slice-of-thai.com → Thai Language → Other Websites for Learning Thai
Other Websites for Learning Thai
Last Update: March 2010.Table of Contents
- Introduction
- thai-language.com
- Thai 101 Blog
- Women Learning Thai (and some men too)
- Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Language Courses
- thaivisa.com Expat Forums
- The Paknam-iverse
- LEXiTRON Software Dictionary
- thai2english.com Dictionary
- english-thai-dictionary.com
- SEAsite (NIU) Thai
- Royal Institute Dictionary (RID)
- thai-software.com Dictionary and Program
- Longdo Multilingual Thai Dictionary
- 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.
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.
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, cultiral blog entries, and a good summary of other Thai-language sites and resources.Most interestingly, includes:
The mother of all lists of free Thai learning resources
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 coures 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:
http://fsi-language-courses.org
At that website, there is currently a collaborative volunteer effort to add real Thai script to the materials (which currently only use romanized Thai). 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 more information, see this post and this post.
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.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.
Now we get to the catch: throughout most of 2007-2009, LEXiTRON's website (both the word lookup part and the downloadable app part) were hopelessly, irritatingly broken such that you sign up via an elaborate, unfriendly process and then fail to get any download link. As of February 2009, NECTEC has finally pulled the entire website and claims an improved version 3.0 of both website and software will be available in Feb 2009. I'm not holding my breath.
In the meantime, you can download a useful version of the dictionary application (version 2.6) from the Bangkok Library Archive. Many thanks to them for helping us bypass hopeless NECTEC bureau-jam.
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 February 2009 was based on LEXiTRON, but as of March 2010 seems to be based on a larger dataset, with pronunciation guides added.More amazing is their USD $40 downloadable commercial Windows software dictionary, which was "coming in a month" for most of 2008 but finally got released in December 2008. This dictionary truly breaks new ground in terms of Thai learning software. The author clearly has a lot of good taste when it comes to laying out the data in a way that is useful and pleasing. He's implemented a word segmentation/dictionary lookup screen where you just paste a big blob of Thai text and it does its best to segment and then allow you to mouse-over any word to get definitions. The segmentation is pretty good, though not perfect of course. Then there is the other screen where you type whole sentences of free-from transliteration in English, and it looks up in its database to find all possible Thai words to match your English karaoke text. At each point in your text it presents the list of possible Thai words, with what it thinks are the most "likely" sorted first, along with the definitions. It works surprisingly well, especially given that he accepts a wide range of fuzzily-defined transliterations (e.g. no tones at all, "pat" and "put" for sara a, "p/ph" for phaw phaan, paw plaa, etc.). It too is not perfect by any means, but it really is something new that advances the field. The software claims to have 110,000 Thai entries and 90,000 English entries, and is not (entirely) based on LEXiTRON, but most of the words seem to be laundry-list cities, amphoes, dtambons, plants with latin/technical names, etc. While it's nice to have a high count, I actually found the obscure words that kept popping up were more of a distraction because they were rarely relevant to my search.
It looks like the dataset is (as of April 2010) the same for the website and the downloadable app. The dataset seems to have been scraped together from various (possibly free) sources meant for Thai natives learning English, because it has a fair number of errors and does not generally clarify which sense of English words are being defined (for example "glass" as a drinking glass vs. a pane of glass are two different words in Thai, but this dictionary doesn't tell you which one you're getting). But they do add (machine-generated) pronunciation guides to help non-Thai-native learners.
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.
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.When you visit this site, you will probably need to configure your browser for the obsolete, 20th-century Thai character encoding that RID uses in order to make the Thai letters come out right. In Firefox this is under "View...Character Encoding...Thai (TIS-620)." In IE this is under "View...Encoding...More...Thai (Windows)." Good luck!
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, 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 Dockum 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. (Feb 2009 update: the CRCL papers site is down, but Richard Wordingham has hosted a backup copy of the font paper).
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:- thai-flashcards.com: commercial online Thai course with a free trial.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- Journey to Thai: occasionally updated blog from a Thai learner. Some info on the Bangkok AUA teaching method, and other topics (thanks to Rikker of Thai 101 for reference).
- Thai Language Links: Site to accumulate links to Thai language resources (like this one!). Also hosts a blog where the webmaster posts some of his homework assignments from learning Thai, and other random topics (thanks to Rikker of Thai 101 for reference).
- 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.
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