🇹🇭 Apprendre le thaï ไทย

The flagship comprehensible-input channel for Thai: several teachers (Kruu Blu, Kruu Noon, Kruu Jerry and others) teach entirely in Thai using drawings, props and gesture, with playlists ordered from absolute beginner through advanced storytelling and a gradual reading course. Still publishing multiple videos a week as of August 2026, and the free back catalogue alone is hundreds of hours. If you want extra material or to support them there is a Patreon, but nothing essential is behind it.

Hundreds of audio and video lessons built around short dialogues that get broken down in English, with lesson notes, a word bank and spaced-repetition flashcards; a free account gives limited access and paid tiers run roughly $4–25 a month depending on plan length. It is a good structured listening supplement, especially in the beginner range. Treat it as one input among several — the lessons over-explain, and the constant discount emails are the price of admission.

Kruu Mod has been publishing free lessons since 2013 and is still posting in 2026, covering everyday phrasing, question forms, polite particles and the vocabulary you actually need with a partner, family or landlord. The English explanations make it accessible from day one, which comprehensible-input channels are not. Paid courses and books exist on the site; the free YouTube library is the main draw, and it favours useful phrases over systematic grammar.

Benjawan Poomsan Becker's course has been the default first Thai textbook for decades: structured lessons with dialogues, exercises, and a parallel track that teaches reading and writing rather than leaving you in transliteration. It is systematic and cheap, which is why teachers still assign it. The presentation is plain, the audio is sold separately in some editions, and the follow-up volumes get patchier.

A second strong comprehensible-input channel, useful precisely because hearing more than one voice matters: Kruu Ying narrates everyday situations in clear, slow Thai with on-screen support, at beginner and intermediate levels, and was still posting in August 2026. The videos are free; one-to-one online lessons through the website are paid and priced on request. The channel is smaller and more conversational than Comprehensible Thai, so use both rather than choosing.

Arthit Juyaso's book takes the 44 consonants, the vowel system and the tone rules in a deliberate order with mnemonics and daily practice, and most learners really do come out reading basic Thai in a couple of weeks. Reading Thai early is the single highest-leverage thing you can do in this language, because transliteration systems disagree with each other and hide tone. It is a paid book with a workbook feel — you have to do the exercises, and it teaches decoding rather than vocabulary.

Brett Whiteside's course drills the writing system and tone rules first, then builds spoken Thai on top, which fixes the classic expat problem of years of transliterated Thai that natives struggle to understand. Five lessons are free by email, so you can judge the teaching style before paying for the full Inner Circle program. It is one of the pricier self-study options and the sales pages are heavy on testimonials — the underlying pedagogy, not the marketing, is the reason to consider it.

Stuart Jay Raj's 63-lesson course explains why Thai works the way it does: the Indic logic behind the script, how consonant classes and tone marks interact, and physical techniques for producing sounds English speakers mangle. At $9.99 a month or $29.99 for a three-month bundle (the print book is around $39) it is cheap for the insight density. It is idiosyncratic and theory-heavy — brilliant for analytical learners, frustrating if you just want phrases.

Yuki and Miki's lesson packs run from Creamy Coconut (beginner) through Sweet Green (intermediate) to Spicy Red (advanced), teaching the colloquial Thai textbooks avoid, with transcripts and detailed vocabulary notes. Seven complete sample lessons are free, so you can judge before buying, and the humour makes repeat listening bearable. The three courses are finished rather than ongoing, and you buy lessons in packs rather than subscribing.

AUA is where J. Marvin Brown developed Automatic Language Growth, the approach of absorbing hundreds of hours of Thai before speaking, and it still runs Thai courses at branches including Bangkok and Chiang Mai. For people living in Thailand it remains the best-known in-person option, and its alumni are the reason input-first learning has such a following in Thai. Course formats have shifted over the years, so confirm directly whether the current classes follow the ALG model and ask about hours and fees — neither is published online.

Grace publishes a free ten-day absolute-beginner mini course, a beginner podcast, subtitled YouTube lessons and a free phrase ebook, then sells structured courses covering beginner-to-conversational Thai, practical reading and an advanced tier, plus a graded reader and vocabulary apps. The free layer is substantial enough to be worth using on its own. Materials are spread across several platforms, so it takes a moment to work out what belongs to what.

Khru Nan is a Thai university lecturer with a PhD in linguistics, and it shows in how carefully she handles tones, vowel length and the sounds learners systematically mishear. The podcast is free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube, with transcripts and Quizlet flashcard sets on the site; extra episodes sit behind Patreon. Episodes are short and conversational rather than a structured syllabus, so use it alongside a course.

One of the more consistently recommended Bangkok schools, offering group and private Thai courses across levels, with an in-house curriculum and the education-visa paperwork that long-term learners in Thailand need. Small classes and a clear level ladder make it a reasonable default if you are moving to Bangkok. It is a commercial school with commercial pricing, and quality still depends on which teacher you draw.

Paiboon's app pairs a large Thai–English dictionary with human-recorded audio for essentially every headword, plus a categorised phrasebook, and it works fully offline — which is the point when you are standing in a market with no signal. Search tolerates rough spelling and transliteration, a real advantage while your reading is shaky. It is a one-off paid app on iOS, Android and Windows, and the interface looks its age.

A Thai-only vocabulary app: words and phrases chosen for real situations, each with Thai script, learner-friendly tone-marked phonetics, recorded audio and example sentences. You rate each word Low, Medium or High and it points your reviews at the weak ones; there are also quizzes, flashcards and a full alphabet module covering every consonant and vowel form. It works on the web, iOS and Android, is ad-free, and premium (about $3.99 a month) unlocks more vocabulary and unlimited reviews. It is a vocabulary trainer rather than a course, so pair it with something that teaches grammar and gets you listening.

A long-running community reference with a large Thai–English dictionary, audio, per-word tone and phonemic analysis, sample sentences, grammar lessons and archived forum discussions that answer questions nothing else does. It is the site experienced learners keep open in a tab. The design is unapologetically from an earlier internet era and the site serves over plain HTTP, so expect a browser warning if you force HTTPS.

Wiwanee's channel makes long, well-researched Thai-language videos on history, mythology, literature and true crime for a Thai audience, uploading several times a week. It is the natural next step after learner content: real vocabulary, real speed, but on topics explained clearly enough that context carries you. There are no learner subtitles or glossaries — bring an intermediate-plus base and a dictionary tool.

Free access to news bulletins, documentaries and talk programmes in standard Thai, plus written articles for reading practice on the same stories. Public-broadcast Thai is clearer and less slangy than commercial TV, which makes it a manageable first step into unmodified native media. It is genuinely advanced material — formal register, fast delivery, and no learner scaffolding of any kind.

Longdo aggregates several dictionaries at once (including NECTEC's LEXiTRON and Thai–Thai sources), so a single search shows technical, colloquial and formal senses side by side. Because it is built for Thai users it covers vocabulary that learner dictionaries omit entirely, which matters once you are reading real material. The interface is cluttered and largely in Thai, so it suits intermediate learners more than day-one beginners.

An unusually good learner community: native speakers and long-term residents answer tone, register and translation questions, and the recurring input-hours logs and school reviews are the most candid comparisons of Thai courses you will find anywhere. Search the archives before asking — resource questions have been answered many times over. Opinions on methods (input-first versus textbook) get heated, so read a few threads before taking any single verdict as consensus.

Thai is written without spaces between words, which makes early reading brutal; this tool segments a pasted passage and glosses each word with tone-marked transliteration and audio. That makes it the fastest way to work through a Thai post, menu or news snippet before your parsing is automatic. Core lookup is free with a paid tier for extras, and its segmentation occasionally mis-splits names and compounds, so sanity-check anything surprising.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, with the monthly price falling steeply on longer plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 14 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

A franchise of local producers filming unscripted street interviews, each episode subtitled in the target language and English, which is the closest free thing to hearing how people genuinely speak. All YouTube episodes are free; membership adds transcripts, vocabulary lists and exercises. Real-speed unscripted speech is hard early on — start with the slower 'Super Easy' episodes if you are below B1.

One-on-one video lessons from roughly $5–30/hr depending on the language and the teacher's credentials. It is the single fastest way to get real speaking practice, and the reason most self-study plans stall is that they skip this step. Community tutors are cheap conversation partners; professional teachers are worth it if you want structure, homework and error correction.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

100,000+ tutors across 120+ subjects, with a free replacement if your first tutor is a bad fit. The main structural difference from italki is that Preply pushes weekly lesson subscriptions and takes a large commission from tutors, which some learners consider a reason to prefer italki. Worth comparing side by side for your language — prices, availability and tutor quality differ per market rather than per platform.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

A reading app built around finishing complete books: you pick a story at your level, tap a word or reveal a sentence's English translation when you get stuck, and it saves the words you looked up. There is one complete free book in every language and you can read a free chapter on the website without installing anything; the rest of the 1,100-book library is paid. The library is uneven: Ukrainian, Indonesian and French have dozens of stories, while Icelandic, Estonian and several Balkan languages have one or two. It is not the same as Storyglot's European Portuguese readers (storyglot.com), which are a separate project with the same name.

Free on desktop, Android and web; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase that funds the project. The interface is dated and the options are overwhelming at first, but nothing beats it for retaining vocabulary over years. Most effective when you stop grinding premade decks and start mining sentences from things you actually read or watch.

The free tier is genuinely usable (ads plus a limited 'hearts' system); Super removes both for about $96/yr. Its real value is streak-driven consistency for absolute beginners, and the smaller courses are thin machine-assisted content rather than the polished Spanish or French trees. Treat it as a warm-up habit, not a curriculum — nobody reaches conversational fluency on Duolingo alone.

The 'learn with locals' video clips are the distinguishing feature — you hear real people at real speed rather than TTS. Be aware that Memrise moved user-created community courses off the main app in 2024 onto a separate site, which gutted what many long-time users valued most, and the app has leaned hard into AI chat features since. Fine as a phrase-and-vocabulary app for major languages; if you came for the community decks, use Anki instead.

Built-in correction tools let partners fix your messages inline, and the social 'moments' feed gets you corrections from strangers without arranging a call. Free for the core exchange; VIP adds more translations and simultaneous target languages. The persistent caveat is that a fair share of users treat it as a dating app, and exchange partners are unreliable — it works best once you already have some output to correct.

Import podcasts, articles or ebooks, tap unknown words for definitions, and LingQ tracks your known-word count over time. The free tier caps how many saved words you can keep, so serious use means paying (~$13/month or less annually). The interface is clunky and the built-in SRS is weaker than Anki, but the reading-plus-audio workflow with 50+ languages is hard to replicate elsewhere.

Built on Tatoeba sentences, it drills words in context by frequency band across 50+ languages and 170+ language pairings, with a genuinely generous free tier. It explicitly starts where beginner apps end, so it is the natural 'what now?' answer for someone who finished a Duolingo tree. Sentences are crowd-sourced and occasionally awkward or oddly specific, and it teaches nothing about grammar explicitly.

Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and one-to-one partner matching rather than a social feed, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Texting partners is free; calling them in the app is part of the paid Pro tier, and the app also sells paid tutors. Both apps live or die on finding one or two committed partners, so expect to message a lot of people before anything sticks.

Unlike most apps it is built around producing speech: you repeat, roleplay and converse with an AI tutor that gives pronunciation and phrasing feedback in real time. Covers Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian and Chinese for English speakers, with a 7-day trial then a subscription (roughly $20/month or $99/yr). Good for overcoming the fear of speaking before your first human lesson, but an AI will not push back or drift off-script the way a real conversation partner does.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit: you shadow native audio, record your own version, and a real human coach returns feedback — 10 free submissions a month, unlimited for about $20/month, with full scholarships for anyone who needs one. Covers French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and English. It only fixes pronunciation and delivery, so it complements rather than replaces conversation practice.

The heavyweight immersion toolkit: one-click sentence mining with audio, screenshot and definitions, plus its own SRS and known-word tracking, for 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and the major European ones. A 10-day free trial then a subscription (roughly $10/month). Overkill unless you are committed to a sentence-mining routine — if that describes you it saves hours a week, otherwise Language Reactor's free tier is enough.

A streaming service where every show has clickable dual subtitles and saved words become flashcards, covering 15 languages with apps on phone, Roku and TV. It solves the 'what do I watch' problem for languages where Netflix's catalogue is thin. The library is much smaller than a mainstream streamer and it is subscription-only — if you already pay for Netflix, Language Reactor's free tier does most of the same job.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

Thousands of public-domain books recorded by volunteers, downloadable as MP3 or M4B with no account. Pairing a LibriVox recording with the matching free Project Gutenberg text gives you a full audiobook-plus-ebook study set for nothing. Two caveats: recordings are volunteer-quality and vary a lot reader to reader, and everything is out of copyright, so the language is often a century old — great for literature, poor for modern slang.

The default place to ask 'is X app worth it' or 'what should I do at B1' and get answers from people who have actually done it, plus per-language subreddits (r/Spanish, r/LearnJapanese, r/French) with far better resource lists. The wiki and FAQ head off most beginner questions. Expect strong ideological camps — comprehensible-input purists versus textbook people — so read a few threads before taking any single answer as settled.

Modern assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will roleplay a scenario at your level, correct your writing with explanations, generate graded reading, and hold voice conversations — endlessly patient and available at 2am, which no tutor is. Free tiers are enough for text practice; voice modes generally need a subscription. The caveats are real: models are noticeably weaker and more error-prone in lower-resource languages, they tend to produce bland textbook register rather than how people actually speak, and they will not correct you unless you explicitly ask them to.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.

A Chrome extension that shows target-language and native subtitles simultaneously, lets you click any word for a definition, replay a line, and save phrases for review. The free tier already covers dual subs, dictionary lookups and the CEFR-graded video catalogue; Pro (about $6/month) adds machine translation, speech recognition and better AI lookups. It transforms passive Netflix time into study time, but you need enough of a base — roughly B1 — for subtitle mining to beat just watching.