I built a tool to help myself learn the Thai tones

[WesternRobby]

I find it difficult to distinguish between the various tones in the Thai language so I built a tool to try and help. I'm putting it online at www.learnthaitones.com so hopefully it's helpful to some people here.

 

Any suggestions as to how it might be improved are very welcome :)

[tgeezer]

I am not sure that it matters since most native speakers don’t know a word by its tone but you could modify your graphics to match the Thai way of presenting tones. Only four tones are numbered and your numbers don’t match. Common- 1-2-3-4 is the order in which they are recited and named in Thai. This matters if you want to introduce some Thai into your lessons in addition to the theory.



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[WesternRobby]

Great, thank you. Will change their order.

[jackdd]

The listening practice doesn't make much sense with single words, you need to hear whole sentences.

Quite a while ago when i had a Vietnamese GF i let her do the tone quiz from thai-language.com which is quite similar to what you have there. Vietnamese has different tones, so she is definitely used to it, but she can't speak Thai. Her result was just slightly better than mine, i can't remember the numbers anymore, but she was still way below 50%

[WesternRobby]

Thanks for pointing out that thai-language.com had a similar quiz, I didn't know that existed.

 

I do agree that it shouldn't be used in place of practicing with full sentences and say as much on the site. However, I think that there is value in practicing with single words as well. My Thai friends get 95-100% on the quiz and I still fall some way short of that but have improved. The problem when you introduce full sentences is that it's possible to identify the word by the context in which it is spoken.