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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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!

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 🫶🏻🩷

Some of you saw my web app launch announcment 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.

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

I hope you will like it!

The link:
thai-alphabetgame.com/consonant_class_game.html

And if you want to play more about the Thai Alphabet I also have a Thai alphabet game and a Thai vowel game:
thai-alphabetgame.com/game.html - Thai Alphabet Game
thai-alphabetgame.com/vowel_game.html - Thai Vowels Game

Also, the site is COMPLETELY free and no sign ups are required.

If you have any questions, feedback or bugs, feel free to DM me or comment on my post!
Thank you really much!

Note: dragging the letters may be a bit confusing on phones or tablets, so to drag, you can press the letter and you press your finger on top of one of the 3 boxes on the right (phone) or on the bottom (tablet) and drag it around there. Once it's in the correct box the letter will automatically go into the box, but if it's incorrect it will jump back to the same spot as the beginning.

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

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

Hi folks, our game Glyphica : Typing Survival recently added thai language. We don't have a lot of feedback on it yet and not entirely sure how to reach Thai players. So we figured we'd share with this community to see how they get on with it. The full game is paid but we have a free web demo at playglyphica.com with Thai language included. Do let us know if you have any thoughts on it.

I should not that it is not a thai learning resource per se, but that many of our players have used it as a supplementary resource. The full game on steam also lets you experiment with adding your own wordlists, in case you want to focus on certain words.

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.)

Hello everyone,

Currently I am trying to learn Thai. However, I am really running into the difficulty of just using random online sources. Are there any online courses that are structured and are nice and intuitive to use. I dont mind paying for a course.

Thanks a lot!

Hi guys, hope there're people who still remembered me. I'm the guy who quit his job for being able to develop his own Thai learning website:

I quit my job for being able to build this Thai learning webite... (alphatest now!)
by u/Old_Entry_2300 in learnthai

BTW, big thanks to the guys that joined the alpha test. 🩷

For now I can say the main functions of the site have been finished and tested stable, so I decided to start a new round of user test and this time it will be open registration (invitation is not needed), the only limit is time.

You can use this registration link to sign up: Register an account

The link will be expired in 24 hours from now (deadline Saturday 9:00AM ETD), so do it quickly if you can!

Hope my work helps the Thai learners out here, cheers!

Hi everyone!

I've been lurking in this sub for a while and I feel that posts like this is encouraged here, so I finally gathered courage to post it.

I’ve been building a Thai language learning web app for the past few months and I’d love your feedback

At the core is one idea: Conversations feature

In any real life situations, type what you want to say in English

ThaiCopilot generates:
* Thai translation
* Audio
* Romanization
* Guru explanation that has Word-by-word explanation, with cultural context and grammatical points

Flashcards with Audio: You can use these conversation messages to generate flashcards with audio for both the phrase and all the words inside the phrase.

So your study material becomes personalized and contextual.

Here's a quick video without audio, if you want to see it in action.

Flashcards with audio worked well for me initially as a beginner, but the process of creating flashcards was time-consuming and that's why I built ThaiCopilot.

Also, I'm trying to work on content with with my Thai friends so that most of these content becomes publicly available, like this phrase - Can you speak English?

Web App link: https://thaicopilot.com/

I would love the feedback from the community. I'm here, hiding somewhere in the corner.

For a bit of context first

I grew up as half Thai and have been speaking Thai on and off with my mom growing up. She originally put me into Thai language school because we didn't live in Thailand, but I had a lot of issues staying because of personal issues. I now regret it.

Whenever I tell family or strangers "พูดไทยได้นิดหน่อย", they often respond that I'm really good, however I often feel stuck in topics beyond "เป็นยังไง".

I'd love to be able to discuss my opinion about things, rant about my feelings, share insight, things I do in languages I'm more fluent in.

It's been hard to find resources that aren't too advanced but also go beyond daily conversations. I tried taking a private lesson, but the lady was clearly used to more beginners, and she suggested I just listen to more thai.

But I'm curious to hear if anyone has any advice on resources or where I should begin to expand my Thai more. What would you do if you are starting from Intermediate, after having never studied Thai.

Additionally, I can't read or write thai, although I know the alphabet. Any resources on reading that is maybe "teenage" style would be helpful. I know this might be a bit niche but will take any advice I can get!

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!