In my opinion, it looks worse and works worse than before. I really don’t understand why, instead of structured sentences and a coherent plan, they’re still messing about with random sentences.

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

Hello reddit, for the past 8+ months I've been tracking every minute I spent learning Thai language and just hit 1000h today. In fact I have quite a few insights and afterthoughts from this experience, and even though I tried it to make it concise it still turned out excessively long, but hey, human rambling is always better than ai slop isn't it? I hope this helps other people plan their own study, I've personally found progress reports like these very helpful (shoutout to u/whosdamike) Feel free to skip sections that you don't find interesting or just skim through the highlighted parts.

About me:

• 29F Polish, moved to Chiang Mai in April
• near zero prior knowledge of Thai
• no experience with tonal languages, some experience learning foreign languages, but in reality English is the only one I got to fluency. though i've never been nearly as serious about learning a language before.

My methodology has been quite simple - if I was doing an activity that included Thai practice I would count it towards the total time - whether it be tutored lessons, listening to content, Anki or just talking to Thai people. When I listened passively, I would usually add a multiplier like 0.5x or 0.33x, which is always a rough estimate, but my reason for tracking hours has been incentivising more study time, not being 100% accurate.

If you're looking for one of those "got fluent in x months" stories then I'll have to disappoint. At the same time I hope posting this won't undermine anyone's motivation. The hard pill to swallow is that Thai indeed does take a long time to learn. The good part is, as you long as you can consistently put in the hours, you'll see improvement every 50 or less. And just because i did it in under 9 months doesn't mean it can't be stretched into a longer period. In fact, I think you can get more bang for your buck staying consistent every day with 2-4 hours than working it up to 6-8 and dealing with cognitive fatigue. But my goal isn't to become fluent with the optimal amount of effort, instead it is to become fluent as soon as possible without burnout, because I wish to have valuable relationships with Thai people as soon as possible since I live here.

Rough breakdown of my study time -​I didn't track what I spent time on, so these are mostly guesstimated retrospectively:

• Listening/watching content- ~585 hours (mainly Comprehensible Thai and YouTube native content, but also Pimsleur, LingQ, Glossika, news, TV shows and tiktok)
• Anki -​ ~200 hours (this should have been much lower if I hadn't experimented with various decks, making my own cards and made the algorithm work for me way sooner)
• Preply​ classes - 90 hours
• IRL conversations with Thai people - 40? hours
• Reading (mostly books, a bit of LingQ) - 30? hours
• Texting (including asking ai to help me understand the message or to help me word/proofread my own message) - 25? hours
• Miscallaneous​ (handwriting, grammar, Stuart Jay Raj lectures, group classes that I dropped etc) - 20 hours
• Shadowing -​ 10 hours
  

Where I'm standing at today:

Vocabulary -​ I know around 2500 words including compound words. By know, I mean I can understand the meaning of word when reading and listening. I know how to pronounce them, but I don't know how to spell all of them in cases of characters where it doesn't affect the sound (e.g. if you ask me if a certain word is spelled with a ส​ or ษ, there's a high chance I won't know). I find that the number of words I can spell is growing at its own pace without conscious effort to memorise them, just by reading/texting. Btw going from 1500 to 2500 in the last three months gave me a huge comprehension boost when it comes to listening, getting to know the new vocab helped me fill out many of the blanks of the old vocab.

Speaking -​ my weakest suit. Although I'm able to sound all the sounds in isolation, it's the combination of them that defeats me. While I can build sentences I want to say with relative ease and sometimes have conversations on topics up to B1 level, pronouncing them is a whole different story. I still have to think about tones consciously unless I repeated a certain phrase tens of times. I will often catch myself straight away when sounding out the tone wrong. Some speakers will understand me easily on the first try, with others I'll need to repeat myself or rephrase, but still can get my point across rather consistently, for example when running errands like fixing a bike, doing paperwork, or at the doctor. For some reasons I still dread phone calls though 😬 A thing I noticed is the words would just flow more naturally during periods where I'd hang out with Thais more. When I go into periods of not conversing in Thai, the skill would go dormant, but I'd regain it rather quick when I get the chance to speak for a longer while again. I haven't been in a group conversation since around 600h mark so I can't comment on that, but I can imagine it would still be hard to follow and nearly impossible to participate.

Listening - more or less satisfied but pretty inconsistent. There's speakers whom I'll understand even when discussing rather complex topics, and there are times I will miss the most basic questions IRL. Hearing tones is tricky, it's like I can hear them and hardly ever confuse the words differing only by tone, but when I start thinking about it consciously I'll often identify the tone incorrect. I'm still having difficulty hearing vowel length, that's why I can't rely on listening as a way to acquire the vocabulary I haven't previously seen written.

Just to give you the idea of the stuff I usually listen to:

https://youtu.be/rN8eV2c6x3o?si=2XtvpWPGwZKU9uvF (probably around 85%-90% comprehension)

https://youtu.be/6MV-Xs6nseg?si=H4SKwJDs__emhqHE (70%-75%)

Comprehensible​ Input Intermediate 2/Advanced (varies greatly depending on the video) https://www.trueid.net/watch/th-en/series/qzDWlk124Pb3/pnMv7K9o5D52/Lv7YE2XA41pj/Y85WVNwmX90o (Japanese TV show with a Thai dub - I find foreign tv shows easier to understand than native Thai shows, but I'd like to transition to Thai content eventually​- comprehension around 70%)

TNN news -​this is a tricky one, I'm bombarded with words I know but my comprehension speed isn't quite there so I only catch every 5th sentence fully, but I can still infer the meaning from key words

Reading - feel like this is my strongest skill. I'm currently halfway through the Thai translation of Eat That Frog and I'm looking up 10-15 words per page, decreasing as I progress through the book. A full page of text takes me like 10-15 mins to read including checking up all vocab and unknown phrases/grammar. I can read modern fonts pretty consistently, albeit slower, but it only happened when I finally learned to handwrite the characters​ (around 750h mark LOL) Before that many modern fonts looked like a stroke to me. I'll sometimes get a bit confused about the tone of the syllable and will need to think about it consciously or look for a similar syllable in my head but most syllables are automatic at this point when I read. I've been reading children's stories for a while and honestly I could have moved on to easy adult non-fiction sooner. Children's stories will often contain words that aren't really used in daily life that often, like semi-obscure animal and plant names. while an easy self-help book will be filled with words I can actively use during my next conversation. But in the end the order of obtaining vocab matter that much, since at this level I'll need to know almost all of the words I encounter if I'm aiming for fluency. One is just slightly more optimal (and fun) than the other. My subvocalisation got a lot better than it was when I first started reading stories around 600hr mark, and higher reading speed has made it way more enjoyable, so I'm expecting to spend more time reading in the following months.

Writing - better than speaking but I'm not focusing on it too much outside of text messages. My handwriting is slow, but I have no desire to practice it any further.

What did I do right and what would have I done different?

The good:

• Tracking hours. What started as a method to keep myself accountable and be able to plan my study effectively ended up being a dopamine spike everytime I added a new entry. Making me lowkey addicted to studying 5555 Some people might find tracking every single minute excessive, but as long as I accepted that there will be guesstimates here and there and this is meant to motivate me, not to reflect reality 1:1, it has been a source of satisfaction and a motivator to do more. I also have a weekly goal of 35 hours, when I don't hit it nothing happens. Obviously my motivation hasn't been unshaken every day, oftentimes I had to battle self-doubt, low self-esteem and frustration, especially after an unsatisfactory exchange with a native. But then I remembered the only way out is through and something I read that stuck with me: "hours of study is the single most reliable predictor of language proficiency"
  
• Mixing focused vocabulary study with input since basically day 1. The way I see it, input alone would be highly ineffective as a means of learning vocab, especially with a complex sound system like Thai that my ears haven't fully cracked 1000 hours later. On the other hand, vocab learned in isolation is useless, and consuming input with frontloaded vocab​ helped me provide necessary context for the newly learned words. It was a very common experience for me to learn a seemingly new word in Anki and be surprised how often I encounter it naturally, finding myself wonder how I could have not noticed it earlier. Plus, the more vocab I learn, the more I get out of every hour of input. Listening to content feels like a massive vocab review at times. Getting my vocab count from 1500 to 2500 has done wonders for my comprehension of harder content (for those of you that follow CI Thai - it made me advance from beginner 3 to intermediate 2) and made my finally reach the sweet spot where I can play native videoessays and be genuinely interested in what's being said
  
• Mixing the methods of study and sources of input has been great for being able to study more without boredom - at the beginning of the year I've been relying mostly on Comprehensible Thai + Anki and it was tedious to say the least. Now I have so many activities I can swap between it's much easier to get the hours in.
  
• A bit of a hot take here, but I'm glad Ive been using autocorrection since the first day I started texting in Thai. I was lowkey worried it would make me too heavily reliant on it and I wouldn't be able to spell words without it. In reality, with enough exposure I've been learning the spelling anyway at its own pace, while in the meantime I was able to enjoy chatting with Thai people much earlier than I would otherwise had (looking up every word I type doesn't fit my definition of enjoyment btw)
  

Not so good/would have done different:

• I wish I started shadowing much earlier than around 800hr mark. The way I do it these days is I record myself repeat a sentence after either a native speaker or AI as long as the pronunciation is good. I then send it to my tutor along with the transcription and she spots the awkward parts. We don't talk nearly enough about how long it takes to train the mouth to speak Thai properly. Without hearing recording of your own voice, and there without a native speaker guidance most people won't be able to tell what sounds off and why it sounds off. Honestly, since I have been speaking from day 1 I could have as well started shadowing from day 1. How I do shadowing is recording myself speak after listening to a recording and I don't know how some people manage to do that in real time, I couldn't even do that in my native language.
• Relying on transcription/information on the tone of the each syllable when learning new vocab. I should have bitten the bullet and kept spelling + audio as the only info on the anki card I was studying. This would have made everything faster: reading, understanding tone rules and hearing tones. The vocab I was learning was from a premade deck so I didn't give it much thought at the time.
  
• Consuming content that was too easy. I was aiming for the 80%-95% comprehension rate but since I was learning vocab separately I could have gone much lower and reaped larger benefits. I do recognise that hearing simple structures tens-hundreds of times is also important and is the only way they become natural. But I think there are more effective ways to achieve that that watching CI content that's spoken too slowly and I don't really find challenging enough to interest me. These structures will appear in more difficult content anyway, so don't be scared to push the comprehension down to levels like 50%, 40% or even 20% at times. You can still make much more progress, especially if you know the words used but struggle to make sense of them. That being said, easy stuff is totally fine to listen to if you just feel like chilling or you're kinda preoccupied with something else.
  
• Not​ taking enough breaks. I like the physical exercise analogy, although a brain doesn't need a rest day after every workout like other muscles do, memory consolidation is a real phenomenon and taking a break not only healthy but has proved to facilitate my progress and make me feel unstuck. I usually only do Anki reviews and shadowing on rest days, around an hour total. If external circumstances don't force me to take a break I'll do something like a planned 2-day break every two weeks. This is highly personal and depends on how much you study, but also how you feel about studying, people prone to burnouts will probably need to take breaks more often. I personally take breaks because of cofnitive fatigue mostly, studying too much can impact my ability to relax and cause symptoms like racing thoughts or difficulty sleeping.
  

What's next? My original plan has been reaching B2 by the end of the year. I'm aiming for 500 more hours by that time and I'm confident my reading skill will get there - I'm excited to have two novels lined up after I finish the current book! Listening will be more of a challenge, unless I make some sort of breakthrough - although I'm making progress on understanding clear speech, natural/everyday speech or dialogues can be hard to understand, e. g. when watching Thai dub anime or a Thai drama my comprehension is super low. I'm planning to incorporate the transcription exercise to my routine - that is, writing/typing out what I hear and reviewing. I'll keep practicing shadowing every day for now, my biggest issue with speaking is pronunciation, not sentence building. I believe sentence building and spontaneity will automatically follow my input skills and through living in Thailand I have plenty of chance to practice those, so I'm probably not going to dedicate deliberate effort to it for now. That being said,​ I'll be happy with consistent B1 speaking by the end of the year. I'm not willing to sacrifice my reading time for the sake of speaking practice for the simple fact that I enjoy reading in Thai - and there's only so much speaking I can do in a day without my mouth getting tired anyway. Starting next year I'm hoping to come back to studying Japanese so I'd like my Thai to be at the level where I can work on both without confusing one with the other by then. Also next year my Thai gf is likely going to move in with me, and I'm hoping my Thai would be decent enough that we won't default to English 80% of the time like we do now (sadly her English is pretty good /hj).

As I mentioned, getting the hours in is much easier once I can consume input I enjoy, so even though there's a lot of work I need to do to be satisfied with my level, I feel like the hardest part of the grind is behind me. The progress moving forward will certainly slow down, but as the number of activities I can semi-comfortably do grows, it often doesn't feel like study anymore. My final goal in the hour tracking app has been set to 3000 hours but I honestly can't tell when I'll be satisfied with my progress enough to stop tracking. Might as well be 2500 or 4000. That being said getting into this thought I'll be further at the 1000hr mark, so I could as well be overshooting into the future. But it doesn't really matter, since I'm loving the process 😊

Thank​ you for staying with me till the end of the post! Feel free to ask about stuff I didn't mention, feel free to critique my routine and if you have any suggestions for me moving forward, feel free to drop them too! See you in December at 1500 ❤️

Hi! I’m a 29M living in Bangkok, looking to make friends with native English or Japanese speakers to practice conversational speaking. I’d be more than happy to help you with Thai in return!

I recently took the IELTS and got a 7.5 overall, but my speaking was a 6.0 and writing was 6.5. I really want to focus on improving my spoken English and building confidence in conversation. Also, I took the GRE back in the day and got a 159 (mostly thanks to the math part!). It's been a long time though, and I remember running out of time and not being able to complete the writing part!

５年間日本に住んでいましたが、タイに帰国してから日本語を使う機会が減ってしまいました。特に会話力を維持したいので、日本語で楽しくお話しできるお友達も探しています！

We can chat over voice calls, correct each other, or just talk about daily life, hobbies, and culture. We can split our calls half-and-half or switch languages each time.

I tried apps like Tandem and HelloTalk, but they felt a bit too much like dating apps. I got some language friends from other language exchange subs, so I’m hoping to find more here.

Feel free to leave a comment or DM telling me what your Thai learning goals are if you'd like to connect!

Does the pronounciation of ขยะแขยง (khà-yà-khǎ-yɛ̌ɛng) hides some rule or is it just an anomaly? One would think that the second part of the word แขยง, following the basic rules, would be pronounced as khǎe-yong.

khà-yɛ̌ɛng just doesnt make any sense to me. Any explanations?

First of all, thanks to the mods for adding Thai Script Master to the sub's sidebar back in May. TSM remains a completely free Thai learning resource that I have spent countless hours tuning over the last five months. I am happy to continue to contribute to one of the many great resources to support the journey to learn to read and speak Thai. TSM is not the only resource available, but I will continue to work hard to make it one of the best.

I am proud to announce the release of TSM v2. There have been hundreds of fixes and improvements, way too many to list. The site is easier to navigate, has significantly more content, including almost 500 curated external Thai-learning resources, and a much-improved CEFR assessment. The original version was complimented by u/ling_app back when I first launched in April, and the new version is objectively better.

I now have a feedback link in the sidebar, so please let me know if you have any feedback you want to share privately. Or, better yet, give me approval using the checkbox on the form, to put your testimonial on the site.

In the first several months, TSM has attracted over 2,000 unique users, almost 150 signed-up users who continue to login, and 30-50 people who use the site every day to study. There is so much functionality that it can be overwhelming to figure out how to organize, but it makes me feel happy to see that some people are enjoying using it.

ALSO, I am working on arcade mode! I have found it helpful for studying the alphabet. There are 20 different arcade mini-games and I am finishing up leaderboards and matchmaking. It is pretty fun.

Anyhow!

The short list of upgrades and fixes (I am so sorry if something here was broken for the last four months!):

New

• A new look across every page, with real light and dark themes. Light is now the default. Your bookmarks still work.
• Simpler navigation: Home, Learn, Practice, Library, You. Sidebar on desktop, bottom bar on phones.
• Media library: 484 hand-picked resources for learning Thai, filterable by level and type, with collections and best-of lists.
• Homepage rebuilt around one recommended next step, with live panels for Practice, Reference, Tools, Progress and Media.
• Learn is now a workspace: a chapter list with progress rings, one open chapter at a time, all 94 lessons, and it resumes where you left off.
• Practice hub: a TODAY panel showing what is due, and a searchable map of all 42 modes by skill and level.
• Every practice drill has its own purpose-built layout. Rating, choosing, typing, tracing, listening and reading no longer look like the same page.
• Placement test: a fixed 36-question form so results are comparable, a shareable result link, and where you stand against other learners.
• Progress now answers one question: how much real Thai can you read?
• Achievements reorganized: 48 marks shown as ladders and gauges, with the unreachable ones labelled.
• Settings regrouped into five sections, including an offline panel for install and storage.
• Feedback link on every page, plus learner testimonials on the homepage.
• "Take Assessment" appears in the menu until you have a level.
• Explore: a play button on every item.
• Reference: Thai comes before romanization on cards, and audio is one tap away on consonant pages.
• Sign-in prompts appear at most once per session, and only after you finish something.
• Music controls on mobile, a new About page, and a site-wide footer.

Fixed

• Daily streaks never advanced past 1. They do now.
• Signing in used tobookmarks andfavourites. Your data now merges with your account.
• The Sign In button on mobile was broken.
• The theme toggle did nothing. It works.
• Every first visit reloaded the page a moment after it appeared.
• 111 audio clips that played silence or a click now play properly. Tone marks and vowels say their names.
• The word decoder and text reader gave wrong readings and tones. Both are correct now.
• Highlighted letters on consonant pages lost their tone marks. Fixed.
• Searching grammar and word-formation with Thai text returned everything. It filters now.
• Media: the beginner filter returned nothing, and 116 resource pages showed a video player with nothing to play.
• Tone colors were inconsistent between pages. One palette everywhere.
• Flashcards greeted new users with a disabled button. Zero-data users saw made-up "weak areas."
• Phones: 22 controls were too small to tap reliably. Pop-ups no longer hide behind the bottom bar. The offline notice no longer covers the header.
• Tablets: the side rail fits the screen and homepage panels open by tap.
• Screen readers now read Thai text in a Thai voice.
• The "install app" prompt no longer shows on desktop.
• Opting out of analytics now fully opts you out. Guests can erase their data without an account.

Thanks for all the support! It has been awesome to see so many people using TSM, and I will continue to work on it and fix all of the issues that are brought to my attention.

-pete

sawadeeka 🙏🏼

Hello everyone! I've been trying to learn Thai for such a long time, but it's such a hard language that I always end up giving up - mainly because I'm trying to learn on my own, and my raging ADHD does not allow me to have the discipline it takes to learn it without any help.

Right now, I can't really afford to pay someone to teach me, so I was hoping I would find someone who would like to be friends and maybe learn together?

I just need some motivation, and I feel like a study buddy would be the perfect help!

I have one acquaintance who's also learning Thai. She mentioned that she's been able to improve her language skills due to someone she found on Discord; however, I have no clue how to find people over there (I haven't been using the app for long tbh, and I barely know how to use it), so I just thought I could write it here. Maybe someone would see this post and want to be study buddies!

khob khun na ka guys ❤️

In Thai, ลง (long, pronounced with a mid tone) primarily means "down", "to descend", or "to decrease." However, its exact translation depends heavily on how it is used in a sentence:

1. Main Action / Verb

To descend / get off:
ลงรถ (long rot) = to get off a car/bus
ลงบันได (long ban-dai) = to go down the stairs

To decrease / drop:
น้ำหนักลง (nam-nak long) = weight decreased / weight loss
ราคาลดลง (raa-khaa lot long) = price dropped

To register / sign up / install:
ลงทะเบียน (long ta-bian) = to register / sign up
ลงเรียน (long rian) = to enroll in a class
ลงโปรแกรม (long pro-gram) = to install a program/app

To apply or post:
ลงรูป (long roop) = to post a photo (on social media)
ลงสี (long see) = to color / apply paint

2. Auxiliary Verb / Directional Particle
When placed after another verb, ลง indicates downward motion, a state of settling, or a reduction in intensity:

Direction (downward):
นั่งลง* (nang long) = sit down
วางลง (waang long*) = put (something) down

Reduction / Softening:
ช้าลง (chaa long) = slow down
ดีขึ้น หรือ แย่ลง (dee khuean or yaae long) = better or worse

Common Compound Words
ตกลง (tok-long) = to agree, okay, or deal
ลงมือ (long-mue) = to take action / start doing something
ลงโทษ (long-thot) = to punish

I see plenty of expats mastering daily conversational Thai, but I’m really struggling to take it to the professional level.

My goal is to use Thai for work and deliver business presentations confidently, but right now, it feels clunky and unnatural. I know most of the necessary domain vocabulary, but because I’m not using these formal terms in daily conversation, putting sentences together on the fly feels like a massive hurdle.

Has anyone here successfully made the jump from conversational to high-level business Thai? What specific strategies, routines, or resources helped you speak naturally during presentations?

I did the Memrise Thai course on a combination of Windows and Android. I'm still reviewing words and phrases in it every day, but I've recently installed Linux on my laptop and was surprised to see that instead of the traditional Thai font is uses the modern loopless Thai font. I've checked this in two browsers. It's a little strange to get used to but I'm slowly getting it. It's been a weakness for a while because so many signs and ads use this font and I couldn't read it at all before. Has anybody else noticed this?

Came across this on row 19 of the table in http://www.thai-language.com/ref/vowels

I can't find any examples with such a string forming vowels. It appears to be the only entry without an example in that table.

So far it seems to only appear in words like ควาย and the ones here and in all the cases ว seems to function as a consonant, not part of the vowel form.

Is that just an error in the table?

Hey fellow learners! I've been studying ~fulltime for a year now so figure it's time to give an update, share whats working for me and ask for some tips for the continuing forward.

Background
Australian, IT engineer.
I moved to Bangkok a decade ago when I was ~30 and spent 3 months at AUA ALG. It worked very well and in 3 months / 300hrs I understood everything going on in beginner. I enjoyed it and the teachers were very entertaning. Intermediate class failed because there was only one teacher, and limited use of visual aids. Instead of switching to another school I got a full time job in a church office...

For the next 4 years I was full time in an office with Thai people, including lots of time on the road and in various villages. Everyone around me spoke some English, many fluently. My language did improve but not that quickly and I wouldn't be able to tell you by how much. I don't know why I didn't pick up more, but I didn't. I forgot new words as quickly as I heard them. During this time I learnt to read/write very slowly in 50hrs part time at Union Thai. In case you're wondering my wife isn't Thai.

North Thailand
I went back to Australia for a while and came back a year ago because I missed Thailand, but this time to the north (outside CM). Pro's and con's up here... The language is a mix of Thai, northern and 5+ tribes. Everyone is super quiet and mutters under the breath most of the time. But hey at least I'm out of the expat bubble.

Last year of study
I hired a tutor 10hrs per week to start and now 16hrs a week. ~500hrs in total due to breaks.

I began by learning to read again as I had forgotten most of it, and then a mixture of reading, limited writing and conversation. We followed a book for a while but I didn't like the constant switching back and forth between english and thai when following the book so we stopped. For the past 6 months my lessons are 100% Thai. Conversation is about general things going on in life around us, and reading was the classroom Thai books but now I've been using AanThai.app plus YouTube (using Whisper to create quality transcripts so I can read along. Listen twice, then read, then listen again).

ANKI
Out of all that reading and conversation I make note of new words and input these into ANKI. I have a custom script/app I wrote (AI wrote) that uses AI to generate images of all new words so my card deck has only Thai + an image. No english unless nessessary. It still takes a bit of time to get the image right, but this also helps to become familiar with the word. I've experimented with both single words and sentences in ANKI. I feel that single words are slower but more effective. Sentences are faster, but my brain remembers the word order not the work meaning, so I can't reuse the word easily. I am planning to adopt a new pipeline of starting words as sentences, then moving them to single words.

I've been doing ANKI for 4 months now and can really see the progress from it. I believe the issue for the past 10 years has been lack of longer term memory. ANKI plugs that gap and its working. I understand so much more now and often when I hear words the image from ANKI flashes into my mind. No english, no mental translaton, just Thai + images.

My stats say that I have 600 new words learnt to >7 days and 400 >21 days. That's in 4 months. Since Aug 1st I've been pushing myself to add 50 new words each week (10 per day).

Effort
This has been the hardest thing I've ever done. Lets say 50% of days I have a headache after Thai class (always morning). And on those days I'll go lie down and sleep 30-60mins after lunch. I work for a few hours in the afternoon and then I'm completely exhausted and just want to veg in the evening. I'm outside talking with Thai people not that much due to this schedule. Maybe averaged out about 6-8hrs a week? My focus has been keeping enough energy to keep up the tutoring classes + work to keep existing clients happy and bills paid.

Currently
So now?
I can hold conversation with my tutor for multiple hours at a time.
I can speak with friends one on one about varous topics. It's a struggle, I need them to repeat themselves often (just like with my tutor), but I can get there.
If in a group conversation I drop in and out of comprehension frequently as the conversation changes. I'll know the topic of conversation but often none of the detail. My brain is great at tuning out and I have to keep tuning in again.
The issue is that my brain is just not fast enough to keep up. When reading or one on one I often need to hear the sentence twice and then I'm good. In a group I can't do this so I loose comprehension.
I goto church some weeks and have no idea what is going on. The language is obviously more advanced than normal conversation and spoken fast.
TV comprehension is improving but I'm not great yet. It's the same as group convo, I drop in and out of comprehension depending on the topic.
The comprehensible Thai YT channel is good, but I haven't spent that much time on it.

I can read both the old and new fonts now at around 30-40 words per minute. This has honestly been my main focus for the past year. I figure if I can read fast enough that it's not frustrating then I'll read more and my vocab will improve.

Where next?
I'd love input from anyone else who has gone through this stage from intermediate to advanced.
Pending any new ideas my plan is to continue as is as it seems to be working ok.
Now that I have finally got the hard part of learning to read (memorising words) out of the way, I am expecting my brain to have more resources for other parts of learning.
I do plan to put more time into listening to natural speed language to improve my comprehension speed.

And a big thank you to everyone in this sub. There is so much quality content and discussion in here.

Cheers!

More example:

卒々然又欲食粿條

จู่ ๆ ก็ อยาก กิน ก๋วย เตี๋ยว

Cū̀« k̆ xyāk kin ǩwyteī̌yw

卒々又 欲 食 粿 條

→ 卒々(然)又欲食粿條

Recently I wants to eat Kway Teow

但如今莫有銀元

แต่ช่วงนี้ไม่ค่อยมีเงิน

Tæ̀ ch̀wng nī̂ mị̀ kh̀xy mī ngein

但如今莫很有銀

→ 但如今莫[很]有銀(元)

But found didn't have money

哀哉

เฮ้อ

Ḥêx

哀

→ 哀(哉)

Sigh

If I have just got my hair cut and want to ask the cashier to give the change to the hairdresser, can I say เอเงินทอนให้ช่างด้วยนะครับ? Is there a better way to phrase it?

Can anyone tell me how to spell this nickname?

Also, just to make sure I didn't misunderstand, is it a common nickname and can it used as a kind of "uh-huh", I guess like อื่ม?

Hi everyone!
Its my first post on here after quietly observing… but I’ll take the leap! I started learning Thai non intensively in January this year. I started by learning the consonants and vowels, as well as other characters, aiming to create a solid base for later learning - now able to read Thai phonetically quite fast however I have an incredibly low understanding. It is at this point that I feel I have reached a point in my learning where I can no longer rely on sporadic bursts of motivation and must move into a structered learning plan.

While I do not live in Thailand, nor have Thai heritage, there is a prominent Thai community in my county, and I have aquired multiple close Thai speaking friends over the years - which sparked my interest in the language.

I am still in secondary school and moving into my last year, so will have to dedicate a fair chunk of my time for exam preparation, however I am prepared to dedicate significant time to Thai. At this point, I’ve estimated I will be able to guarantee an hour every day (and more on weekends) to language study.

I am a keen reader, and so have thought about the possibility of emmersion in the language by reading, however my vocabulary is very limited and I have decided that would be a foolish waste of time.
I’m really at a loss of how to advance my learning and would be really grateful for any honest input you guys have!!! Keep learning :)

I just finished my "reading courses", learnt and understood everything about classes, tones etc.

Reading now is fun but also so slow, i just read like 20 words long sentence in 6 minutes 😅

How should I proceed now? Just keep reading regularly and it will get faster? Or do you have any tips? Share your story ☺️

I don’t know this word in Thai, but my Thai friends often call me “tee.” I’ve tried asking them what it means, but they won’t tell me They also say something like “tee yam tink pee” or something like that I’m not sure if I’m hearing it correctly but
Can someone explain what it means, please? Thank you!!

I am half thai and grew up in thailand before moving way my speaking is pretty good but I can not read or write very well and would like to build my vocabulary more

I've learned thai for almost 3 years and I can handle a basic conversation.

However, the is a word that I am still having problems with... Open เปิด

This is one of the most common words because you have to use it frequently to ask in shops, businesses about whether is open or close.

Everyday when I go and ask, they cannot understand me. Eventually, I just ask if it is closed with the word ปิด and then they understand...

Does someone have the same problem?

https://voca.ro/1dhvwf3Ze5Mi

I found that Pimsleur is what got me the furthest when it came to listening and speaking. I vibe with the specific method and being able to listen to it while driving, at the gym, or otherwise was a great part about it for me.

Unfortunately, it only has one level.

Can anyone recommend anything similar to Pimsleur that can help me develop my Thai?

Hey fellow Thai learners

I'm a developer by trade and early in my own Thai learning journey. I've been building a side project that I think some of you might find interesting.

The concept is a Pokemon-style world where you walk around and each house represents a learning app or resource.. kind of like Lovable allows you to create apps. You can customise your world over time as your learning needs change, swapping things in and out. Think of it like having your own personal learning environment that you actually move through.

It's built on Cloudflare's AI stack, and one of the things I'm most excited about is a "blueprints" system, where someone builds a learning app, shares it as a template, and others can use it as a starting point. I'm curious whether there's something interesting in that community sharing aspect rn

To be clear, this is not a commercial project. I have a FT day job as a developer. This is purely about matching my learning journey with my own curiosity and style, and seeing if others feel the same way, and if that can in turn motivate me more.

Right now a handful of friends have accounts. I'm covering the AI token costs myself for the moment for in app app creation, though at some point I'll ask people to bring their own API key, which is straightforward enough - and i've been using GPT Terra for now - it has done a decent job on the

I'm looking for a small group of people who find this idea genuinely interesting and want to be alpha testers of this mostly out of curiosity and not so much under the promise of this being the antidote of all your learning pattern pains.

If this sounds interesting to you lmk i think i might get to open up a first batch over the weekend

Again - this is completely free and very early stage - it is a passion project that eventually i'd love to OSS and accept donations for