Core Philosophy: Muscles First, Meanings First

Last time, I shared the story of how in 2000 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, I grew frustrated with teachers telling learners “It’s just like that.”
That refusal to explain why is what drove me to design Cracking Thai Fundamentals in the first place.

At the heart of that design sits a simple philosophy that I still hold to today:

Languages are “Meaning Making Tools” — meaning-making first, with words as a secondary layer.

In fact, whether it’s playing the piano or writing a computer programme, the principle is the same: we use tools to communicate a story or realise a meaning we want to pass on (or receive).

In other words: the only real limit is your ability to use the right tools to communicate meaning. If you can assemble meanings and express them with your body, the words will follow.

Meaning Building Blocks — Thinking Outside Your Mother Tongue

Most language classes start with vocabulary lists. Learners memorise 20 words for fruit, 15 colours, 30 animals, and how to count... unless you’re learning Danish.

The problem? You end up with “words in drawers” — disconnected, sterile, and often impossible to recall when you actually need them.

To get learners over that hump, I started crafting what I call Meaning Building Blocks — a small set of high-frequency particles that form the backbone of meanings within a language.

For demonstration purposes, let’s use Thai.

Many learners may learn the following words as listed below:

ไป pai / มา maa (go / come)
ขึ้น khêun / ลง long (up / down)
ให้ hâi / รับ ráp (give / receive)
เอา ao / ส่ง sòng (take / send)

But to just translate words like this does the learner (and the language) an injustice. It cuts off a huge chunk of the Meaning Building potential of the language.

I created hand-signs and glyphs for these so learners could bypass English entirely. Rather than translating in their head, they could physically feel the block, snap it into place, and start building natural Thai sentences where mangled English concepts didn’t interfere with understanding.

Black and White — No “Pretty, Prettier, Prettiest”

As an English speaker, you may want to learn how to build the pattern:

Big → Bigger → BiggestPretty → Prettier → PrettiestSick → Sicker → Sickest

Thai doesn’t have these structures. Any attempt to get a straight answer from a Thai may lead to confusion, or the Thai simply saying anything to satisfy you so you stop asking — because they’ve never needed to explain it before.

In Thai (and other similar languages), you need to feel the innate blackness or whiteness of a word, or the negativeness or goodness.

Taking political correctness out of the equation for a moment:

Is pretty a black or white word?
Is terrible a black or white word?

Why does this matter?

Because if you want to say pretty → prettier, you can’t just add “-er” like in English.

The function of the word ขึ้น (khêun) doesn’t just mean up. It also carries the sense of growing, expanding, rising, ascending, inflating, and everything in between.

Likewise, ลง (long) carries the opposite sense: shrinking, reducing, deflating, descending, and so on.

As Building Blocks, attaching ขึ้น (khêun) to something “white” makes it grow whiter and whiter — or more and more positive:

Pretty สวย sǔay → Prettier สวยขึ้น sǔay khêun

But terrible is a “black” word — negative. You can’t say:

Terrible แย่ yâe → More Terrible แย่ขึ้น yâe khêun

That makes no sense. Instead, you’d say:

Terrible แย่ yâe → More Terrible แย่ลง yâe long
(Descending into an even more black state of terribleness.)

So rather than just learning:

ขึ้น khêun = up
ลง long = down

…we see that doing so lobotomises an entire function of the language and sets us up for confusion.

That’s why I developed hand-signs and glyphs — to get people’s minds out of their mother tongues.

Suddenly, learners weren’t trapped in “meaning prisons” dictated by their native language. They had the freedom to play, to create, to mean.

And this isn’t just about Thai. Every language has functions and dimensions that may not exist at all in the languages you already know. That means we need to install a new mindset when learning a language. Political correctness — and even “linguistic correctness” — need to be shelved, at least while learning.

Muscles Before Pitch

Another trap: treating tones as if they were musical notes on a staff. “Memorise this rising pitch. Memorise that falling one.”

The truth is: tones are throat and mouth actions first. Pitch is just the by-product.

A Thai speaker doesn’t think: “I must now raise my voice by a major third.”
They just do the action — a constriction, a release, a tightening, a lengthening.

So in CLF, we train the muscle memory. I built tools like the ToneBox and later, animated mouth diagrams to show learners exactly what to do. Pitch graphs and IPA are useful visual anchors, but the real fluency comes when the body learns the action.

Think of it like sport. You don’t learn tennis by reading diagrams of forehand angles. You get on the court, you swing, you feel it.

You cannot learn tones properly just by trying to match the plotted curve on a frequency graph or spectrogram. The contour may change drastically depending on the person, who they’re speaking to, or even their mood.

Tones are about muscles — not just emulating pitch.

Context Is King

The final piece of the triangle is exposure to the language in the wild. Not rote drills, not sterile exercises, but actual Thai media — TV, radio, YouTube, conversations overheard in taxis.

Learners start noticing how these Meaning Blocks and tone actions show up in the wild. That’s when the system really “installs” itself — when you see, hear, and feel it operating in real life.

The penny drops not in a classroom, but when you hear two people negotiating a taxi fare or joking with a street vendor, and suddenly the patterns are alive.

Why This Still Matters

This philosophy isn’t just about Thai. It’s about how we approach learning anything new:

Don’t start with lists. Start with building blocks of meaning.
Don’t obsess over theory. Train the muscles.
Don’t isolate practice. Immerse yourself in the real context.

Whether it’s languages, music, coding, or even AI — the pattern is the same:
Meaning first. Muscles first. Context always.

This is the second part of my journey from Cracking Thai Fundamentals to Cracking Language Fundamentals — and now to Cracking Intelligence.

Each post looks at the lessons I’ve learned over 25 years of building systems for learning, and how they apply not just to languages, but to education, culture, and AI.

Next time: I’ll dive into tones more deeply — why the myth of “pitch” has tripped up generations of learners, and how treating tones as physical actions changes everything.