slice-of-thai.com → Thai Language → Other Websites for Learning Thai

Other Websites for Learning Thai

Last Update: October 2017

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• thai-language.com
• Women Learning Thai (and some men too)
• thai-notes.com
• thaivisa.com Expat Forums
• LEXiTRON Software Dictionary
• Royal Institute Dictionary (RID)
• thai2english.com Dictionary
• english-thai-dictionary.com
• Longdo Multilingual Thai Dictionary
• Thai 101 Blog
• SEAsite (NIU) Thai
• Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Language Courses
• The Paknam-iverse
• SEAlang and CRCL
• 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.

Women Learning Thai (and some men too)

Interesting blog by Catherine Wentworth with links to cheat sheets, anthems and poems decoded, interviews with successful Thai learners, cultural blog entries, and a good summary of other Thai-language sites and resources.

Most interestingly, includes the best resource list:

The mother of all lists of free Thai learning resources

And for more advanced learners:

Thai-Thai & Thai-English Study Resources

Unlike me, Catherine does a very good job of keeping her list up to date and chasing down bad/moved links.

thai-notes.com

thai-notes.com is a fairly new site with some cool technology for learning Thai:

• An online Thai-English dictionary that lets you look up individual words or bulk-translate Thai text word-for-word.
• A better front-end to the Royal Institute Thai-Thai dictionary
• A Thai-Thai Classifier Dictionary for finding the classifier for your specified noun
• Some Typing Training web apps to help you learn to type Thai
• A course about Reading Thai
• The new home of the Foreign Service Insitute Thai Language Course which was updated to modern standards by a huge group of volunteers

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. Be warned though that the thaivisa forums are full of bitter old trolls (less so for the language forum, fortunately).

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 app for Windows Desktop/Laptop computers that LEXiTRON offers, which you can do by choosing "English" on their site, creating an account using the menu at the left, then going to their Download page.

An even easier option is to use one of the many free or almost-free dictionary apps available for iOS and Android. Almost all of the Thai dictionary apps all use the LEXiTRON data, because it is free. The apps are legally required to disclose that their data comes from LEXiTRON, but many don't, which is quite dishonest. But you can usually recognize the LEXiTRON data quickly...

The issue with LEXiTRON is that while it is free and has about 80,000 English-to-Thai entries, 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 very blatant errors that relate to the designers' non-native understanding of English.

That is why you tend to see the same egregious errors both in mobile apps with built-in Thai dictionaries and also some websites with built-in Thai dictionaries: they are all using the same free dataset to avoid the multiple-person-year effort required to create a new dataset from scratch. LEXiTRON legally requires apps and websites using their dataset to mention LEXiTRON so you may find reference to it somewhere in the app/website.

This is the one thing that sets apart the Talking Thai-English-Thai Dictionary app for iOS, Android, and Windows that I made along with Paiboon Publishing. We designed our dataset from the ground up with the needs of the foreigner learning Thai in mind, and we invested person-years of labor in editing and enhancement.

Royal Institute Dictionary (RID)

The Royal Institute of Thailand publishes the authoritative Thai-Thai dictionary of the Thai language. For decades it has existed in paper form (1436 page, 600 baht, ISBN 974-9588-04-5). Until as late as 2016, the only digital version available (old RID website) was so horribly bug-ridden, with obsolete pre-Unicode technology and whole swathes of words missing and tons of typos (it seems they hired someone to re-type the dictionary!), that it was a shameful departure from the usual top-rate treatment that anything associated with the royal instutution gets in Thailand.

Fortunately, around 2016, with the help of the Thai government agency NECTEC, the RID came into the 20th century with:

• A proper website with search engine

• A mobile dictionary app with search capability:
  • for iOS (iPhone/iPad)
  • for Android phones and tablets

• A "Read and Write" app that helps with spelling and pronunciation (including Thai surnames):
  • for iOS (iPhone/iPad)
  • for Android phones and tablets

Even better, thai-notes.com did an improved web interface to RID 2011 here.

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 site also has a cool screen where you can paste a paragraph of Thai text and see a phase-by-phrase breakdown of the Thai in the text along with transcription.

The dictionary hosted at least up to February 2009 was based on LEXiTRON, but as of March 2010 seems to be based on a larger dataset, with pronunciation guides added.

Most cool of all was a USD $40 downloadable commercial Windows software dictionary with a greatly expanded version of the website feature set, but strangely as of September 2017 the software seems to have disappeared.

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). The data is based on LEXiTRON.

The site also hosts a Virtual Thai Keyboard for those who don't want to figure out Thai on their computer keyboard.

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.

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.

Although Rikker has not updated his blog since 2014, the archived posts still contain a lot of key insights on Thai language not seen anywhere else.

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.

Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Language Courses

There are a series of public-domain Thai (and Lao and Cambodian and ...) language courses, created by the US Government in 1970 but apparently still quite useful, that include not only extensive written material but also audio material.

These courses have taken on new life by the efforts of a fearless volunteer Glen D. Fellows, who digitized them onto fsi-language-courses.com in 2006, and then, when that website fell away, continued by another group of fearless volunteers including Rikker Dockum of Thai 101 and Catherine Wentworth of Women Learning Thai at:

https://www.livelingua.com/fsi-language-courses.php

After that work was published, there began a collaborative volunteer effort to add real Thai script to the materials (which currently only use romanized Thai), and to separate out the sound recordings into the individual dialogs and lessons that they go with. Rikker and Catherine are looking for volunteers to "help type out some of the Thai, proofread some of the English, or format some wiki pages." For the latest fruits of that labor, see:

http://thai-notes.com/FSITLC

For more information, see this post and this post.

The Paknam-iverse

The Paknam Web Network, an interlinked network of "family-friendly websites about Thailand" created by Richard Barrow, includes several sites useful to language learners, such as ThailandQA.com, a web forum with several sections on Thai language learning. As of around 2015 Richard took several of his other sites offline, but we hear he might bring them back at some point.

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. (Feb 2009 update: the CRCL papers site http://seasrc.th.net/paper/paper.htm is down, but here is a mirror copy).

The SEAlang Lab hosts several online language learning tools which CRCL has been developing over the last few years.

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:

• Tiger Press: websites, downloadable mp3/video publications, and a paper phrasebook from Aaron Handel:
  • Test your listening skills with the Thai Language Quiz
  • Learn the Five Thai Tones
  • Thai Phrasebook With Tones; HTML5 audio; runs on a smartphone, tablet, or computer

• thaiflashcards.com: free website with interactive consonant/digit flashcards that work offline too.

• Learn (Thai) with Oliver: commercial online Thai course with a free trial.

• Lingopolo: Hugh Prior tells us of his commercial online Thai course with a limited-time free trial. During the free trial you can view all vocagbulary and play all the recordings, and with full membership you can take all the online quizzes as well.

• Thai Language Hut: a Bangkok Thai language school with an online/Skype option.

• L-Lingo.com: Reader Traci reports:

  There's one I've found really useful that you might want to add, which is l-lingo.com. It's a completely unimpressive site for the most part—it looks like it belongs in a language lab from 1987, actually—but the gem is that it has thai spoken at a faster pace than that awful beginners thai that's spoken on most language-learning sites (e.g. "Sawat. Dii. Khaa! Khun. Chue. Arai. Kaa!" ACKKK!!), but still not at breakneck speed which I'm not up to yet either. *So* few resources at that level!

  The online version uses some kind of JavaScript emulator that was slow and buggy on my Firefox Windows computer, so you might possibly have better luck with the downloadable offline version.

• Learn Thai from a White Guy: blog with lots of guided translations of short passages and other word topics (thanks to Rikker of Thai 101 for reference).

• Fluent Forever Thai: Formerly called Tower of Babelfish. A page with some Thai learning links and their recommended method to learn any language.

• 60 Minutes to Learn the Thai Alphabet: According to several outside sources I've read, this downloadable, commerical ebook is an excellent way to learn the Thai alphabet. Apparently, the author's idea of choosing pictures which represent the shape of, and help one memorize, each Thai letter has been stolen more than once by other sites, so it must be good! In my original 2007 review of this ebook's website, I was immediately put off by the scammy, crass sales pitch (it was like a Ginsu Knife commercial), however that crassness has now been toned town signficantly and replaced with positive reviews, at least some of which seem legit.

• 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.

If you have or know another website that would be good for this page, please let me know.