lingq.com
1-604-922-8514
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