Sabai Thai

Sabai Thai teaches the Thai you would actually use: ordering food, getting a taxi somewhere, making a shopkeeper laugh. This is the environment I tried to create, to make it fun and easy for people to learn the Thai language since I have struggled with it in the past myself.

Everything in the course is free. All 540+ lessons across 34 chapters. No trial clock, no daily cap, no lesson behind a paywall.

How you actually learn: Lessons are short and mixed: 5,400+ exercises across 19 different formats, so you are not doing the same multiple-choice card five hundred times. Translating in both directions, listening, typing Thai, arranging word order, matching, dictation, speaking aloud. Every Thai word has audio, a bundled clip rather than your phone reading the letters aloud, which flattens the tones. Romanization sits under every Thai word from day one so you can start speaking immediately, and the script is taught separately at your own pace instead of being a wall on day one.

I built it for what is specifically hard about Thai. It includes 9 practice drills, because tones and script are not the same problem as vocabulary. The tone trainer shows the five tones as pitch curves, then quizzes your ear: it plays a word and asks which tone that was. The character tracer has you draw all 68 letters over a ghost glyph with your finger, because muscle memory helps the user to learn more easily. Shadowing records you saying a phrase, plays it back against the reference, and scores you word by word.

Spaced repetition runs quietly under all of it, scheduling each word to return just before you would have forgotten it. The app tracks what you get wrong.

Five games that people can play to help them learn Thai.

Eight tools for that help you when you are in Thailand: A taxi card you type a destination into and show the driver in Thai. A currency converter that reads the amount out in Thai number words. A tip calculator, weather, unit and Thai date conversion.

I added 17 companions in Thai style to keep it fun and playful. They are all obtainable for free if you complete enough lessons.

Other apps keep the lessons behind a paywall. For instance: Ling its Thai course sits behind a $89.99 a year subscription. Duolingo has no Thai course for English speakers at all.

What users can pay for: One optional subscription, Sabai Pro, at €17.99 a month, €119.99 a year, or €169.99 once for lifetime, with a seven-day trial. It buys an AI tutor you can hold a conversation with at your level or ask any question about Thailand, a drill built from the words you personally keep relapsing on, full mistake history, every companion and theme, and unlimited hearts for the games. It never locks a lesson.

Android only for now, IOS in the near future.