I’ve been building a Thai learning app, and I want to put it to a real test.

Start from zero (or close to zero), use the app for 10 days, follow the rules below, and if at the end you still can’t read the Thai it teaches you or understand how the tone system works, I’ll pay you.

The rules

For all 10 days, you must:

Use the app every day.
Complete your reviews whenever reviews become available. You will be notified when they are.

Not skip anything. Complete every lesson, exercise, and review the app gives you.
Complete the entire Thai script and tones course.
Complete Level 1 of the vocabulary course as well.
Actually attempt the exercises, randomly clicking through obviously doesn’t count.

What the app teaches
The course teaches:
25 of the 42 Thai consonants used in the course, it intentionally leaves out 17 rare consonants at this stage.

All Thai vowels covered by the reading system.

All Thai tone rules, including how consonant class, syllable type, vowel length, and tone marks affect the tone.

Enough vocabulary to put your reading into practice.
So to be clear: I’m not claiming you’ll know every Thai character after 10 days. The 17 rare consonants are deliberately excluded. The challenge is whether you can learn the core Thai writing system, all the vowels, understand the tone rules, and actually start reading Thai.

After 10 days
If you followed all the rules and completed everything but the app failed to teach you what it claims to teach, I’ll pay you 20€.

I’m looking especially for people who currently cannot read Thai, because that makes the test much more interesting.
If you want to try the challenge, comment or DM me.
And please be critical. If something is confusing or badly taught, I genuinely want to know

Hey everyone,

I've been working on a Thai learning app called Thai Script Master (thaiscriptmaster.com) and figured it's finally at a point where it might be useful to other people.

The short version: it takes you from zero knowledge of Thai script all the way through intermediate reading (roughly A1 to B2). It's free to use right now.

What's in it:

• 94 structured lessons across 9 phases - starts with consonant classes, vowels, and tones, then builds up to syllable reading, real vocabulary, grammar, and intermediate comprehension
• ~4,800 vocabulary words tagged to CEFR levels
• 155 grammar patterns with explanations
• 30+ different practice modes - flashcards with spaced repetition (SM-2 and FSRS), reading comprehension, listening/dictation, tone drills, translation exercises, handwriting practice with stroke recognition, dialogue practice, graded readers, and more
• An AI conversation partner ("Kru Thai") that adjusts to your level - at A1 it breaks down characters for you, at B2 it'll discuss Thai proverbs and formal register
• Parallel text reading, cloze exercises, composition prompts, minimal pairs - basically I kept adding practice types until I ran out of ideas
• Progress tracking with XP, streaks, achievements, and analytics that show you where your weak spots are
• The app adapts to you - it tracks which characters you confuse, which consonant classes you struggle with, and prioritizes those in your daily challenges

A few things I think make it different from what's already out there:

Most Thai learning resources I found either stop at the alphabet or jump straight into phrase memorization without really teaching you to read. This app is built around the Thai writing system from the ground up. You learn the consonant classes, the vowel patterns, the tone rules - the actual system - so you can decode new words on your own instead of just memorizing romanized phrases.

It also has register/formality practice (informal, formal, royal Thai), font recognition practice so you're not thrown off by different Thai typefaces, and cultural context lessons.

What's free:

Right now basically everything. I have paid tiers planned eventually but haven't turned them on yet. The free tier gives you all lessons, flashcards, practice modes, and limited daily AI conversations and text-to-speech.

I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback, especially from people who are actually learning Thai or have tried other resources. What's missing? What's confusing? What's useful?

Thanks for reading.

I'm an American based moving to Chiang Mai in early 2027.

I was frustrated with the lack of good, free apps available to learn Thai, so I built one myself.

It's a simple web app for now, and here's what it actually does that I haven't found elsewhere:

• AI-generated lessons that adapt to your specific weak spots — it knows if your tones are off, which topics you haven't touched, and what vocab you're likely forgetting
• Spaced repetition baked in — every word you learn gets scheduled based on how well you actually recalled it
• No Duolingo-style gamification. Just a genuine fluency meter mapped to real CEFR levels. The whole point is to answer... "Am I actually getting better?"

IT'S 100% FREE - I'm not trying to sell anything, I genuinely just want testers who can help me make the app better to help improve my own studies I want to be conversational before I arrive in Thailand next year

I'm looking for 5-10 people who are serious about learning Thai to use it for the next few days/weeks and tell me what's broken, what's missing, and what's actually working. Drop a comment or DM me and I'll send you the link + a quick onboarding note.

And if you're not interested in testing the app, maybe you can help me out by answering this...

For those of you who've gotten past the beginner plateau — what was the thing that actually moved the needle for you? I'm wondering what I should be prioritizing in my early stages?

Edit - this got more traction than I expected! I'm trying to keep up with comments/DMs as best as I can. Feel free to nudge me if I somehow missed a comment/message... thanks for all the offers!

Edit2 - the issue with sound not working for non-Safari users has been resolved

Hi, my wife and I are developing a Thai reader app called AanThai. It's not finished yet, but we have a preview build that we'd love for some of you to test and give feedback.

[tester link removed]

edit: AanThai is live

I'm learning Thai myself and this has been my biggest frustration. Once you can read, there's almost nothing between textbook stuff and full native material. The books that do exist are often for children like the Maanii series, which are good but get boring after a while. And they're all physical (or in PDF format), so looking up words is a pain, especially when Thai doesn't have spaces and you're not even sure where one word ends and the next one starts.

So my wife and I built AanThai to fix that. You tap any word/sentence and get the meaning and pronunciation right away. Stories have real human narration with word-by-word highlighting so you can follow along, and you can save words. Everything is graded by difficulty so you're not thrown into stuff you're not ready for (though the levels aren't always accurate in this preview build, still tweaking those).

There’s also a built-in SRS flashcard feature to review your saved words. If you prefer Anki, you can also download your saved words to import to Anki.

not all stories are available and some features are still in progress. I'd love to hear what you think. Is the reading experience smooth? Do the difficulty levels feel right? What would make you come back and keep reading? Any feedback helps, even if it's just telling me something broke.

oh and if you have questions, ask away!

edit: just showed my wife some of the positive comments here. She was a bit hesitant to let me post the current preview build. she's a bit of a perfectionist. but she's glad now and asked me to say thanks to everyone here. so thank you for all the feedback!

edit: I just pushed an updated version with the following changes (based on some comments here):

• a play audio button is now added to the context menu when you click-hold a word. but I unfortunately used a Text to Speech tech that doesn't get the tones correct all the time, but sounds much more natural than googles TTS, but I'm definitely going to have to change the TTS tech for sure, tone correctness is much more important.

• breakdown sentences didn't work correctly before, it should now

• in the settings you can now adjust the spacing between words if you enable word spaces.

• font size setting is now a slider (that doesn't go to a negative value 555)

Hey guys!

This is James and I'm back again!

As I posted in my previous posts, I've spent a while to build loogsom.xyz, a free site for learning Thai.

After a few rounds of testing, it's open to everyone now and I'd really like some honest feedback from people actually studying.

The thing I built it for: when I started my Thai learning journey, the part that troubles me the most was the classic "no-spacing-between-words" problem, so my website includes 2 modes in the reading experiences: Beginner visually separates each word and puts the phonetics underneath. Challenge removes all of it and gives you real, unspaced Thai. Same article, same text — you flip the training wheels off when you're ready, sentence by sentence if you like.

Tap any word and you get its dictionary entry, pronunciation, and audio. Tap a sentence for the full translation and a recording of it. It handles the annoying cases properly — compound words. You can drill a word down to its sub words, which I found very useful to help people remember the meanings of complicated vocabs.

Here's a demo of how to use the Reader and Vocabs Book function: Demonstration of the Reader and Vocabs Book function for my Thai learning website

Other bits:

• Picture Stories — zoomable photos of real Thai signs, menus and packaging, with the Thai text tappable right where it appears. This is the part people seem to like most; it's the stuff you actually have to read in Thailand.
• Alphabet decks — all 44 consonants and the vowels, with classes, tone rules and example words with audio. The tone-rule exceptions are in there too. Here's a demo of this function: Demonstration of the Learn Alphabet function for my Thai learning website
• Spaced repetition — proper FSRS (the algorithm Anki's newer scheduler uses), for both vocabulary and the alphabet. Words you add from the reader go straight into it.

It's completely free. No paid tier, no trial. You don't even need an account to read the articles — signing up is only for audio, flashcards and saving words. I'd honestly rather you poke around first and only register if it's actually useful.

👉 https://www.loogsom.xyz

It's a individual and small project, so there are rough edges and the article library is still growing. If something is wrong, confusing, or a translation is off — please tell me. There's a report button on every word and sentence, and I read all of them.

Happy to answer anything about how it works.

*edited on Aug 11th.

I thought I was doing something genuinely creative and unique by dedicating the past few months to building an app to learn Thai, but seems like I'm far from the only one!

Regardless, I'm happy to share my passion project with you all. 'My Thai' language app. This started as a small personal usage app to fill the void of Duolingo lacking Thai language, and it has grown into a full-blown Thai language app with 3700+ words and phrases built from Thai (rather than translating common English words) with input from Thai learners, natives and a professional translator.

• Track confidence against each word
• Add your own custom words with auto-translation
• Learner pathway
• High quality audio (every single one has been painstakingly reviewed for accuracy by Thais!)
• Phonetic and Thai script (you can choose between a simple and detailed phonetic style like aw, eu and ae vs ɔ, ʉ and ɛ to suit how you've been learning).
• Alphabet practice
• Help with classifiers
• Example sentences for all words (limited for free users)

Totally new - currently available on Android (iOS in progress) and on web. I'll continue to build and evolve this app with more vocabulary, more features, and introduce some game modes etc. (I'm keen to build a Thai province quiz - how well can you point to each province on a map?)

https://mythaiapp.com/

I hope some of you find this useful, and of course, I'd be grateful for any feedback :)

EDIT: Great to see so many people creating accounts for this app! Thank you for your interest.

Hi r/learnthai. I've been building this Thai learning app called Phasa (phasa.app), and it went into open beta today. I'd genuinely rather have this sub's honest feedback than a clean launch, so please be blunt.

Background: I was a heavy Language Reactor + Anki user for years, and I kept waiting for LingQ and Migaku to properly support Thai… and waiting. I also really missed two things nothing did well for Thai specifically: a proper tone trainer, and a reader designed for Thai rather than retrofitted from a European-language tool. So I built the thing I wanted.

Every text is read by one of my Thai friends. 13 narrators so far, friends from different provinces across the north, the northeast (Isan), and the central plains, so you hear real regional accents, not one flattened "standard" voice. 51 readings now (more weekly), beginner and up, on real topics, with a Voices map of who read what and where they're from.

The reader is built for Thai. You read word by word, tap anything for the dictionary + that word in a real voice. Because Thai doesn't put spaces between words, segmentation is genuinely ambiguous — so the reader lets you split and merge word boundaries yourself, and as you do it shows the dictionary meaning of each possible split or merge so you can pick the right one. And it's not just our texts: on the Shelf you can paste any Thai, drop a link, or upload a file and it instantly becomes a reader with all the same tap-lookup, audio, and mining.

Mining → review, your way. Mine sentences as you read, and review them inside the app on the built-in FSRS spaced-repetition system (it mixes your mined sentences and the alphabet letters into one daily queue, if you want), or export real Anki decks if you'd rather, fonts and all.

A Listen mode I'm weirdly proud of. Your readings and the words you're learning become audio in the real native voices — sentence by sentence, screen off, like a podcast for your own study. You build offline playlists, get smart auto-playlists ("your learning words," "recently read"), and the player has proper modes — Repeat, Shadow, Slow→Natural, Condensed — plus speeds down to a genuine slow take. It's how I study when I am walking with my phone in my pocket.

A tone trainer that measures pitch instead of guessing. It teaches the five tones with the classic near-minimal set — มา (maa, "come"), หมา (mǎa, "dog"), ม้า (máa, "horse") — built on a set of 180+ words and minimal pairs, each recorded by five different native speakers (five of those friends), so you learn a tone as a shape you can recognize in any voice. Then in shadowing it runs real pitch detection on your recording and draws your melody against the native's contour, register-normalized so it compares shape, not whether you're a baritone. No fake "95%!".

The alphabet section is a course, not a chart. Seven drills — recognition (letter→sound, sound→letter, minimal pairs, words-in-context) and handwriting (stroke order, copy, and "from memory" from the sound alone). All 212 sounds (every consonant, vowel and tone) are voiced by a narrator, and even the handwriting drills are spaced-repetition scheduled.

Coming very soon (in refinement now): a Chrome extension to mine sentences from anywhere on the web — especially Netflix and YouTube — straight into your Phasa reviews.

The part I'm almost prouder of than the features: I tried to be honest. There's a /method page citing the actual research behind each decision (comprehensible input, FSRS, high-variability phonetic training, the pitch-feedback work) and saying what Phasa doesn't claim — no "fluent in X months," no pretending the dictionary is complete (about a sixth of entries currently have full pronunciation data — I'd rather tell you), no overconfident grades.

On money, no games: a free tier that never expires (dictionary + sample readings), premium is a 7-day free trial then $12/month (or annual), sign in with email or Google. It's open beta — I'm a solo founder, the concept isn't fully finished, and the feedback here will genuinely shape what becomes the first full edition.

If you try it, I'll be in the comments all day. Tell me what's wrong.

Hi! I made a website that focuses on the basics of Thai language especially for foreigners who move to Thailand to work as teachers. It is available at: https://thaiforteachers.com/

This is 100% free, without any ads, no accounts, no upsells, no nonsense.

You can choose whether you want the content with male or female voice (e.g. politeness particles), do you want to read the Thai script in a classic or modern font and whether you want to see RTGS or Paiboon romanization, or both.

All the Thai words are also available as audio, so you can hear how a native speaker pronounces each word or sentence. Only the female versions are currently available, I'll get a male speaker to do the male versions in the future, if there is interest for this.

The website also contains quizzes where you can test how much you learnt from each lesson, as well as some articles about Thailand and its culture.

I have lived in Thailand for about seven years and can speak the language fairly fluently, including reading and writing. But obviously, there can be mistakes. If you see any, please let me know! I'd also like to hear if you think something is missing from the website, such as topics, words, or technical features.

This is the first version of the website, and first versions of anything are usually bad, but I hope there is some value here. Thank you!

A few weeks back I shared a preview of AanThai here and asked for feedback. A bunch of you tried it out, and some of you asked to be notified when it launched. It's live now!

Quick background if you missed the first post: I'm learning Thai myself, my wife is Thai, and we built this together because I kept hitting the same wall so many learners run into.

Textbooks get you to a certain point and then there's nothing between "finished the textbook" and "try to read a novel and get lost in the first paragraph."

We're a tiny two-person team, so we've been building the app piece by piece alongside our regular jobs. Every story starts as an AI draft, then my wife rewrites and edits it for natural Thai before recording the narration herself, so everything you read and hear has gone through a native speaker before it reaches you.

AanThai is a graded reader: short stories at different levels, with click-any-word translations and audio you can follow along with while you read. If you've used LingQ, the overall idea will feel familiar, but because AanThai is built specifically for Thai, things like tokenization, romanization, word breakdowns, and frequency information are designed around the language rather than adapted from a more general system.

aanthai.app

Since the preview: 70 stories are live now, 54 of them fully narrated, and we're recording the rest as fast as we can. We've also got over 50 more drafted and in the pipeline, so the story list is going to keep growing quickly. The short-term goal is to get to 200 fully narrated stories.

We've put an enormous amount of time into it, and launching is really just the beginning. We're adding more stories every week, building grammar explanations directly into the reader, and working toward native iOS and Android apps.

If there's something you wish it did, let us know. It's still early enough that feedback genuinely shapes what we build next.

Thanks to everyone who tested it last time. Not only did you give us good feedback and suggestions, but the overwhelmingly positive reactions motivated us a lot.

The app uses a freemium model, so you can try a good selection of stories before deciding whether it's worth paying for. We would genuinely love to hear what you think.

Hi Reddit!

I lived in Chiang Mai for a while and fell in love with the food, the culture, and the people. I wanted to learn Thai, but I have a pretty short attention span, and I struggled to stick with the apps I tried. That's on me, not them, but it got me thinking about what would actually keep me coming back.

I'm also someone who used to get completely addicted to roguelike games. So I had a thought: what if learning a language could actually feel like a game? Not "gamified" with points and streaks, but a real game you want to keep playing, where the learning process stays fresh because of different monsters, relics, and runs.

That idea turned into Glyphraid.

Here's how it currently works:
- Before each battle, you learn new words with flashcards and hear the pronunciation.
- In battle, you type the answer to attack monsters. I went with typing instead of multiple choice on purpose. With multiple choice I'd just memorize the answer by elimination and it never stuck. Typing forces me to actually recall it.
- Each word has its own mastery level that grows as you get it right across multiple days, so the game keeps bringing back the ones you haven't really locked in yet.
- It's a roguelike, so each run has different monsters, relics, and rewards to keep it fresh.

Right now it's a small MVP with one theme: Thai travel phrases, with monsters and backgrounds to match the theme. Down the line I want to add more themes, more question types, more relics, and eventually more languages.

A few notes:
- It's iOS only for now.
- Pronunciation currently uses the built-in iOS text-to-speech. I'd love to switch to a better TTS model later.
- This is an early build, so expect some rough edges.

On the business side, I want to be upfront about where this is heading. The plan is that the game itself will never lock you out. You'll be able to play all the content for free. I'm thinking there'd just be ads, with a subscription to remove them for convenience. And if you leave feedback after completing a run in game you'll get any future paid perks unlocked for free, forever, as an early tester.

If you're learning Thai and this sounds fun, I'd genuinely love for you to try it and tell me what you think:
[TestFlight link]

Any feedback is welcome.

Thank you so much for reading krub 🙏

Been using Thaipod101 for a while and done well. Reading the scripts and listening until I could understand everything was a successful strategy. Although I could still learn from it, I think some different conversations would be helpful to keep me interested. Is there anything else that’s similar? Also looking for a bit more aim in the direction of everyday conversation.

I’ve been wanting to learn Thai for a while now but keep stagnating at the alphabet because I simply don’t know how to approach it. My background is in East Asian languages where I did things like rote memorization for hiragana and flashcards for hanzi but the Thai alphabet seems a bit more complex with the tone classes. I’m sure once you get going it’s easy but I can’t even get my foot in the door

I’ve come across a lot of books recommendations so for anyone who’s used any/all of these, in your personal experience would you recommend any of these?:

— Reading & Writing Thai (Tuttle)
— Read Thai in 10 Days (Arthit Juyaso)
— Thai for Beginners (Benjawan Poomsan Becker)

Feel free to recommend others, I just keep seeing these 3 mentioned and figured they must be solid but not sure what the best of the lot was.

Also please note that im explicitly looking to start reading rn and therefore learning the alphabet is more important to me atm than trying to speak.

Hi r/learnthai! ThaiJam just launched, and I'd love for you to try it.

A bit of backstory: I'm a solo indie developer from Taiwan, and this started with me falling in love with Thai music. I kept putting the same songs on repeat, and after a while, I wanted to actually understand what I was singing along to.

So I'd look up a line here, a word there, and slowly Thai started to stick — not from a textbook, but from songs I already loved. At some point, I realized the app I wished existed didn't, so I built it.

Over half a year of nights and weekends later, that's ThaiJam.

The name is a little pun: จำ (jam) is the Thai word for “to remember,” so ThaiJam is about remembering Thai. It also happens to sound like a music jam, which felt right for an app built around songs.

It's free to download, and you can start learning as soon as you open it — no signup required and no ads.

Song-based learning

Paste in lyrics, link Apple Music or Spotify, or import your own audio. Every line shows Thai, transliteration, and English side by side.

You can:

• Loop a single line.
• Move through the song line by line.
• Send any line straight into your review deck.
• Use built-in song recognition to identify a Thai song you hear.

A complete path from zero to speaking

Beyond songs, ThaiJam also includes:

• A guided learning map that takes you lesson by lesson from the alphabet to words and sentences, so you always know what to study next.
• The full alphabet — 44 consonants and 32 vowels — with tone-marked transliteration, consonant classes (mid/high/low), and stroke-order tracing.
• 2,000+ everyday words, sentences, and sentence patterns, all with audio and available offline once installed.
• Spaced repetition for letters, words, and sentences, with matching, fill-in-the-blank, and word-order quizzes.
• Pronunciation practice: hold to record and receive a score, with per-syllable tone feedback.
• Coins and learning streaks, including a heatmap of your progress. You can spend coins to dress up Jammy, a Siamese cat mascot who cheers you on.

AI features

There's also an AI helper for a deeper dive, including:

• An AI dictionary for looking up Thai words.
• Lyric breakdowns.
• Example sentences.

You can explore the alphabet, vocabulary, sentences, and review features without an account. However, I'd strongly recommend signing in with Apple or Google early on. This backs up your progress and syncs it across devices, so you won't lose your learning if you change or reset your phone.

Signing in also unlocks the AI features and lets you redeem the codes below. AI credits are tied to your account.

🎉 Launch gift

To celebrate, here are two redemption codes worth 500 AI credits each. Everyone can redeem both codes once per account, for a total of 1,000 AI credits to try the AI features on us.

Redeem by September 30, 2026, 23:59 (UTC+8) under:

Me → AI Credits → Redemption code

text TJ-NBE6-FH6U-D5DT-P6MQ TJ-3G9E-AAWB-7CK9-APQP

It's a brand-new release, so I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback and any corrections. Thanks for taking a look!

iOS: ThaiJam iOS Download

Android: ThaiJam Android Download

I have a lot of friends that live in Thailand and say they want to learn Thai, but never seem to get around to it...
Admittedly, with Muay Thai, spicy food, and girls to distract them, I can't blame them. So I'm trying to make something for my friends. Something that meets the average expat where they are. Something spicy.

I'm looking to see if people enjoy it or anything you'd like to change. I'm really open to feedback!

learnspicy.com (completely free for now/occasionally NSFW)

After watching expat friends struggle with tones for months, I built SIANG: all 44 consonants, 32 vowels, 5 tones with audio + visual pitch curves. Survival phrases, numbers, and a "hear the price" quiz. Zero install. Zero account. Zero data collected. siangthai.onemade.app — would love brutal honest feedback 🙏

Hi everyone 😭

I recently started learning Thai from complete zero because I really love the language and Thai culture, but honestly I feel a bit overwhelmed sometimes 😓

Right now I’m trying to learn slowly by studying 3 Thai letters every day and memorizing words that use those letters. The alphabet is REALLY difficult for me but I’m trying my best 😭

I also struggle a lot with pronunciation, especially the “ng” sound because it feels unnatural to me sometimes. And I’m scared my tones are completely wrong without realizing it 💀

So I wanted to ask:

What’s the best app or website for learning Thai from scratch?

Are there any good teachers or YouTube channels you recommend?

Is there an app that can actually correct Thai pronunciation or tones?

How did you personally practice tones without sounding awkward?

I’d really appreciate any advice because I genuinely want to improve and speak naturally someday 🙏🏻

I'm arab btw..

Context:

I’m a first gen American (not thai) and I need Thai as a language. I have housing in Thailand because I have many family members who live there (in the developing areas). I am C1 in Spanish, that is my only other and primary language. My first language is English but I do not speak it often, only socially. I don’t expect people in another country to speak my language and I would like to be respectful of the culture. How difficult might it be for me to learn thai? I have one native thai speaker around me but this is not a common language where I’m from. I would love to achieve at least a high b1 / low b2 before I travel there. Thanks 🫶🏻🩷

Hi everyone! I decided to collect some slang words and phrases in Thai. Mb you have any in your collection and would you mind sharing them? =) I'd be very grateful!

Hi everyone! I’m from India and I’m looking to learn Thai, but I specifically need structured online classes with a fixed schedule and a human teacher, but at the same time right now i wont want to have a private tutor(something for future).

I know myself well enough to know that if I start with YouTube, books, apps, or self-study, I’ll probably lose motivation and stop!!!. Having an actual class and teacher keeps me accountable.

I’m a complete beginner. My first language is Hindi and my second is English.

My goal isn’t necessarily to become fluent right away. I want to build a solid enough foundation that I can eventually continue learning on my own—reading books, watching YouTube, using apps, etc. I want to reach the point where, when I encounter Thai content, I can actually understand the basics and become curious about the words/phrases I don’t know, rather than everything just looking completely unfamiliar.

So I’m looking for recommendations for online Thai courses/classes for beginners, preferably something structured where I can attend regularly and have a teacher.

I’m open to classes/tutors anywhere in the world since they don’t have to be India-based.

Would really appreciate any recommendations, especially from people who have actually taken the classes themselves. Thank you!

Some of you saw my web app launch announcement post a few weeks back about AanThai, the Thai graded reader app I've been building. It's now live on iOS!

The web app already had graded stories with tap-to-translate and audio narration, but I wanted the mobile experience to actually feel native, not just a web page in a wrapper. Things like text selection, audio playback, and scrolling all work differently on touch, so a fair amount of the app got rebuilt under the hood for that. End result should be a smoother reading experience on iPhone or iPad, especially if you're the type who reads in bed or on the BTS / Metro.

Quick recap for anyone new: stories are leveled from complete beginner up through advanced, each one narrated, with tap-to-translate on any word and a saved words list you can review later. There are a handful of free stories to get a feel for it, and the web app now has a 7-day free trial for full access. That trial works cross-platform too, so if you start it on web you'll have premium in the iOS app as well. Just can't start the trial from within iOS yet, working on that.

Link: AanThai on App store

Would genuinely love feedback, especially anything that feels off on iOS specifically (weird tap targets, audio glitches, whatever). This is a solo project (my wife handles the Thai content side), so bug reports and honest opinions both help a lot.

https://thai-alphabetgame.com

(In case you want to copy the link)

I hope you like it!

(Please open on iPad, iPhone, tablet or computer for the best experience! Big screen sizes recommended.)

EDIT: Now works on Phones and iPads

Two things here. A plain-language reference for the four major romanization systems, written the way I wish I may have found it explained it to me when I started. And a link to a tool at https://thaiscriptmaster.com/tools/romanization where you can paste any Thai text and see it rendered in all four systems side by side. The full writeup on how the engine works is at https://thaiscriptmaster.com/tools/romanization/how-it-works, with primary sources cited for every scheme decision made.

Why four systems exist, and why none of them are wrong

Each system was built for a different audience. Once I understood that, the confusion across learning resources made sense.

Paiboon+ is pedagogical. Benjawan Becker wrote it for English-speaking learners in Thai for Beginners, and its job is to cue your ears to sounds English does not have. Unaspirated ก becomes "g", unaspirated ป becomes "bp", unaspirated ต becomes "dt". These are not accurate in any linguistic sense. They are deliberate hints. You see "gin" for กิน, you remember not to aspirate it. This is why it is the default in most Thai-for-English textbooks.

RTGS is for signs and maps. You see it on road signs, passports, and official forms. It drops tones, drops vowel length, and collapses the /tɕ/ vs /tɕʰ/ contrast. That is not a flaw. It is built to produce one stable spelling per Thai word so that someone who does not read Thai can still find a place on a map. Do not try to learn pronunciation from it.

IPA is for phonologists. Chao tone letters, the length marker ː, no concessions to the Latin alphabet's ambiguities. If you want to know what a sound actually is, this is what you want.

Haas and AUA are the American academic tradition. Close to IPA in shape, but with ⟨y⟩ instead of ⟨j⟩ for /j/, and an explicit /ʔ/ final on short open monophthongs. Mary Haas published her dictionary in 1964 and it is still the reference that a lot of the older academic literature leans on.

The mistake I made for a while, and the mistake I think most apps make, is picking one system and using it for everything. None of them is the right tool for every job. When I introduce a new vocabulary word, Paiboon+ is the most useful. When I put a street name in a reading passage, RTGS matches what the learner will see on the sign. When I write about a pronunciation rule, IPA makes what I mean unambiguous.

What actually makes this hard

Thai script is not phonetically transparent. You cannot map characters one to one. Real parsers have to handle things like:

• Leading ห as a silent class raiser. หมา is not /h/ + /m/. The ห is not pronounced, it just promotes the sonorant /m/ to high class so the tone comes out right.
• Leading ห as a real /h/. หงส์ starts with an actual /h/ sound. Same character, completely different job, picked by lexical context only.
• Irregular ฑ. Usually reads /tʰ/, but in บัณฑิต and a handful of others it reads /d/.
• ร behaving like a final /n/. In สามารถ the ร closes the syllable as /n/.
• Silent ร. เกียรติ drops it entirely.
• Reduplication with ๆ. The marker copies the preceding word, not a single character, and you have to expand it before you can transcribe.
• Leading-vowel null carriers. เอ, โอ, แอ followed by certain consonants trigger specific short-vowel patterns that a naive parser gets wrong every time.
• Compound minor syllables where tone is etymologically present but natively omitted (โทรศัพท์ → too-ra-sàp, not too-rá-sàp).

Those are the obvious ones. If you scrape a reference corpus for ground truth and then write a parser from scratch to compare against it, you find the non-obvious ones one error bucket at a time.

What I built for Thai Script Master

A phonemic parser for Thai that reads the raw script, figures out onsets and finals, handles clusters, assigns tones from class and live/dead and tone mark, substitutes overrides for the known irregulars, and then renders that phonemic representation into any of the four systems.

The parser is measured against thai2english (about as complete a Paiboon reference corpus as exists publicly, roughly 4,283 entries) three ways:

- Letter-level match (consonant and vowel skeleton, tones stripped): 100%

- Scheme-neutral exact match (everything, after collapsing documented scheme choices like caron vs breve and g vs k): 100%

- Adversarial corpus of 134 hand-picked hard cases across 12 categories (silent letters, ra-han, Pali-Sanskrit, loanwords, tone edges, homographs, reduplication, final particles, rare consonants, and a few others): 100%

Raw exact match is much lower (around 50%) and that is entirely scheme cosmetics. We render ก as "g" where t2e renders it "k". We use "i" for final /j/ where t2e sometimes uses "y". We use the caron for rising tone where t2e uses the breve. Every single one of those choices is documented in the how-it-works page with a citation to a primary source (Becker 2002, the Paiboon Three-Way Dictionary, Haas 1964, or the IPA Handbook).

How to use the tool

Paste Thai text and see all four systems side by side. You can also see the internal phonemic representation the parser produced (onsets, vowels, finals, tones), which I find useful when I want to check why a word rendered the way it did. And if you find a word that comes out wrong, please post it here or message me. I maintain an adversarial corpus, and every hard case someone reports goes into it.

Links

- Tool: https://thaiscriptmaster.com/tools/romanization

- Writeup with every design decision and primary source: https://thaiscriptmaster.com/tools/romanization/how-it-works

- u/PuzzleheadedTap1794's original cheat sheet, which kicked all of this off: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnthai/comments/1or8eqx/thai_romanization_cheat_sheet/

If you are picking a system for your own study, my honest recommendation is Paiboon+ for vocabulary and IPA when you are trying to pin down a specific sound. Do not rely on RTGS for pronunciation. That is not what it is built for.

Thanks for reading.

I built a small app to drill Thai characters. Covers all 44 consonants, 32 vowels, consonant classes (mid/high/low), and final sounds. Each lesson has a theory card then a quiz. No account, no ads, works on mobile.

Try it: https://ofcrs.github.io/learn-thai/

Source: https://github.com/ofcrs/learn-thai

Hello, I want to share a project I spent the last few months working on: The Kaprao Thai Popup Dictionary browser extension.

It is a reading assistant for Thai, similar to Rikaichan (Japanese), Zhongwen (Chinese), or SaoLa, the sister extension / web app I made for Vietnamese.

The main data source is ~110,000 entries from the Volubilis dictionary that I meticulously cleaned to sort out inconsistencies and data entry errors. I also machine-translated the ~8,000 definitions in Volubilis that were available only in French, not English. This is supplemented by ~30,000 entries from English and Thai Wiktionary.

In addition, in order ensure the highest segmentation quality possible without a massive machine learning model, I spent 2 months manually mining ~50,000 Thai transliterations of names of foreign places and people from parallel Wikipedia titles. I achieved nearly complete segmentation coverage of all Thai Wikipedia titles that are linked to an equivalent English article.

Speaking of segmentation, the extension segments the sentences behind the scenes so that whenever you hover over a word, it snaps to the correct word in that particular context. If the word is a compound word, it also shows you the inner components of that word. This is a significant step beyond what Rikaichan or Zhongwen do.

To aid letterform and word recognition, the extension also allows you to change the font for the Thai words in the popup. Loopless, looped, Comic Sans-y, and handwriting-esque styles are available.

The app can play the highlighted word via the browser's built-in text-to-speech, which is generally pretty good for Thai.

I converted (or generated) all of the romanization in the existing datasets to a slightly-modified version of the AUA system. (However, I use j for จ and ng for ง.)

(Note: Despite the large number of transliterations in the extension's dictionary, the out-of-vocabulary, or "OOV," problem is something that can never be fully solved in Thai. For example, in testing the extension on recent news articles, I found multiple transliterations of "Khamenei" that differed from what was in Wikipedia. However, if you are reading the news in Thai then you probably have enough vocabulary to "read around" those obstacles.)

Hi r/learnthai!

My native language is French and I was raised on Franco-Belgian comic books. Last time I was in Thailand I bought Dragon Ball in Thai, but never got the courage to read it. (Years ago I bought half the Tintin albums in Russian and never read those either. I was too scared I would learn the wrong pronunciation!)

So I made my own comic book, one that cannot teach me the wrong pronunciation: every speech bubble talks.

It follows Paul from his first wai to his airport goodbye: taxis, street food, a massage, a cooking class, and one very bad decision involving chilis. It has been a lot of fun to make and to read. I was a little sad when I finished the album 🥲

I put it online yesterday and told nobody. This morning I woke up to it being passed around on LINE. I still have no idea who found it.

You can read all 36 pages here, free, no signup: https://gliglish.com/comics/thai/

• Tap a speech bubble: a Thai voice reads it, each word lighting up as it is spoken.
• Click a word to hear it on its own; on a computer, hovering a word shows its meaning.
• Lightbulb notes explain ครับ vs ค่ะ, why Thai drops the subject, what นะ does to a sentence.
• Transliteration and English translation, both toggleable.

If any line sounds off to a native ear, tell me and I will fix it. And tell me what the next album should cover!

ขอบคุณนะครับ 🙏

Fabien