L-Lingo Thai: A cool new app for learning Thai on an Android phone

Finally a proper learning tool for Thai for Android smartphones. L-Lingo is actually available for many different languages.

The free version of L-Lingo Thai is here and the paid for version can be found here.

All the other apps I tried are pretty useless (at least o me) phrasebooks for travelers. This here is a great way to learn some new words. It is an Adobe Air app, so you need Air installed also. It runs prettty smooth on my Sony Arc phone. There is loads of lessons in the paid version, overall 65 different ones. In each one you get a mix of different exercises to do. You might have somebody speak a Thai sentence and then get a choice of images to choose from the right answer.

Or you might just get a Thai sentence without sound (to learn to read) and then also choose the answer from an image. There are other types of quiz questions available. You can choose if you want to see Thai letters (if you can read Thai already0 or if you want phonetics (for beginners).

i thin kits a simple app but has lots of content and overall is well worth the 15 USD it costs. Thats on the upper side for Android apps and Im not sure how much they will sell at hat price but language apps tend to be more high priced and for the amount of content you get this is an OK deal.

Thai Basic reader MP3's

Here is another great resource for learning Thai: Thai Basic Reader is an electronic version of the book of same name that developed by Thomas W. Gething and Pongsuwan T. Bilmes (Revised 1992 with CD Sound), University of Hawaii.

There is lots of mp3 files that are great for listening on your iPod or whatever else you are using. It is still possible to order the text book directly from the University of Hawaii apparently but I haven't tried that yet. 

Thai Reader Project

The Thai reader project provides from my point of view the by far best and most well thought out reading lessons for the Thai language. Thai reader is a project from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and it is fantastic that all these lessons (about 80!) are made available for free. It could easily be a paid product.

You can download all Thai reader lessons here.

Each lesson comes with text, multiple choice questions, comprehension questions, many pictures, etc. For example, in the lesson about food, there are several pictures of menus shown that use different Thai fonts. This is really good as some Thai fonts are difficult to read, even when you are already quite good in reading Thai. It exposes you to different real-life issues that you are going to encounter sooner or later. So if you are a beginner-intermediate learner, this is the perfect course material for you.