2000 at the FCCT: Why “It’s Just Like That” Made Me Angry

Back in 2000 I was approached by members of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand.
They were journalists, diplomats, NGO and UN workers – people who needed Thai not as a hobby, but as a tool to survive in their work from day one.

The problem was always the same. They had started with teachers, but most had given up.

Why? Because every time they asked the why questions – Why does this word take that tone? Why is it written this way? Why do you say it like that? – the answer they heard was either:

• "You don’t need to know that."
• or the even more deflating: "It’s just like that."

Those four words are what spurred me to cobble together what became Cracking Thai Fundamentals.

I couldn’t accept that an entire language could be taught without giving learners the keys to unlock the system behind it.

Installing a Thai Operating System

Because of my background – part Fijian Indian, learning Sanskrit and Hindi, and also speaking Indonesian, dialects and Chinese dialects like Cantonese – I could see immediately that Thai wasn’t arbitrary at all.

The Thai writing system was very familiar - an Indic abugida in disguise. I already knew tonal languages like Chinese, but when i saw the Thai tone system, I realised the ingenious way that it mapped perfectly to the Indic abugida (map of the mouth writing system) and those two seemingly disparate systems I already knew - tones and Sanskrit writing, actually were united in Thai. Once you understood how the consonant classes were "baked in" to the script, the so-called mysteries of Thai pronunciation weren’t mysterious at all. As I dove further down the rabbit hole, I realised that up until recently, Chinese Dictionaries for hundreds of years, had been using a similar Sanskrit mapped system to display words in a similar way that Thai does called 'Qieyun' (切韻).

So I set about creating a programme that didn’t just hand over lists of words, but instead installed a Thai Operating System for the Mind.

• Show the structure of the script as a map of the mouth.
• Treat tones as throat and mouth actions, not abstract pitch lines.
• Build "meaning blocks" that could be snapped together into real Thai, rather than parroting set phrases. (Also knowing Sign Language, I developed hand signs for these to help short-circuit learners' mother tongue).

It worked. People who had been lost in the swamp of "It’s just like that" suddenly had the lights switched on.

Why This Still Matters

What struck me then – and still strikes me today – is how often education hides behind the same four words.

Not just in languages, but across subjects, across cultures.

"It’s just like that" is what we say when we’ve stopped asking why.

It’s what we say when the system is more interested in compliance than comprehension.

But learners know when they’re being fobbed off. Some give up. Others, go digging.

The Seed of a Larger Journey

That first course for the FCCT was eight sessions long, and I delivered it a couple of times a year face-to-face for many years. It set me on a journey that’s now stretched over two decades – through books, workshops, tools, and eventually into the system I’ve been building these past years.

But the heart of it is still the same:

• Respect the learner’s questions.
• Expose the underlying system.
• Show the bridges between what they already know and what they’re trying to learn.

Those journalists didn’t need Thai to be easy. They needed it to be explainable.

And that’s the part I still refuse to compromise on.

This is the first in a series of reflections on my 25-year journey from Cracking Thai Fundamentals to what has now become Cracking Language Fundamentals. Each post looks at a different corner of the journey – tools, education, AI, and the questions we should be asking along the way.