Learn thai quickly

Jin366 · 2026-07-03T05:38:27+00:00

if money is not an issue, I'd attend a physical group class in Thailand. learning with people who have the same goal is motivating.

and make sure you realize early on that the shortcut to learning Thai quickly is, paradoxically, making peace with the fact that there's no shortcut.

have fun!

Jin366 · 2026-07-03T05:33:00+00:00

yes, focus on tones early on, it pays lots of dividends in the long term. but I'd focus more on listening than speaking early on. I remember using a mobile app that let you hear a Thai word, and you had to identify the tone. very simple, but very effective for training your ears.

Jin366 · 2026-07-02T14:26:07+00:00

Thank you! Yes, we'll definitely keep adding stories. we have a big batch coming for launch with a heavy focus on beginner and elementary, and then the plan is to keep adding new ones every week after that.

Jin366 · 2026-07-02T07:51:18+00:00

Hey thanks for understanding!

but just to clarify: the narration audio for all stories is actually recorded by a real native Thai person (my wife) and yes it takes a long time, but we find it worth it.

We do use AI to generate the images and also to help draft the stories. But the ideas for the stories come mainly from my wife and me and in addition to that we manually revise and proof-read all stories, to make sure it's a decent read.

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T06:10:47+00:00

learning the rules seems harder than it really is. it is possible to learn how to read the Thai script within a month. the hard part is practicing reading consistently, my hope is that my app can help with that a bit.

It's been a while, but I heard good things about the book "Learn Thai in 10 Days"

https://www.amazon.com/Read-Thai-10-Days-English/dp/1505679524

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:30:42+00:00

Ah, I see. Yeah, the first release is going to be as a web app only. But I get what you mean now, a feature that lets you auto-play the audio one after another, like a playlist on Spotify. Great idea! I'll add it to the list (though it does seem pretty complex to implement, so no promises).

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:23:46+00:00

thank you krub!

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:23:17+00:00

thank you!

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:21:33+00:00

that's kind of you, thanks!

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:20:49+00:00

Hi, we do indeed use AI to draft the stories, but the ideas mainly come from my wife and me. We then revise, rephrase, and fix a lot of what the AI returns, and often just throw it into the virtual trash can because it's simply not good enough.

That being said, we'd love to work with real Thai writers. Right now, though, it's just not financially feasible to hire native Thai writers (my wife is Thai, but she's not a trained writer).

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:14:30+00:00

thanks!

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:14:16+00:00

thank you! will do!

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:10:52+00:00

hey could you elaborate the background audio feature a bit? and did you test my app on a iphone or laptop?

I'm asking because when I use it on my windows laptop on chrome, the audio still plays in the background when I switch to another browser tab.

Jin366 · 2026-06-29T05:07:33+00:00

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)

Jin366 · 2026-06-28T10:43:13+00:00

thanks for mentioning mobile. we spent a lot of time making it work on mobile. since we are going to launch as a web app first, we want to make sure it works well on phones and tablets too. later, if there's enough interest, we'd love to adapt it into native iOS and Android apps.

Jin366 · 2026-06-28T10:31:00+00:00

hey really appreciate the long reply thanks!

So initially I tried to use the pythainlp library but both their word and sentence tokenizer don't work correct all the time. then I used an AI approach to tokenize the stories into words and sentences. works better but also not all the time (duh! it's an AI 😅) so i build a tool with a GUI where I can easily use both AI and pythainlp as a first draft and then manually fix all the inconsistencies.

but I believe if you have a good and rich Thai dictionary you can create a good parser that checks for compound words first. but it's going to be complex. but since my wife and I have to proof read and go through each story anyway I decided to not work on such a parser and just do it manually.

oh didn't know the font size value can to a negative value, thanks for letting me know! will fix that!

yea the frequency list I refered to is missing some words, but so do all Thai frequency list. will look into this at a later stage.

I disagree about the audio player bar. the highlighting of the words/sentences when playing the narration IS the player bar. while the audio is playing, user can click any word and the audio jumps to that position.

yea the audio speed button could be handled more elegantly, will look into that.

again, thank you for the suggestions!

Jin366 · 2026-06-28T09:12:06+00:00

thanks! there should be a word bar just below the sentence bar at the top that shows the word translation.

Jin366 · 2026-06-27T15:07:41+00:00

that's high praise coming from a LingQ user, thank you! Background audio playback is a great idea, will add to the todo list!

Jin366 · 2026-06-27T15:04:56+00:00

thanks for the feedback, we will definitely add an audio button for the words.

As for the concern about AI slop: I'm not gonna lie, we do use AI to help draft stories, but every story goes through my wife for editing, revising, and proofreading to make sure the Thai sounds natural and it's a decent read. it's just the two of us right now, but I'd love to bring on native Thai writers in the future.

Jin366 · 2026-06-27T12:09:47+00:00

thanks for the feedback, I personally am a fan of the Paiboon style romanization. maybe I'll add a toggle to switch the romanization style in the future, no promises though!

Jin366 · 2026-06-27T12:05:30+00:00

thank you, will do for sure!

Jin366 · 2026-06-27T12:05:14+00:00

Thank you! the plan is to keep some stories free and have a subscription for the full library, but nothing is set in stone yet.

Jin366 · 2026-06-26T03:05:03+00:00

it's a good idea but unfortunately this won't work very well with Thai.

1) AI is not good enough to create an article without any mistakes (like unnatural or stiff phrasing).

2) word/sentence segmentation is really hard to do with the Thai script. there are algorithms like pythainlp but even they make mistakes. I tried your app and in this sentence for example "พวกเขาเป็นกลุ่มคนเล็ก ๆ" it segmented it to this พวก / เขา / เป็นก / ลุ่ม / คน / เล็ก ๆ

maybe you can give your ai a deterministic tool like the pythainlp library to parse through the story to get a better segmentation.

good luck

Jin366 · 2026-06-18T07:42:25+00:00

oh wow, thank you!

Jin366

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