I am a novice at learning Thai, and like many whose native language is English, reading Thai script has been the most challenging piece. I have downloaded many a PDF and screenshot a score of reference guides on the web as well as making my own cheat sheets as notes in my phone, but the struggle was truly real until I happened upon this app while searching for something - anything - that might help my hapless brain hold on to some hope of a breakthrough.And what a happy bit of happenstance it has been! Not only are you able to arrange the order of the Thai consonants in what makes the most sense to your own brain - be it alphabetical (i.e., the order used by native speakers), frequency (from the most commonly encountered letters down to the rarest used), by class (high/middle/low - very important for knowing which tone to use), or by sound (in alphabetical order by English equivalent, no less!). This alone would have been enough of a reason to download the app, but wait…there’s more! Because there is a *flashcards* feature in which you are able to effectively check your memory and confirm whether you’re ready to move on or still need more time studying, and it’s customizable so that if you want to just focus on 5 or 10 letters at a time (a strategy I highly recommend), it’s very easy to do so.But that’s not all! There’s also a full list of vowels - and I cannot stress enough how much I appreciate this feature, as many Thai script lessons spend a good amount of time on the consonants but precious little on the vowel symbols, which I find far more challenging because other than a few exceptions (looking at you, ร), Thai consonants are each limited to only one sound that you can rely on when attempting to pronounce a written word, whereas the vowel symbols can combine in what feels like an infinite number of ways to produce the same vowel sound, and often there are several different combinations that can all give the same vowel sound even though they look nothing alike (prime example: เ_าะ and ็อ_) - along with…you guessed it…their own flashcards! Truly incredible, a complete and utter game changer.And that’s still not where the features end! There’s an entire section dedicated to the five tones where you can hear them while visualising their pitch, and my favourite aspect is the matrix where all of the rules based on consonant class, live vs dead ending, vowel length, and tone marks are succinctly summarized into a table that with just a glance you can see, by class, the tone produced in each scenario (and it’s interactive with example words!). And yes! even this section has flashcards wherein you look at a word and then see if you can identify correct consonant class and subsequent vowel tone. Absolutely ingenious!Now you may be thinking there is surely nothing more that could possibly fit into an app of this nature, but I am chuffed to report that จริงๆแล้ว there’s STILL MORE! These additional features include a chart showing the dead ending sounds that are made by each consonant, consonant clusters (true, false, leading, and loan), Thai numerals, a *phonetic* keyboard, and even a transliterator you can use to copy and paste a word or phrase in Thai and see the pronunciation spelled out in English - a fantastic and useful bonus!So to anyone out there who might be on the struggle bus and feeling like you’ll never be able to remember all of the consonant and vowel symbols no matter how long you’ve worked and how hard you’ve tried, download this app and before you know it, you’ll be able to mean it when you say the name: I can read Thai!!
