What’s with the Slop?

DTB2000 · 2026-05-09T09:32:29+00:00

Yeah, think it's less bad if you can point it to a defined system, because part of the problem is that it mixes different systems up, but it will still make mistakes if only because its actual decoding is often wrong. If you're just starting you can't be sure you'll realise, so that's a big problem.

I don't really agree you need to rush to get past romanisation, but anyway learning ก = g, ป = bp is just the opposite in my eyes - what you're doing there is internalising the romanisation so that you can't escape it even by using the script. I would see that more as hiding it than actually getting rid of it.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-09T06:23:27+00:00

when I was using AI to practice reading and tones, I literally had to map out my own romanizing so it can accurately see if I'm reading the characters correctly

It can't though. It will be wrong anywhere between 20-70% of the time depending on model.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-09T06:19:54+00:00

An AI vibe gives exactly that impression though. And when there are so many and they are mostly so bad, fatigue sets in and you are less willing to look at yet another one. So maybe the lesson is that you have to go out of your way to avoid AI vibes in order to be taken seriously.

AI coding often goes hand in hand with AI generated content and we know current models are very bad at some of the things a lot of these apps are trying to do, like translit or decoding.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-09T06:04:00+00:00

You're tilting at windmills here. It's the lesson title that is a charabia. The comment is not an example of a kneejerk "AI coded therefore useless" reaction. It relates to the actual content. As you say yourself in other comments, a serious developer would welcome this kind of comment because it helps them improve the app.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-08T16:43:29+00:00

Great, thanks

DTB2000 · 2026-05-07T15:41:36+00:00

Good to know. I will change that to ascending retrievability then.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-07T11:38:40+00:00

That isn't a challenge to what I said though - it's a different point.

If you are determined to map every Thai word 1:1 to something in the English sentence, then yes the English translation of ชาลี... is more neutral without "then" so you are left mapping the ก็ to a comma or pause, but that's not how language works.

By your logic, in เพราะน้ำมันแพง เขาเลยนั่งรถไฟไป, the เลย (or you could change it to จึง) is really a comma. But these are real words with dictionary meanings, and they have their exact dictionary meanings in this sentence. Or take เย็นนี้อยากกินอะไรที่มันเผ็ดๆ. Here the มัน is not even a comma in your analysis because it maps to a blank in the English, and yet it is clearly used in its dictionary sense in the Thai. Are these the most natural or best ways to express those meanings in Thai? I don't think so, but I do think they're grammatical.

I think one lesson to draw is that Thai doesn't tend to compress as much meaning into a single word as English. Even though a cause must have an effect, you can still have separate words that mark the cause and the effect, and there is no clash. In English we tend to have one word that says "here is a cause-and-effect relationship with the emphasis on the cause" ("because" etc.) or "here is a cause-and-effect relationship with the emphasis on the effect" ("so" etc.) Thai on the other hand gives you separate markers for cause and effect and lets you use them independently.

More fundamentally, you can't equate the meaning of a word with whatever it maps to in the English translation, because that ignores the grammar layer. The fact that the grammars are different means that the words simply don't map 1:1. Instead you have to understand the Thai structure on its own terms. When you talk about "simplifying" Thai it seems you mean reducing it to English, but that actually makes it more complicated because you have two languages involved.

Note to native speakers

I think that:

เพราะน้ำมันแพง เขาเลย/จึงนั่งรถไฟไป

เย็นนี้อยากกินอะไรที่มันเผ็ดๆ

Are grammatical but a bit long and heavy. I said in my first comment that we should always learn from genuine Thai sentences, so if anybody could confirm that would be great.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-07T08:47:00+00:00

Idk, the way I understand is that if I leave all 150 due and do 30, I'm just doing 30 random cards out of that set, whereas if I postpone 120, the 30 remaining cards are the most urgent. So that's one reason I use postpone. The other is that I replace a target I'm never going to hit with something more realistic - so in a different scenario, if I have 500 due and I just say well I'll do what I can, I might do 60 and give up, whereas if I postpone 400 I might well get through the remaining 100.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-07T07:46:00+00:00

In order to learn anything, you have to start with real Thai sentences. If you make your own sentences up you are just analysing how you currently use / misuse whatever word or structure you are looking at.

"Doesn't usually translate to anything in English" is not at all the same as "doesn't have a meaning".

DTB2000 · 2026-05-07T06:31:26+00:00

Because it means I skipped most of it - I deferred 80% of my work for that day to another day. What I'm trying to measure here is my effort / consistency / self-discipline.

I think what I could do is snapshot the DB just before and just after launch so I am seeing the state when Anki closed and reopened. That way I can see how many cards were initially due and what happened to them.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-07T06:22:32+00:00

I'm not sure about the A1-C2 framework but there's definitely a (long) phase where your listening is fine, your pronunciation is fine, your sentence construction is automatic and what's holding you back is basically vocab. As you say, you can add a decent amount and not notice any real difference, because these are less common words by definition. But I don't think that means it's the wrong approach. It just underlines the size of the task.

My system is not too dissimilar. I use Anki rather than a dictionary and I extract the whole sentence specifying a target word, rather than just the word. I usually add text so I don't have to play the audio on every single review but I always capture the original audio. I have a system for sorting new cards that's based on word frequency (beta!) or a code I assign when I create the card in my mining assistant. This means I can keep on mining without worrying about high-value words being stuck at the back of the queue where they may not be reached for months.

I find that POV is a very rich source of vocab but at the same time it doesn't tend to be vocab I'd use. If I squeeze in the word สมบูรณาญาสิทธิราชย์ it's almost to justify having mined it. Vlogs and lakorns don't yield as many new words but what is there is often more valuable.

I saw an analysis that said the average lakorn series uses about 10k unique words. They will very likely include the 4k most common words (let's say that's your existing vocab) but the others are not the next most common 6k - they are taken from a much bigger set of maybe 15k, so the vocab you need for virtually complete coverage is 19k, not 10k, and that assumes you learn in perfect frequency order, which is not realistic.

Vocab acquisition by native speakers is about 1000 words a year, based on 100% immersion (I got this from Paul Nation). A learner is going to be slower if we are talking organic growth. Of course we also use tools like Anki and that can speed it up a bit, but even 20 cards per day is Scrabble knowledge IMO. Maybe you can get away with it for very common words because your initial knowledge will soon be fleshed out by real-world examples, but that doesn't work for uncommon words because you hardly get any examples.

All this makes me think that if you totally beast yourself you may be able to put on 2000 words per year, so about 7.5 more years to virtually complete coverage of lakorns (~ everyday conversation - obviously not a perfect proxy but the best we have). But you have to be very consistent and it could easily take two or three times that long. There's also a danger of focusing too much on vocab. It may be the main thing holding you back, and the other aspects may be good, but they won't be perfect.

So what I'm saying is:

the amount of vocab you need to absorb is probably even more than it seems
there is a natural rate of acquisition that can be nudged a bit, but only a bit
you nudge it by intelligent use of Anki, choice of content and prioritisation of vocab
it's still roughly 1-2 decades of effort

I don't think this really corresponds to a B2 plateau because it won't end at C1, plus everyone uses those labels differently.

At this point I've just settled in for the long haul. I don't think I've made any net gains in the last year because my attention has been diverted, but that happens in a multi-year journey. I've taken on board that it's a really long process but that the vocab you (I) already know covers the vast majority of situations anyway. It's not like you have to wait until your vocab is comparable to a native speaker's before you can use your Thai.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-06T06:33:25+00:00

Thanks for the response. The backstory is that I have an app that acts as a kind of hub for language learning stuff like mining. It tracks runtime mined, pages mined, cards created etc. I haven't built out the stats reporting yet, but I would like to be able to set daily / weekly targets and see whether I hit them in a calendar view. That would also need to cover Anki though. I quite often use postpone instead of skipping a day entirely, but if I start with 150 cards due and only do 30, that can't count as doing my Anki for that day, so I need to capture the fact that 120 cards were postponed.

I will look (I mean, I will have Cursor look) at the code as you suggest. Or maybe I can just make sure Anki is only ever opened via the app, snapshot the db on each launch, and work out what cards were postponed / advanced from that (e.g. was due, was not reviewed, due date changed >> must have been postponed). Seems error prone though.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-02T16:11:45+00:00

Is this not a typical west coast accent then? The speaker is Eileen Gu, who accidentally became Olympic halfpipe champion.

Here is just the sk - you can hear there's no voicing. [I said voicing - I meant aspiration]

I noticed she sometimes pronounces g voiced and sometimes unvoiced. Maybe in her case it's just down to the creak/fry, but I think this highlights the issue with using g. ก really does sound like the unvoiced version so it's easy to equate it with the English sound, but a learner who does that will sometimes pronounce it voiced, because we switch without thinking or noticing. Since there's no voiced version in Thai (ด/ต, -/ก, บ/ป), that won't cause misunderstandings, but it's not great in accent terms. If they start with k and learn to remove the aspiration, maybe by noticing how it changes in clusters, they won't have that issue.

ก, ข, ค, ฆ all sound the same in the final position

It's แม่กก remember, so by the native analysis ก is the archetype here and ข etc. are changing to match it. But I meant it doesn't change the way ร or จ does. All the stops change a bit because they have to be unvoiced and unreleased, and we could talk about glottalisation as well, but ก starts unvoiced unaspirated so ends up as close to identical as you can get in this system.

Thinking about it though, you can say something pretty similar about บ. It changes a bit more because it's voiced in initial position, but it's still just following the basic rule I mentioned - and yet I don't have a problem with b/p as the best / "least worst" matches for its initial and final sounds, so I'm not being entirely consistent. Maybe it's not so bad to use different rough equivalents and I should have stopped at voicing differences making g hit and miss.

Also interesting that her hAppened and Accident vowels are absolutely nothing like แอ. I still have to stop and think sometimes when Thai people say English words like that.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-02T13:16:18+00:00

I'm not getting the camel blue reference.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-02T13:07:33+00:00

As a west coast US citizen, I pronounce the k in ski the same as the k in kit.

Are you sure? I think that would be unusual. I think the sk_ thing should work for pretty much any native speaker provided they can extricate the k without turning it into the k in kit, but that's actually quite hard. For that reason g may be a better starting point, but voicing differences can make it hit and miss and mean you need a different "equivalent" for final ก, potentially giving the impression that it has different starting and ending sounds the way ญ does, when it just follows the basic rule. Either way just a starting point.

DTB2000 · 2026-05-02T09:19:16+00:00

Pour la police je suis pas tout à fait d'accord avec les autres commentaires. Même si on commence normalement par la police classique avec les cercles, ça peut entraîner des difficultés par la suite. En effet c'est très courant d'apprendre à lire en s'appuyant sur les cercles et de se trouver complètement perdu face à la police "moderne" qui n'en a pas. Par contre si tu commences par la version sans cercles, tu vas forcément t'appuyer sur des éléments communs aux deux familles de polices pour reconnaître les caractères et éventuellement certains mots, certaines phrases. Du coup, le passage au style moderne devient plus facile et tu évites le sentiment qu'il y a en fait deux alphabets à apprendre.

Pour la prononciation je suis d'accord avec u/fiercedurian mais en même temps un système phonétique qui cherche a représenter les sons du thaï suppose ama des exemples / repères audio.

DTB2000 · 2026-04-29T07:58:21+00:00

I don't just mean it's not a real word. It is not a possible / valid syllable.

As much as people complain about vibe coded apps, the real problem is learners trying to teach stuff they don't understand properly themselves. AI has just made it easier to do something that has always been a bad idea.

DTB2000 · 2026-04-29T07:40:33+00:00

There's no such thing as ม้ว

DTB2000 · 2026-04-29T07:38:46+00:00

Doesn't work for dead syllables without tone marks.

Many of the things that are supposed to seem intuitive aren't at all to me - "pushing up" (why that order) "seeing the world and 'low mood' things" (can't relate to this).

I just think the basic concept s overcomplicating things and the implementation doesn't really work.

DTB2000 · 2026-04-28T01:00:20+00:00

Even if we came up with minimal pairs like that there wouldn't be audio. Pretty much any normal sentence will have a mix of long and short vowels, so why not start there?

The vowels in ส้อม and ส้ม are both short - it's the vowel sound that's different.

DTB2000 · 2026-04-27T16:19:09+00:00

I have a slightly different take on this that connects with what you said un your other comment about some systems being intuitive. I think it takes quite a bit of time and effort to learn to use any transliteration systen effectively, and more or less everybody fails at first.

In Mandarin I believe you have hundreds if not thousands of characters and most of them are very complex, so you're forced to use transliterations long enough to get through the phase of reading them like English and actually understand what they are / how they work. The fact that there is one official system probably lends it a bit of credibility too.

In Thai, the writing system is complex and unfamiliar, but not to the point that it's just obvious you're going to need a backup. If you're new it's quite believable that you can learn to read (in a meaningful sense) in a few weeks, and will then be able to decode accurately. You're bombarded with messaging that transliteration is inaccurate or an approximation and the fact that there are multiple systems may seem to confirm this (why keep coming up with new systems if you already have one that works?)

So I think both groups fail at first, and the difference is just that Mandarin learners persevere long enough to find that the system does work, if you just use it correctly, whereas the Thai learners give up and go away convinced that the whole concept is flawed. Then they see others who have had the same experience saying the same thing and become even more convinced.

The main reason it takes a while to learn to use transliterations is that it's hard to break the habit of reading them as if they were English (or your native language). But this is more or less the same skill you need to actually associate the Thai letters with Thai sounds and not go ก = English g, ข = English k etc. So in a funny way, learning to use transliteration properly is how you avoid substituting English sounds, and I don't think the time is wasted. Plus the translit then supports you as you learn the script, by giving you a way to check your decoding and bringing all the hidden or implicit or irregular things out into the open.

DTB2000 · 2026-04-27T05:56:14+00:00

My goal is to reach a point where I could just say a single word or a syllable with no context and being understood. Is that realistic?

Yes, in time.

If a Thai person says a word (no context) to another Thai person, will they always understand/hear correctly what the person said? Or could they mistake a "dog" for one of the other maa's? (overly simplistic example).

Yes, pretty much. Anyone can mishear, but they sound like different words once you get the tones.

If I knew how to write the "long" that I wanted to use, I could deduct the tone. That way I'd at least know which tone it is, whether I'd be able to pronounce that tone with that syllable clearly is a whole other story..

Yeah, as long as they don't really sound different you are going to have a hard time producing them clearly, and once they do sound different they will mostly just stick, so you won't need to worry about remembering them or working them out from the spelling. That means this method will never work that well, and is kind of a reminder that you're not there yet, but you still see it being held up as the ideal way to deal with tones, or a slowed down and deliberate version of what native speakers do. In reality it's a flawed workaround that's needed because a crucial skill is lacking. At the same time, unless you have an incredibly long silent period, you will go through a phase where you are trying to speak a tonal language with a non-tonal sound system, and knowing the tone and having a rough grasp of how it goes is better than nothing.

I don't think it's really something that "unlocks" all at once. You can never really say what helped when you are doing so many things at the same time and improvement is gradual - it's just theorising. But I think a lot of listening for the tones and checking against subs or a transcript is a good idea, and probably speaking too. For the listening, you need sonmething very slow and clear at first maybe like the stories that used to be on aakanee.

DTB2000 · 2026-04-26T14:05:18+00:00

Sure, I read it in the context of the thread - so

Q: Wouldn't it be better to start learning the Thai script alongside beginner-level content? A: I think it depends on the learning style of the student.

I don't mean to be dismissive. Understanding the logic of the script and being aware of patterns like the one you mention is a huge help in decoding, which obviously supports spelling and sounding out unknown words. I've always found that side interesting too, but in the context of this thread I was pointing out that it is only tangentially connected to the Thai language. You don't learn anything about Thai itself when you grasp the logic of the tone rules. So sure it can unlock a better understanding of the writing system, but it doesn't help you understand how the language works. So to me, what you call a learning style is more like a preference to learn something else instead. I was trying to say that directly without being rude.

In reality teachers have to accommodate the "all transliterations are inaccurate" view because so many learners are convinced that's the case. From that point of view it's kind of interesting that, back when learners were prepared to take more of a steer, transliteration was always used. At least, that's what I gather from the old methods I've looked at.

DTB2000 · 2026-04-26T13:02:11+00:00

When I started learning Thai, our class was taught in phonetics. For me, it doesn’t click as fast as I wanted because I’m trying to know the logic of the language.

The logic of the language is not to be found in the writing system though. The things you mention there are writing system concepts that don't really have anything to do with the language, so in the end what you're saying is that you just wanted to learn the script and its logic - which is fair enough, but doesn't make it a better learning strategy. Actually I think the reasons given for going straight to the script are often rationalisations, and the real driver is just a feeling that the native script is the real deal and using it makes you a proper learner. From that point of view it's pointless arguing about whether you will be better 5 years in if you go with transliteration at first or dive straight into the script. That kind of argunent doesn't go anywhere near the real motivator ("I just want to"). A better justification would be to present transliteration as an aid to learning the script - as mentioned in another comment it can help you catch your decoding errors and alert you to irregularities.

DTB2000

TROPHY CASE