slice-of-thai.com → Thai Language → Other Websites for Learning Thai
Other Websites for Learning Thai
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- thai-language.com
- The Paknam-iverse
- LEXiTRON Software Dictionary
- thai2english.com Dictionary
- english-thai-dictionary.com
- SEAsite (NIU) Thai
- thaivisa.com Expat Forums
- Royal Institute Dictionary (RID)
- thai-software.com Dictionary and Program
- Longdo Multilingual Thai Dictionary
- SEAlang and CRCL
- Thai 101 Blog
- Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Language Courses
- Thai Language Summaries
- Other Sites
Introduction
On this page you will find a list of other websites that also help you learn Thai.If you have or know another website that would be good for this page, please let me know.
thai-language.com
Started by Glenn Slayden in the late 90s, the still-advertising-free thai-language.com hosts a stunning array of helpful pages:- reference documents including one of the most complete vowel/consonant charts.
- interactive lessons for learning Thai.
- a gigantic interactive, online dictionary which Glenn and his Thai friends have been building for years. The dictionary even includes sound clips of Thai words.
- uncensored and non-commercial forums which have consistently had the best and deepest discussions on Thai language issues from beginner to advanced.
TLC allows you to choose your preferred pronunciation guide for Thai words, just like we do.
The Paknam-iverse
The Paknam Web Network, a gigantic, interlinked network of "family friendly websites about Thailand" created by Richard Barrow, includes several sites useful to language learners:- LearningThai.com has a big collection of reading, listening, and speaking exercises and practice games.
- ThailandQA.com is a web forum with several sections on Thai language learning.
- ThaiForBeginners.com has a set of study aids and quizzes that go with the Paiboon Publishing books of the same name.
- SpokenThai.com is a repository of video and audio clips you can use to practice Thai, mostly from realistic sources like soap operas and news broadcasts.
- eThaiMusic.com dictionary: a small dictionary based on the needs of Karaoke? Interesting concept.
LEXiTRON Software Dictionary
More than a decade ago, the helpful Thai folks at NECTEC developed, and released into the public domain, a 53,000-word English-Thai dictionary and a 35,000-word Thai-English dictionary called LEXiTRON.You can access the dictionary online at the LEXiTRON website, but if you're going to be looking up more than a few words, it's a whole lot quicker and more pleasant to download the free, Java-based application that LEXiTRON offers for download here. Most people will want to download the one called "LEXiTRON 2.1 pre for Windows (.exe with Java Runtime Environment 1.5)."
Because LEXiTRON offers their data for free, many of the other Thai learning websites are partially or entirely based on the LEXiTRON data. That's why you tend to see the same errors and typos on different sites :)
The LEXiTRON data is very detailed but it was created by Thai-natives for Thai-natives. There is enough English that English-natives can also make use of the dictionary, but there is no pronunication guide for us English natives, and you will often find errors that relate to the designers' non-native understanding of English.
thai2english.com Dictionary
The sleek and functional thai2english.com hosts a friendly online Thai-English-Thai dictionary which, like our website, lets you choose which pronunciation guide system you want to use for Thai words.The dictionary hosted at least up to July 2008 is based on LEXiTRON, with a pronunciation guide added.
The site also promises a very tantalizing full-featured downloadable dictionary (a for-cost product based on new dictionary data), but as of July 2008, the site has been saying the dictionary will be released "in two weeks" for more than 6 months now! I hope it does get released because it looks great.
english-thai-dictionary.com
Another clean site (from a Swede apparently), english-thai-dictionary.com has an online, 83,000-word Thai-English dictionary that shows a Paiboon-like pronunciation guide for single words (not sample sentences). Not clear whether the data is based on LEXiTRON or something else.There is also a medium-activity online forum inviting discussions about Thai language and culture, as well as chat rooms and a cool Virtual Thai Keyboard for those who don't want to figure out Thai on their computer keyboard.
SEAsite (NIU) Thai
The sprawling SEAsite from Northern Illinois University contains resources for many south-east asian languages including Thai. SEAsite was one of the first online resources; some of the technology and pages are showing their age but they're still useful for study.To access the Thai resources, you click on the mysterious Left Door (why not the right?) and get a long list resources such as the famous maanii reader, flashcards, a picture dictionary, recently added cultural information on business Thai, and even an online dictionary independently developed by SEAsite.
thaivisa.com Expat Forums
There's a pretty good Thai Language Forum on the venerable thaivisa.com expat forum, including some long, helpful pinned threads at the top with learning resources.Royal Institute Dictionary (RID)
The Royal Institute of Thailand publishes the authoritative Thai-Thai dictionary of the Thai language. The dictionary is primarily used in paper form (1436 page, 600 baht, ISBN 974-9588-04-5), but there is a stunningly badly implemented RID website where you can access the data online too.Normally stuff associated with royalty in Thailand is really nicely done. It is shocking and shameful how bad a job they did of the website. In addition to the fact that it fails to use modern Unicode or encoding tags (forcing you to go to your browser's menus and say "View...Character Encoding...Thai" in order not to see garbage letters), giant swaths of hundreds of entries of the dictionary are simply missing from the online version, and many, many words contain egregious typos. It is clear that they hired someone to re-type the paper dictionary rather than just import their data, and did no editing whatsoever. Hopefully this will be addressed sometime soon. Rikker addresses some of the shortcomings in his blog post from Feb 2008.
thai-software.com Dictionary and Program
Doug Anderson of Bangok-based thai-software.com has spent years creating an online multilingual dictionary including not only lots of English and Thai, but even some words in Lao, Isaan, Burmese, and some minority languages.More recetly he produced the commercial SpeakEasy Thai CD-ROM with more than 5,000 images and 5,000 sound clips of Thai words.
Longdo Multilingual Thai Dictionary
The Longdo Thai-English-Japanese-German-French dictionary is an ambitious project still under active development, with an online web interface and even some browser plugins you can use to look up words you see on web pages.SEAlang and CRCL
Doug Cooper, who created the Bangkok-based Center for Research in Computational Linguistics (CRCL), has amassed many resources of interest to learners and linguists alike.There is a searchable online Thai-English dictionary that is based on the seminal work of the late Mary Haas, as well as some bilingual texts and searchable text corpora.
In particular, in the SEAlang archives you can read the full-text of some very old PhD theses about Thai grammar (Noss and Gedney) that are probably still to this day the most detailed and in-depth analyses of Thai.
There is also a set of extremely cool technical papers including an amazing paper about how Thais tell their letters apart in different fonts.
Thai 101 Blog
Rikker Dockum created the Thai 101 blog, which has lots of fun tidbits about the Thai language, including explanations of Thai Puns and other wordgames, reviews of Thai movies, more serious posts about the Royal Institute dictionary and its (lack of) progress on the web, as well as posts on advanced linguistic topics such as historical Thai.Rikker also created the Thai Video Transcripts page mentioned below.
Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Language Courses
The non-governmental site fsi-language-courses.com contains a collection of free, public-domain, complete languages coursese created by the US Foreign Service Institute decades ago (thanks to Rikker Dockum for the ref), including a Thai course with both written and audio materials!Thai Language Summaries
Some handy one-pagers mostly useful to linguists:Wikipedia page on Thai Language
Omniglot page on Thai Language
Some interesting papers:
Paper about Thai keyboard standards and how they came about. Thai politicians cannot resist interfering, not even in something as trivial as this!
Other Sites
Here's some other sites I haven't used so much:- langhub.com: Free mp3 audio and mp4 video files for learners of the Thai language.
- Thai Video Transcripts: a wiki site where people can work together to produce a transcription of any Thai-language YouTube video. This site hosts an initial implementation of this idea by Rikker Dockum, as he explains on his blog.
- TeachThai.com: Free Thai lessons from the Thai Ministry of Education. If it's government, it must be good.
- ThaiARC Thai Page: Free but kinda aging site, funded by NECTEC, with Thai Language historical info, images and soundfiles of the Thai letters, lists of Thai language school programs across the world, etc.
- thailanguage.org: A clean, new site that's just getting off the ground, from a Spanish creator, with short pieces on Thai grammar, phrases, slang, etc.
- siamdic.com: Thai-oriented "free" online Thai-English dic with incredibly annoying, intrusive advertising. It seems they are trying to drive you away with their ads.
- ITS4Thai.com: Commerical online thai language course where you get 40 free lessons for starters. Interesting idea; I haven't tried it.
- THAILEX Travel Dictionary: A commercial "illustrated trilingual reference guide on Thailand." Haven't tried it.
- 60 Minutes to Learn the Thai Alphabet: Scammy, crass sales pitch to get you to buy and download their ebook. It might be good—who knows?—but who wants to wade through a Ginsu Knife commerical to find out?
