Thai Reading Assistant

I’ve been thinking back to when I was learning to read Thai, and specifically when the class started using real materials (specifically that day’s newspapers). It was a painful process, and working through even a short article would take two hours or more. There really was no pleasure in the process.

Part of the problem was lexis: our vocabularies were far too small easily to comprehend what were were reading, without recourse to dictionaries (which the school discouraged). In turn this meant that it was more challenging to split phrases and sentences into individual words.

And using real world materials meant that there was no spaced repetition of new words.

This led me to wondering what could be done to make things easier and more pleasurable, and in turn to my creating a “Reading Assistant” which (a) splits Thai text into individual words and short phrases, and (b) provides an English language dictionary lookup on clicking on a word. It looks like this:

Words can be circled and/or space separated. As one gets more advanced, one can turn off the circling and extra spaces but still have the “on click” dictionary definition.

It could be argued that deferring learning efficiently to split phrases into words slows learning how to read, but I believe that by removing the grinding tedium of learning to read Thai, it will encourage people to read more and build their vocabularies, so that word splitting in future becomes easier. It also makes reading a lot more fun.

Similarly it could be argued that being able to get a translation simply by clicking on a word makes things too easy; looking up a word in a paper dictionary makes it more likely that the word will “stick” in the mind. That’s probably true, but the learner could, perhaps, make flashcards for each new word they want to learn.

Anyway, the app. is at https://thai-notes.com/reading/readingassistant.html I’d be interested to hear what you think.

(Just to add, the app. doesn’t do too well on proper nouns and English loanwords that aren’t in dictionaries. It still does a pretty good job, though, in my opinion.)