Read Thai in 10 Days

book that teaches you how to read the thai script. i love the way it organizes and teaches you consonants, vowels, class, tone rules, exceptions, etc – i tried and failed learning to read thai a number of times but this book made it all 'click' for me. epub, azw3; also on z-lib. find the audio for this book here.

Slice of Life

website made by an expat living in thailand. the section linked above is the best resource i've seen for learning the phonology (sounds) of thai. explains sounds unfamiliar to english speakers such as ป, ต, and −ือ clearly and in language accessible to those unfamiliar with linguistics. i found the spectrograms to illustrate the five tones as well as the difference between ป and บ to be particularly helpful.

honestly i don't think the textbooks available for thai are all that great since they're typically aimed at tourists, rely on romanization, and don't get that advanced especially compared to what's available for more popular languages. here are the ones that i used when i was just starting out, but i don't recommend you treat them like college textbooks and spend like sixth months going through it – just pick one and get some basic vocab and grammar down.

Spoken World Thai

teaches basic vocabulary and grammar over the course of 15 lessons. i recommend being able to read thai before starting this book, although there are romanizations. comes with culture notes, reading and dialogue practice, and comprehension questions. i've uploaded the audio here.

Complete Thai

teaches basic vocabulary and grammar over the course of 17 lessons. the above link goes to an archive.org copy where you can 'check out' the whole book for an hour at a time. the audio for this book can be found here for free; an anki deck for this book can be found here.

Mango Languages

interactive website and app. it's organized similar to a textbook with major units broken up into smaller chapters, but also has a vocab flashcard SRS system built into it. it was free through my local library; you can check if yours carries it through the link above.

FSI Thai Language Course

website that has taken the Foreign Service Institute's thai language course and converted it to text to make it more accessible to modern learners. there's a lot of audio and it's embedded right where it's needed, you can toggle IPA transcription on or off, and is much more thorough than other courses i've seen. however it was made in 1970 and is definitely showing its age, plus it was designed for 8 hours a day of in-person drilling and instruction so there's not much in the way of self study exercises.

Thai: An Essential Grammar

a reference book of the most common grammatical structures in thai. very clear, concise, and to the point, with lots of example sentences. has thai script and romanization.

Comprehensible Thai

youtube channel of with thousands of hours of ALG style videos. designed to be used without any other traditional study methods, just watch the videos and acquire the language naturally. you can read a simpler explanation of the method here or watch more in depth videos discussing ALG here. i personally use this channel as listening practice alongside sentence mining for the bulk of my thai language learning.

Learn Thai with Bo

youtube channel where the teacher, bo, talks about her life in short ~5 minute videos. has soft thai and english subtitles and is suitable for beginners.

Riam Thai

youtube channel of kruu riam, one of the teachers on comprehensible thai. she has both beginner and intermediate content. i like that she provides soft subtitles on her videos, so you can sentence mine.

Understand Thai

youtube channel of kruu ying, another one of the teachers on comprehensible thai. she has some beginner content, although most of it is meant for more intermediate learners. i personally really love her videos where she discusses thai slang, culture, news, etc with kruu fah.

Pimsleur

audio only course covering basic thai. there are 30 lessons that are 30 minutes each. could be used as an introductory course but i used it as supplementary audio practice. link above takes you to a mega.nz folder where you can stream or download their complete course.

Mary Haas Thai Reader

a series of short graded readers, first published in 1945. the link above is to an online version with interactive features such as an integrated pop up dictionary and the ability to choose between a looped or loopless font.

Operation Language Stories

a small collection of very short fictional stories. a lot of them are kinda... weird? not like bad but when i got to the end of a lot of them i was like ??? that's it?

Thai Stories for Language Learners

a published book with short stories in both thai and english. the stories are mostly folktales, aesop's fables, and the like. each story has key vocabulary and comprehension questions. link has a pdf of the book as well as recordings of all the stories in thai.

Language Crush: Thai Conversations

100 ~7 minute conversations between two native speakers on a variety of topics. comes with audio and transcript. the website is free but some features are restricted if you don't pay. i don't really like the interface anyways so i downloaded them all as .txt and .mp3, which you can access here.

Aakanee: SEA Illustrations

around 40 15-20 minute monologues of thai speakers describing daily activities based on a given picture. comes with audio and transcript. you can also watch them as videos here, but they do not have subtitles. as of writing this the aakanee website is down but is still viewable through the wayback machine; i will add a link to an archive of the recordings and transcripts soon!

Aakanee: Thai Recordings

over 100 5 minute monologues of thai speakers recalling experiences they've had in their life. comes with audio and transcript. i will add a link to an archive of these recordings and transcripts soon as well ^^

thai-language

best thai-english dictionary on the net imo. you can choose your romanization system or turn it off completely, there are a ton of example sentences, and most words have native audio. i like that you can browse words by categories, and they have a good amount of thai slang although nothing super modern. definitely check out their reference section too, they have some interesting pages on more obscure and advanced features of the language.

lingopolo

website with a ton of example sentences with native audio. has a built in flashcard system, but they can only reviewed by lesson (in blocks of like 10 or so) so i recommend using anki instead.

thai-notes

website with a variety of tools related to learning thai. i've already linked to the two i find most useful, their FSI course and their Mary Haas readers, but they have some other cool stuff like in browser games and a classifier dictionary.

LearnThaiPing

my favorite thai typing trainer. introduces new characters at a good pacing and i like that they have audio.