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Our fees: Is four to six hundred baht an
hour reasonable?
Most
language school fees are very confusing. Don't
be confused by prices that turn out to
be for 40 minute "hours"! Or lessons that turn
out to
be group lessons, not individual lessons. Or
offer 150 baht-an-hour “instructors” who have no serious training in
Thai language
instruction, which takes a lot of experience to do effectively (Most
Thai
people just do not comprehend the “problem” non-Thai have with
tones and Thai
consonants - tones are just “natural” to the Thai).
But if you do the
arithmetic you will see that most of the
best Thai schools charge 400 to 600 baht per 60 minutes face-to- face
(individual) instructor time depending
on the qualifications and experience of the instructor.
This is about one third the cost in the US
and Europe.
Our fees for individual
lessons are competitively priced
depending on the lesson location, your time commitment, and your need
for
written and audio materials.
Almost all of our lessons
are 90 minutes of continuous
instruction. This is a serious "workout" but in our experience is the
most effective way to learn quickly.
Group? Out-of-office?
We also offer group
lessons at a lower rate per individual. If
you bring a friend or two, you
can effectively split the costs! Or keep in touch, we’ll let you know
as groups
form.
If you would like
instruction in your home or office, we
will propose a reasonable surcharge to cover our transport and travel
costs.
Typical fees?
Here
are some example proposals given in 2005 to typical
students, showing how we worked out the costs:
Mr. Takeshi
is a
serious Thai learner who wanted to learn to read and write Thai in two
90
minute evening lessons a week for twenty weeks, or 60 hours, at our
office next
to the skytrain station. He had studied with our founder Nim before and
he
insists on her personal instruction. Due to the large commitment we
were able
to offer him a discounted rate of 550 baht
per hour for her time, or 33,000 baht.
Mr. Smithies visits Thailand
from England
often and he wants an introductory course of Thai speaking, 20 lessons
(30
hours). He is happy to work with Naang, who has done this course many
times
during the year and a half she has worked with us and comes from the
same part
of Thailand
as
Mr. Smithies' fiance, so she can help him with Isan dialect. His fee is
18,000 baht for the course.
Scott and Noah are
California friends, first time in
Thailand, and want a get a crash course in elementary
Thai conversation (along with some useful
Thai insights for visiting gentlemen) and will share the cost of ten
lessons over
a couple of weeks. Both Nim and one of our other instructors work with
them to
give them exposure to a couple of styles of speaking, and we hold two
of the
lessons in one of our favorite local restaurants to help them order
and enjoy eating
local inexpensive food. This works out to 6500 baht each, about one
hundred sixty
dollars. They save more than that by "going local" in their
eating habits and
moving to a better but less expensive accomodation we found for them!
Mr Smithies also wants to
help his fiance Dang improve her English,
typing, and computer skills, and covers
the cost of his fiance visiting our school for 7.5 hours a week to work
with
our computer instructor Poo on various
basic PC skills such as email, MS Word, and Excel.
We charge
1500 baht a week for this service, and Dang is also
planning to join our
next open English group lesson.
So…..
To
sum it all up, you are
going to pay about 600 baht an hour for a top instructor anywhere, why
not do
it at an establishment with 20 years experience and stability, a steady
repeat client
list, a great location, where you can get good advice and unbiased help
on many aspects of your
Thai experience?
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