my history with thai
i feel like i've been trying to learn thai all my life, although i only really started studying... successfully? i'd say in like 2021. thai is arguably my heritage language, as my mother is thai, but i never learned anything beyond the numbers 1-10 and how to ask where the bathroom is when i was a kid. i've seen different definitions of how much exposure to a language is necessary as a child to consider it a heritage language, but for the sake of simplicity i'll consider myself one here.
i went to visit my family in thailand the summer after my freshman year of college with my mother, where i quickly discovered how horribly inconvenient it was to rely on one person to translate everything in order to talk to anyone or even buy anything as no one in my extend family spoke english and they live in a part of thailand where no one else does either. i have a good relationship with my mom, but it was annoying to feel like a kid who needs their parent to do everything for them. i also realized that my mom wasn't going to live forever; the reason we went was for the 1 year anniversary of her dad's passing to hold another funeral ceremony. being there, it made me think of one day having to do the same for my own mom, and how i would no longer have any way of talking to her family or navigating her homeland by myself. that reality seemed so painful so i figured i should take advantage of my mom to help me while she was still alive.
despite my revelation, i didn't really learn anything the three months i was there and was unable to successfully build a language learning routine for myself when i got back home. even though i had taken french in high school, i didn't really know how to study a language, especially by myself and for a language that was so much more different from my native english and with way fewer resources. i also feel like my college workload was too much at the time for me to want to spend my precious free time doing even more studying. it wasn't until after i had graduated and found a job that i decided to take another stab at trying to learn thai in late 2021.
how i study thai
i honestly feel like a big part of my success in actually getting anywhere with learning thai this time around, beyond the increased free time and mental stamina afforded to me by graduating university, were the resources that had been published since the last time i had tried and given up. the first resource that really changed the game for me was the book read thai in 10 days by arthit juyaso. i personally am anti-romanization when it comes to learning a language, since other languages have sounds that don't exist in your own so you can't really capture the new sounds accurately in your own writing system. also in the case of thai there is no standard romanization system so when you read romanized thai you can't be sure if it's using british english or american english vowels, if vowel length has been taken into account or not, which of the five tones it is, and all this other bullshit that could be avoided had you just taken the time to learn the language's script. for these reasons i really wanted to start with learning the writing system but i had never been successful before. there are 44 consonant characters, each of which have one of three "classes", that combine with one of 32 vowels, possibly one of four tone marks, and possibly another consonant at the end to determine the tone of the word. so as you can imagine it's a massive pain in the ass to learn as it's not as simple as associating a letter with a sound. i found that the way this book breaks up the characters and gradually introduces them alongside the ideas of consonant class, vowel length, live vs dead endings, and tones made everything click for me. while i didn't finish the book in 10 days (it took me 20, which i found was a much more manageable pace), i did finish it feeling like i had a good enough grasp of the writing system to be able to iron out the kinks through just reading more and using thai script on my anki cards.
the second resource i found instrumental in getting started learning thai was the youtube channel comprehensible thai. i felt like before i didn't really have any resources for listening practice aimed towards beginners that wasn't just, like, example dialogues of tourists ordering pad thai or something. but this channel that started in 2020 i think had hundreds of hours of graded listening material on so many fun and interesting topics, all for free and is still releasing new content as of writing this, that i felt like i hit gold. i don't follow the ALG (Automatic Language Growth) method personally, where you're supposed to only watch the ALG content and not use traditional studying methods alongside it as a full course is suppose to take you from not understanding anything to beginning to understand native level content. i believe the aim is to basically replicate the first five or so years of a child's language development so you have the skills to keep learning in whatever direction you want to, but can do so within your target language, just like you did with your native language as a child. but tbh i feel like my adhd prevents me from only sitting and watching videos without any sort of interaction. in the beginning i did watch the channel for the recommended 2+ hours a day, but i also went through other beginner textbooks and courses as well as keep up with my anki cards.
i still watch comprehensible thai, although i use it more for more passive listening practice while i wash my dishes and stuff like that. right now i'm going through the intermediate 1 playlist, which currently has over 700 30+ minute videos and is still getting tons of regular updates so at the rate i'm going i'll probably be using it until the heat death of the universe. i do a lot of sentence mining these days. for a long time i mainly sentence mined vlogs and cooking videos on youtube, although i've been doing more shows and more complicated youtube content like history, interviews, and science now. there aren't that many that have thai soft subs, but i do mine pretty intensely (basically any i+1 sentence i come across) so sometimes it takes me ages to get through a single show. i don't really practice reading much because quite frankly i a) have not come across enough content that interests me that is at my level, and b) i have very little need to read thai beyond signs and menus and the occasional facebook message from my family. through reading the thai on subtitles and my anki cards alone my ability to read thai has already surpassed my mom's ability to read english and she's been able to survive living in america just fine for over 20 years so tbh improving my reading is kinda low on my list of priorities lol. july 2025 update: after struggling to get into novels and manga translated into thai due to 1) manga using small ass and often heavily stylized font; 2) every thai publisher forcing me to use their mobile app all of which don't allow selecting text to look up words using my phone's native dictionary or screenshots, much lessing being able to use browser and desktop tools like yomitan or ocr; i finally discovered the world of fan translated manhwa... i'll probably always be more of a manga girlie but manhwa is definitely a nice change of pace. i also feel like i've picked up a lot of words through reading that i haven't come across just through watching stuff, especially royal vocabulary (never thought i'd get into isekai romantasy for the language gains... but here we are lol). i still haven't really gotten into reading novels but i did learn that one of my favorite authors, keigo higashino, has a ton of novels translated into thai that haven't been translated into english, so i might suffer through thai publishers' draconian anti-consumer restrictions just to read them 😅
if you want to see all the resources i've used to study thai, you can check out this page on my resources site. you can also find more resources i've found on the internet here, although i can't vouch for the quality of every source or if they're all still up. the media log tab has all the non-youtube media i've sentence mined if you're looking for tv shows and movies that have soft subtitles.
