Where do I start learning Thai?

With the sounds, not the script and not the grammar. Thai grammar is genuinely simple - no conjugation, no plurals, no articles - so the hard parts are the five tones and the writing system. Learn a few hundred spoken words first, then start reading around week five, by which point you recognise words rather than decoding them.

How long does it take to learn Thai?

For a comfortable conversational level, most people are looking at a year or more of regular study, and the US Foreign Service Institute puts Thai in its harder category for English speakers. Daily life vocabulary comes much faster than that - a few weeks gets you through a day. Fluency is a different project and no app delivers it.

Should I learn to read Thai or just use romanization?

Learn to read, earlier than feels sensible. Menus, signage and pharmacy labels are not transliterated, and more importantly tone is a property of the spelling - the consonant class, the tone mark and whether the syllable is live or dead. Romanization hides the thing that tells you how to say the word.

Is Thai grammar hard?

No, and this surprises people. Verbs are not conjugated, nouns have no plural, there are no articles and no grammatical gender. Time is shown with separate words rather than by changing the verb. The difficulty in Thai is entirely in the tones and the script.

How to learn Thai, in order: a free route from zero

Two things to know before chapter 1

The grammar is easy and nobody believes it. Thai verbs are not conjugated. Nouns have no plural. There are no articles and no grammatical gender. "I eat rice" and "they ate rice" use the same three words, with time added separately when it matters. The whole grammar system is 18 topics, and most of them are short.

The tones are the actual work. Five of them, and they change what a word means rather than how it sounds. Hear the difference first - it takes two minutes and it reframes everything after it. You do not need to produce them perfectly in week one. You do need to stop hearing them as the same word.

The route

Four stages, 34 chapters, roughly a year at a relaxed pace. Each chapter only uses vocabulary the ones before it introduced, so the order is not decorative - skipping forward means meeting words that were explained earlier.

Weeks 1-4 · Chapters 1-7

Survive a day

Greetings, numbers, time, family, getting around and food. By the end of these you can greet someone correctly, buy something, tell a taxi where to go and read a price. This is the stretch where the most changes per hour spent, so it is the worst one to rush.

Do the politeness particles properly. ครับ and ค่ะ on the end of a sentence do more for how you are received than correct word order ever will, and which one you use depends on your own gender, not the listener's.

1. Greetings & Politeness

Learn essential Thai greetings and polite particles used every day.

2. Numbers 1–100

Count from one to one hundred and use numbers in everyday situations.

3. Colours & Objects

Name common colours, clothing, and describe everyday objects.

4. Family & People

Talk about family members, pronouns, and the people around you.

5. Days & Time

Name the days of the week, months, and tell time in Thai.

6. Getting Around

Give directions, ask for help, and name places and types of transport.

7. Pronunciation Practice

Speak Thai aloud and get instant feedback on your pronunciation.

Weeks 5-10 · Chapters 8-13

Have a conversation go slightly wrong and recover

Markets, daily life, feelings, hotels, hobbies. The vocabulary stops being nouns you point at and starts being sentences that can be misunderstood - which is the point, because recovering from a misunderstanding is most of what speaking a language is.

Start the script here if you have not. By this stage you know enough words that reading stops being decoding and starts being recognition, which is far less painful.

8. Food & Drink

Order food, talk about tastes, and handle yourself at a Thai restaurant.

9. At the Market

Talk about money, bargain politely, and buy fruit at the market.

10. Daily Life

Talk about your routine, your home, and how you feel.

11. Emotions & Feelings

Say how you feel - happy, tired, worried, excited - and ask others how they’re doing.

12. Airport & Hotel Check-in

Get through immigration, check into your hotel, and ask for what you need during your stay.

13. Sports & Hobbies

Talk about the sports you play and how you like to spend your free time.

Months 3-6 · Chapters 14-25

Handle the situations that cost money

Taxis, dining, banking, pharmacies, the BTS, apartments. This is the tier that separates a tourist from someone living there, and the one where the specific chapter you need tends to arrive without warning.

Take these out of order if life demands it. The chapters are ordered so each uses only earlier vocabulary, but if you are signing a lease on Thursday, do Housing on Wednesday. The expat route reorders them by urgency.

14. Getting a Taxi

Hail a cab, tell the driver where to go, and talk fares and distance.

15. Social Expressions

React naturally - apologize, celebrate, encourage, and reply on the fly.

16. Dining Out

Order with polite requests, handle dietary needs, and get the bill like a local.

17. Counting & Quantities

Big numbers, halves, and the Thai classifier system for counting things.

18. Wants & Needs

Say what you want with อยาก - to eat, drink, sleep, or go.

19. Language Help

Survival phrases for actually using your Thai - ask people to slow down, repeat, or help.

20. Shopping 2: Closing the Deal

Push past the basics - final prices, sizes and colours, paying, and gift wrapping.

21. Animals

Elephants, monkeys, and mythical giants - vocabulary for the world around you.

22. Banking & ATM

Open an account, use an ATM, exchange money, and handle common banking problems.

23. Health & Body / Pharmacy

Describe symptoms, buy medicine at the pharmacy, and get help at a clinic or hospital.

24. Public Transport (BTS/MRT)

Navigate the Skytrain, MRT, and buses - buy tickets, find your line, and change trains.

25. Housing & Apartments

Find a rental room, understand the lease, and talk about rent, bills, and furniture.

Months 6+ · Chapters 26-34

Have opinions

Comparing, planning, complaining, culture, news, work, festivals, technology, and finally regional dialects and slang. The vocabulary here is less about surviving and more about being a person rather than a transaction.

This is where an app stops being enough. Opinions need someone to disagree with them. Everything past this point is people, not chapters.

26. Comparing Things

Say what's better, bigger, cheaper, or the same - comparatives and superlatives.

27. Making Plans & Arrangements

Check if someone's free, set a time and place, and handle a change of plan.

28. Complaints & Requests

Say something's broken, ask for a fix, a refund, or file a complaint politely.

29. Culture & Customs

Festivals, merit-making, and the traditions that shape everyday life in Thailand.

30. Opinions & News

Share what you think, agree or disagree, and talk about what's possible.

31. Work & Office Thai

Talk about your job, handle email and meetings, and make common office requests.

32. Thai Festivals & Holidays

Songkran, Loy Krathong, and more - the festivals, dates, and traditions behind them.

33. Technology & Internet

Talk about apps, Wi-Fi, social media, and troubleshoot common phone and computer problems.

34. Regional Dialects & Slang

Recognize common Isaan, Northern, and Southern dialect words, plus modern Thai slang you'll hear everywhere.

The script runs alongside, not after

Reading is a separate track you start around week five and finish in a fortnight of ten minutes a day. It is not a later stage - it is a parallel one, and doing it early makes everything after it easier because tone is written into the spelling.

1. The 44 consonants, by class

Learn them grouped as mid, high and low, not in dictionary order. The class is half of every tone rule; the alphabetical order tells you nothing.

2. The vowels

Written before, after, above and below the consonant, sometimes several at once. Length matters because it decides live or dead.

3. The tone rules

Consonant class plus tone mark plus live or dead. Fifteen lines, and then you can read the tone of a word you have never seen.

4. Real passages

Twenty graded readings, every word glossed. Read something real long before you can read everything.

How long this actually takes

Honestly: longer than any app's marketing suggests. The US Foreign Service Institute puts Thai in a harder category for English speakers, and that is with full-time instruction.

What comes fast is daily life. A few weeks of the foundations chapters and you can get through a day without English. What comes slowly is everything after that, and the thing that decides whether you get there is not the app - it is whether you are talking to Thai people regularly. Every tool on this site, ours included, is a supplement to that.

Start

No account, no install, nothing to decide. Chapter 1 is greetings and politeness, with a recording on every word. If you would rather start by reading, the alphabet is here.

Practise these phrases in the app

Spaced repetition, speaking practice and audio for every phrase. Free, forever.

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