JHicks

No idea about Vietnamese, but I was much, much better with Japanese. I feel that I'm a dumb regarding Thai. Japanese was much easier for me to catch words from speakers and repeat them about the same. It did not work for me with Thai. I'm always wrong, eventually gave up. I believe learning language is just like other things. Person to person it works differently and it is depends on different things + talent in language. It's probably going to be harder for a Westerner to pick up spoken Vietnamese than spoken Thai - the number of totally new sounds is about the same (I think

Not really - either you read the tones (using the tone rules), or you recognise the word and remember the tone without needing to use the tone rules. More realistically, you do both. If you didn't want to use the tone rules, you'd have to rely completely on recognising the words, but in order to learn them in the first place (complete with tones, obviously) you'd have to have some method of writing the tones down. In the long run I think it's easiest just to use the Thai method, and then you're back to learning the tone rules anyway. It's different for native speakers, because they absorbed mo