I totally agree; the methodology you use to learn something is not near as important as the motivation you have to learn it.

In retrospect I think learned thai out of spite;
Firstly: I got sick of foreigners, who'd been here since Hector was a pup telling me thai was too hard to learn.
Secondly: after being here for a while it became apparent these people ain't the sharpest tools in the proverbial shed. I knew if they could speak/understand read/write thai so could I, if I wanted to.

Unfortunately I hafta totally disagree with your premise about the tones. Any speaker of english uses all five tones that thai has. In fact, we use them almost every time we speak. In english we use tones to impart emotional value to what's being said, where thai uses tones to delineate words.

It's not that foreign learners of thai can't hear the tones. It's that they are listening for the tones for the wrong reasons. Their ears are programmed to hear tones for emotional value to what's being said, NOT to 'hear' different words. It takes time to re-program your ears to listen for the tones for the right reason, but it is NOT beyond the ability of 99.99% of the foreigners here.

Face it, IF you live here, there's no such thing as a minimal ROI.. For christ's sake you live in and amongst almost 70+ MILLION people who speak thai day in day out!

While I agree that this language is sort of a one trick pony, seeing as this is the only place it's spoken or used; any proficient thai speaker reader can find pretty regular work outside this country as a translator IF you look around. You'd be surprised how many thaiz live abroad yet can't speak engrish for shit.

I certainly didn't mean to boast about my half-assed thai ability. I go out of the way to say, it's coarse, it's got a mid-western american hill-billy accent, it's poorly structured and it sounds about as un-thai as a foreigner could sound speaking thai..

I only meant, if I can do it, anyone who wants to can too.

Sorry if what I wrote sounded condescending, it was not meant that way. The last thing I wanna do is dissuade people from learning thai.