Ok, we finally have Thai on Lingq, after a decade of waiting.
But it’s still a long way from being usable.
First, as I was afraid, the splitter sucks. What are those words “ตื่ - นนอน” which meet us in the very first lesson? It has zero sense! We even have some “definitions” for them on click, which is rather harmful for beginners.
While word splitting may be not the easiest task for languages like Thai, other tools like Language Reactor and Thai2English have managed to do a better job. And it’s especially painful for Lingq, because it requires us to mark every single word. So we now just stuck into endless quest of correcting each phrase by ourselves.
Why couldn’t someone at least go through all these beginner stories and correct the splitting manually?
Then, I couldn’t find the way to show transcription above words in the app. Ok, looks like you can find it on the website itself. But it’s very flawed anyway. For example it transcribe อาหารเช้า as [aantao], which is not even close (it’s something like aa-hăan cháo). Come on, it even miss tones!
While it could be argued that there are too many standards, and none of them represents Thai sounds accurately, the one is used by Lingq is probable the worst.
Finally, I would be happy to see some nicer dictionaries available for external translation, like the mentioned thai2english. Because the split is unreliable, there must be a way to check, if such a word even exist, and for that we’d be better with a more classic style dictionary, rather than just Google Translate.