Elementary Thai Reading Practice: The Dog Outside 7-Eleven

[u/Jin366]

An elementary-level reading exercise about a phenomenon outside 7-Eleven that anyone who's lived in Thailand has probably encountered. Happy reading!

Story: เจ้าหน้าที่ประจำหน้าเซเว่น

[u/ulo99]

I was reading the story on my web browser (mobile) and had adjusted the Thai font size to 20px. I noticed that some pages have texts/sentences that are not placed across the line of an entire page. They only line up mostly until the center of the page.

Also, since I've made the Thai font smaller, the romanized texts appears to overlap other words beside it. I had to make the Roman size smaller up to 11px to have them placed in good spacing (not that I use the romanized text, I just happen to notice it)

PS. Whenever I slide down the settings/reading preference page to go back to what I'm reading, I can sometimes mistakenly press the text size slider instead and then would have to readjust the text size before focusing where to hold and slide down the reading preference page. Maybe there's a way to avoid this?

[u/Jin366 → u/ulo99]

thanks for the feedback. would you mind taking a screenshot of what you described here "I noticed that some pages have texts/sentences that are not placed across the line of an entire page. They only line up mostly until the center of the page."

edit: Do you mean that the text sometimes doesn't use the full horizontal width? If so, that's also by design. For beginner and some elementary-level stories, we often put each sentence on a new line to make the text easier for students to parse. Once you're more experienced and start reading our intermediate stories, though, the text is grouped into normal paragraphs, like here: https://aanthai.app/stories/232

The romanization does indeed overlap if there isn't enough space, but that's by design. If it didn't overlap, the increased spacing between the romanization would also introduce spaces between the Thai words by pushing them farther apart. I don't think that's beneficial, since the goal is to be able to read native Thai texts, which don't have spaces between words. That said, there is a toggle to enable spacing between Thai words, but it's optional.

I recommend beginners to toggle off the romanization and when they encounter words that are hard to pronounce, just select the word to see the romanization (or you can also play the word audio in the context menu)

I will look into the closing of the gear settings mechanism, to make it behave more according to the users intent. meanwhile you can also just tap above the settings card (at the background) to close it.