Thaipod101

[leosmith]

Innovative Language Learning, the "Pod101" company, which I consider to be the best language podcast company, has started up a ThaiPod101.

http://www.thaipod101.com

Intermediate lessons haven't been created yet, but there are some videos that are just beautifully done; Thai with Thai subtitles, which are intermediate level.

The advanced audio blogs they have are really nice, have straightforward language and come with Thai and English transcripts.

There are some beginner and survival phrase podcasts. They are well done, and probably better than anything else out there, but the teachers aren't true voice actors, so they lack the amusing banter present in their other language podcasts. I am going to request that they add voice actors, or train their existing actors.

These are totally free, but you may have to join to get to the lessons (I joined by habit - I'm a member of Japanese, French and Russian Pod101)

I have no affiliation with this company, and in no way stand to gain from it. But I request that you go give them some traffic so that they will add lessons. Their other languages have hundreds of lessons, so here is our chance to finally get some descent podcasts for Thai. A good podcast will help fill what is, in my opinion, the biggest hole in Thai learning resources - the lack of graduated comprehensible audio with transcripts.

I noticed that a member here is involved with this new site - can you please elaborate on other features?

[LazyYogi]

Thanks for your support.

I'm actually the podcast host with the weak acting skills. Although in my defense I'll just say that we recorded a huge block of lessons before I was able to hear them and didn't realize how wooden my delivery is at times. I'll definitely be more on the ball with future recordings.

But as far as the actual content, I'm pretty happy with what we are able to get out. If you sign up at the website there are three tiers of membership. With a free account you can download and listen to all the podcasts for free. With the Basic Membership you can also download lesson notes in a pdf format. Then with a Premium Membership there are quite a few online learning tools you can access on the website, such as flashcards and quizzes of the vocabulary words. There are also extra sample sentences with audio for all the vocabulary words, and you can select words to keep in a bank to review later. A lot of the Premium Member features are actually pretty good for reading practice.

I haven't been responsible for all of the content. For example, the Survival Phrases series was all recorded long before I was on board. But one thing I've been able to do is get a consistent system of Romanization in place for the transcripts and vocabulary lists on the lesson notes. It is somewhat similar to the Paiboon transliteration method, although I couldn't use the special characters ɛ ǝ ɔ ʉ, so we use 'ae' 'oe' 'aw' 'ue' instead. Bad karaoke Thai is one of my pet peeves, so I've been doing what I can to help people get a jump on good pronunciation.

[leosmith]

I'm actually the podcast host with the weak acting skills.

Sorry about that. I just really like the banter ala JapanesePod101, and hope you guys will play around like that in the future.

Two things to to add

1) one can get a 7-day free membership, which gives them access to everything (I think), so they can download all the podcasts, etc in that time.

2) when you join, you will get 1 or 2 emails a day trying to get you to upgrade. I just tag them as spam, and let it get filtered out. For me, this is a small price to pay for good free podcasts, but I figured I should at least give y'all a heads up.