What is the best app to learn Thai?

Quick picks

• Best free course: Learn Thai For Free (ours). Runner-up: ThaiPod101's free account, with the first three lessons of every series.
• Best paid Duolingo-style app: Ling.
• Best for audio lessons: ThaiPod101, for its sheer range of levels and topics.
• Best for speaking before a trip: Pimsleur's 30 audio lessons.
• Best for vocabulary games: Drops.
• Best for listening and repetition past the basics: Glossika.
• Best for reading Thai: our free Read Thai course, with Pocket Thai Master for longer explanations.
• Best for your own flashcards: Anki.
• Best for real conversation: a tutor on italki or Preply.

If you were hoping for Duolingo, Babbel or Rosetta Stone: none of them teaches Thai. Our guide to Duolingo and Thai explains why.

How we compared them

General app reviews judge Thai apps like Spanish apps. We looked at what makes Thai different:

• Tones: does the app show them, train your ear and check your voice?
• Script: does it teach you to read Thai, or keep you on romanization forever?
• Audio: native speakers or synthetic voices, and both male and female speech?
• Speaking: any feedback on your pronunciation, or conversation practice?
• Free tier: what you can actually do without paying.
• Price: in US dollars, from each company's own pages and store listings in October 2026. Prices change often and vary by country.

Our information comes from each company's own course descriptions, store listings and price pages. We make Learn Thai For Free, so we're not neutral. We've tried to be fair to everyone, including about our own weaknesses, and we'll update this page every quarter. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.

A 60-second test for any Thai app

Before you pay for anything, look up a few words in the app and check how it handles them:

• ใกล้glâi (near) and ไกลglai (far): does it show the difference in tone, and can you hear it?
• ข้าวkâao (rice) and ขาวkǎao (white): are tones marked on every syllable?
• ขอบคุณครับkàwp-kun kráp and ขอบคุณค่ะkàwp-kun kâ: does it teach both the male and the female form, or only one?

If the app can't tell near from far, it won't teach you to say it either. You can hear all of these in the phrase list below.

Learn Thai For Free

Our own app, so judge accordingly. It's a free web course for English speakers: 24 units from beginner to B1, a Read Thai course from your first letter to real signs, a sounds-and-tones course, numbers, songs and culture lessons.

• Good: completely free, and you can start without an account; every syllable shows its tone; an AI speech trainer gives word-by-word feedback on your tones; AI role-plays let you practise conversations; every phrase adapts to male or female speech; you choose Thai script, romanization or both.
• Not so good: it's new; the audio uses AI voices rather than recordings of human teachers; the AI features have usage limits (a small allowance before you sign in, a daily one after, and signing in is free); it teaches standard Central Thai, with notes on Northern and Isan words rather than full regional courses.
• Price: free.
• Best for: a complete path at no cost, especially if speaking and tones matter to you.

Ling

The app that feels most like Duolingo for Thai: short lessons, mini-games, streaks. Its Thai course has around 200 lessons in 50 units, with grammar tips, culture notes, letter tracing for the script, speech recognition and chatbot dialogues.

• Good: game-like and easy to stick with; covers reading as well as speaking; lots of content.
• Not so good: only the first two units are free; the same engine serves 70+ languages.
• Price: $16.99 a month or $89.99 a year (with a 7-day trial on the yearly plan).
• Best for: Duolingo fans who are happy to pay for a Thai version.

ThaiPod101

A huge library of audio and video lessons, from absolute beginner to advanced, with transcripts, lesson notes and vocabulary lists. The free lifetime account includes the first three lessons of every series and new free lessons every week.

• Good: depth and variety; real dialogues; easy to use on a commute; Premium PLUS adds a personal teacher.
• Not so good: listening is passive unless you repeat out loud; frequent upgrade offers and long-term-plan pricing take some navigating.
• Price: advertised from $4 (Basic), $10 (Premium) or $23 (Premium PLUS) a month on 24-month plans; shorter plans cost more. There's a 60-day money-back guarantee.
• Best for: audio learners who will actually listen every day.

Pimsleur

The classic audio method: a voice asks you to say something, you answer out loud, and the course recycles what you've learned at growing intervals. For Thai there's one level of 30 half-hour lessons, about 15 hours, with an AI pronunciation coach in the app.

• Good: gets you speaking from lesson one; hands-free, so it works while walking or driving.
• Not so good: only one level for Thai; doesn't teach the script; slow-paced; a lot of money per hour of Thai.
• Price: about $15 to $21 a month after a 7-day trial, or around $150 to buy the level outright.
• Best for: a structured spoken start in the month before a trip.

Drops

A beautifully designed vocabulary game: more than 2,000 Thai words with pictures and audio, in five-minute sessions.

• Good: fun, fast and good for a daily habit; the free tier is usable every day.
• Not so good: vocabulary only, with no grammar, sentences or speaking practice.
• Price: free for 5 minutes every 10 hours; Premium about $13 a month or $70 a year.
• Best for: a word habit alongside a real course.

Memrise

Memrise has an official Thai course with 300+ lessons, 3,000+ words, videos of native speakers using the phrases, and AI conversation practice.

• Good: real Thai faces and voices; conversation practice for each scenario.
• Not so good: built around phrases and video rather than reading or tone rules; full access needs a Pro subscription.
• Price: free to start; Pro subscription for everything.
• Best for: phrase-first learners who like video.

Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone doesn't teach Thai any more. It once sold a Thai course as CD-ROM software, but Thai isn't among the 25 languages in its current app. If you see "Rosetta Stone Thai" for sale, it's old software. If you liked its picture-based immersion style, Glossika or Memrise are the nearest Thai options.

Glossika

Glossika trains you with thousands of natural sentences: you listen and repeat, over and over, with native audio and a romanization. The Thai course runs from beginner to advanced.

• Good: a huge volume of listening and speaking repetition; good at making common patterns automatic.
• Not so good: repetitive by design; little explanation of grammar, tones or the script, so it's not ideal as your very first resource.
• Price: 7-day free trial, then $19.99 a month, or about $199 a year.
• Best for: learners past the basics who want lots of listening practice.

Anki decks

Anki is a free flashcard app built on spaced repetition: it shows each card just before you'd forget it. It's free on computers and Android; the iPhone app costs $24.99 once.

• Good: very effective for memory; free; you can add your own words, sentences and audio.
• Not so good: it teaches nothing by itself; shared Thai decks vary widely in quality, and many have no tone marks or audio.
• Best for: committed learners who want to review the words they meet in real life.

Tutor apps: italki and Preply

Marketplaces where you book one-to-one video lessons with Thai teachers. Each tutor sets their own price: on italki most Thai lessons cost about $10 to $20, and Preply's own figures put the average Thai tutor at about $20 an hour.

• Good: live feedback on your tones; real conversation; lessons built around your goals.
• Not so good: costs add up; quality varies from tutor to tutor; you need to schedule.
• Best for: anyone past the first few weeks. Book trial lessons with two or three tutors and keep the one who gets you talking most.

Free vs paid: what you actually get

You can get surprisingly far for free: our full course, ThaiPod101's free lessons, five minutes of Drops a day, Ling's first two units, Pocket Thai Master, Anki on a computer or Android phone, and graded YouTube channels such as Comprehensible Thai.

What money buys, in order of value:

1. Human feedback. A tutor who corrects your tones and makes you talk. Nothing else speeds you up as much.
2. More structured content. ThaiPod101's full library or Glossika's sentence bank, once you've finished what's free.
3. Convenience. Unlimited Drops, no ads, offline lessons.

One tip: pay monthly for the first month or two before you buy a yearly or lifetime plan. Most apps make their long plans look cheap, and most learners stop using most apps.

Best apps for reading Thai

• Our Read Thai course starts with seven common mid-class consonants and four long vowels, adds the remaining letters and tone rules step by step, and ends with real signs, menus and LINE chats. Letters you learn become flashcards that come back for review.
• Pocket Thai Master is a free textbook-style app by an independent developer, with clear reading lessons and grammar notes. It hasn't been updated since 2020, but the explanations still hold up.
• Ling includes letter tracing, which helps if you also want to write.
• Anki is ideal for drilling letters and the words you read on real signs.

Whatever you use, read real Thai early: shop signs, menus, bus destinations. Our Thai alphabet chart has audio for every letter.

Best apps for speaking practice

• Our AI speech trainer checks your tones word by word, and the AI conversation partner lets you rehearse ordering food, giving a driver directions or chatting with a friend.
• Pimsleur makes you answer out loud in every lesson.
• Ling and Memrise add chatbot or AI conversation practice to their lessons.
• HelloTalk and Tandem connect you with Thai speakers who want to practise English, by text and voice message. Free, with paid extras.
• italki and Preply are still the gold standard: a real person, in real time.

A word on the many new AI-built Thai apps that have appeared since 2024. Some are good, but before you pay, check that the audio gets tones right (use the 60-second test above) and that you can leave easily after a month.