If you have or know another website that would be good for this page, please let me know.
TLC allows you to choose your preferred pronunciation guide for Thai words, just like we do.
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 ResourcesUnlike me, Catherine does a very good job of keeping her list up to date and chasing down bad/moved links.
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.
Fortunately, around 2016, with the help of the Thai government agency NECTEC, the RID came into the 20th century with:
Even better, thai-notes.com did an improved web interface to RID 2011 here.
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.
The site also hosts a Virtual Thai Keyboard for those who don't want to figure out Thai on their computer keyboard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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See Also | You'll probably also like these sites... |
A site about Pai, my peaceful home in the mountains of Northern Thailand. | |
Buzzword bingo, bill the borg, MEZ, lurker's guide to video, and Thai, oh my! | |
Party? Meeting? Request a map, label it yourself, and easily fling it to your friends! | |
Travel with my friend Nang, who is a great nature, birding, and cultural guide. | |
My English-fluent Thai friend Jeed is a freelance illustrator who is available for hire. | |
See, sponsor and purchase the amazing paintings of Sa-ard Nilkong. | |
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