How to use the Thai course

Glossika makes it easy for everybody to learn Thai without having to learn the writing system.

If you want to read and write Thai, at the bottom of your session screen, turn on Full Practice mode. There is a Typing Guide below the typing box (it's not a pronunciation guide).

If you want to practice speaking and listening, then turn on Listening Mode, and I strongly recommending turning on the "Recording" button as well! You'll get to see more detailed phonics in this mode for pronouncing Thai.

Thai is romanized and taught here using the Royal Thai romanization. There are other romanizations that we're working on adding. Thai is not normally spaced, except between sentences, so we use the vertical bar to separate sentences in our transcriptions.

Glossika offers transcriptions for all languages written in different scripts:

● Typing Guide (appears under the typing box): this adheres closely to actual spelling rules, and teaches you how to type in native scripts. For Thai, we teach you how to type using a the royal romanization + tone contour (F = falling, R = rising, H = high, M = mid, L = low). Long vowels are doubled. Feel free to turn on your Thai keyboard when you're confident enough, and start typing in Thai anytime you want. Make sure that you type tones after the stacked vowel and not before: the order counts!

● Pronunciation Guide (toggle on and off in listening and recording modes): the pronunciation guide is an easier to read version how to pronounce each word accurately. Tones are marked on top of the vowels using standard symbols: â = falling, ǎ = rising, á = high, a = mid, à = low. For you linguists out there, this pronunciation guide is "phonemic" and doesn't show allophones.

● Phonics Guide (toggle on and off in listening and recording modes): phonics is written in international phonetic alphabet (IPA), and for you linguists, this pronunciation guide is "phonetic" showing the allophones. What this means is some sounds change in special environments. This guide shows you the way a native speaker actually pronounces each word in detail.

We help Thai learners by focusing on the pronunciation of the tone rather than the written number of the tone. This is because in written Thai, the tone category number is written rather than how the tone is pronounced, and this is quite confusing for anybody who is not Thai, or didn't grow up speaking Thai already. The first and last consonant of every syllable affects the way the tone is pronounced.

We have a great blog article that introduces the Thai tonal system using an easy to read table and lots of color to help you learn it more easily.

If you're interested in digging deeper, we compare Thai tones with all other tonal languages in Asia, showing you how everybody shares the same system. By understanding that Thais count their tone categories, and that other languages count the tone contours, will help you to compare and contrast what seem to be very different systems, but are actually very similar.

Pronouns: we mostly use royal "we" (เรา/raw) throughout Glossika as a polite form of "I" (all sentences recorded by our male speaker) and without sentence ending gender. This is a really nice sounding "I" and immediately lets Thai people know that you're speaking to them from a position of respect and humility, which is always best practice. Our female speaker however has used female "I" and sentence-ending gender more frequently on her sentences.

Some Thai words have alternate spellings (like we have in English "do not" and "don't"). We're working on standardizing Thai spelling in all sentences and adding the alternate spellings as well, so that your typed entries will work no matter how you type. Keep in mind that all foreign names are optional and are not required to be spelled accurately, or even typed at all.

We post regular updates in notifications here on updates to Thai.

How to use the Thai course

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