I had a decent understanding of Thai, but that was many years ago and I've probably forgotten most of it. I'd probably get away with making myself understood, but would fail at understanding what was being said to me apart from the odd word. Learning individual words is very easy because like Chinese the words are mostly monosyllabic.
The difficulty lies with it being a tonal language. 5 different tones; high, low, rising, falling and flat. The word for rice = khao can mean several different things if the tone is wrong.
I had a go at learning Spanish a few years ago and as it stands my Spanish isn't bad, but I'm lazy and not getting to use it unless I'm on holiday leaves me pretty rusty.
Over the last couple of years I felt the urge to learn more about Romani.
The problem with Romani is that it's not a written language and never has been.
The language is passed on orally from generation to generation and because of this the language can have minor differences between Romany people around the world depending on what country they live in.
In other words, there are many dialects of Romani.
For example; Romani in England (Anglromani) has been reduced to a form of creole.
This makes learning what is left of the language quite easy because it's just a case of replacing certain English words with the Romani equivalent.
I already had a decent vocabulary of Angloromani passed down from my father and his father before him etc.
The version of Romani I'm most interested in at the moment is Kalderesh(sp?) Romani. A chosen dialect used to standardise the language in the hope of preserving Romani for future generations. This version is closer to the original than most others, although most of the words used are basically the same.
I'm seriously considering taking one of these courses sometime in the future.
ROMANI Project - Manchester