ปิ่น วงศ์ประเสริฐPim Wongprasert
34 · Schoolteacher · เชียงใหม่ Chiang Mai
I learned to read aloud from my grandmother. She made me slow down on the long vowels — she said you were doing the listener a favour.
A daily room for years of Thai immersion
ภาษาคือ
บ้านหลังหนึ่ง
For the learner who means to acquire Thai over years, not weeks — and who recognises craft when they see it.
A language is a house you can live in. · Set in IBM Plex Serif & Sarabun.
The extension
Read everything you watch.
Phasa turns the subtitles on YouTube and Netflix into a living text. Tap any word for its reading and meaning, mark it new, learning, or known — and your unknowns stay lit everywhere you watch.
NewLearningKnown
This scene · 0
Words you tap will gather here.
Works on YouTube, Netflix & more
iFrom the editors · an opening
Phasa is a daily environment for people learning Thai over years, not weekends. It is not a phrasebook, not a tutor, not a course in twenty lessons. It assumes you have already decided this matters to you.
We build it in the tradition that runs from Stephen Krashen’s idea of comprehensible input — that you acquire a language by understanding it, not by drilling it — through the immersion movement that followed: AJATT, the Mass Immersion Approach, Refold. The method is not a secret. Read widely and listen constantly to things you almost understand; mine the sentences just past your reach; review them so they stay. What the method has lacked, for Thai, is a tool built for it.
Because Thai deserves one. It has five tones, a writing system the polyglot Stuart Jay Raj calls “a map of the human mouth,” a literature, and an enormous spoken life — and the tools that exist, good as some are, were built for other languages and fitted to Thai afterward. Phasa is built the other way round.
What follows is a walk through the rooms, in the order a serious learner uses them: the reading that arrives each week, the reader that holds the dictionary inside it, the record you keep yourself, and the two reference works underneath it all.
— the editors
iiThe Library · a reading each week
New readings every week, read aloud by people we ask by name.
New writing in Thai — a paragraph of memoir, a fragment of news, a short poem — recorded by real Thai people we ask by name, first slowly and then at a natural pace, in voices from across the country. Fresh readings arrive every week; how many you can open depends on your plan. Or bring your own — paste any text, upload any audio, and your library sits beside the curated one.
This week · one of several new readings
ภาษา
— on the word itself, and what it asks of you
Slow longer pausesNatural as Pim would say it
Read this week by
สมศักดิ์ พงษ์ธรรงสีSomsak Phongtharangsi
58 · Retired bus driver · ขอนแก่น Khon Kaen
I read for my granddaughter, who is learning English in Bangkok. She has the same trouble I had at her age — only the other way round.
นารี สุขเกษมNaree Sukkasem
27 · Librarian · สงขลา Songkhla
There is a particular pleasure in reading a sentence you have heard your whole life and finding it has a shape you never noticed.
iiiThe script · two living traditions
Two faces, one alphabet. Most apps hide that the choice exists.
Thai is written in two contemporary forms — looped, the traditional hand with small terminal loops that Thai children meet first, and loopless, the modern face on signs and screens. Stuart Jay Raj argues the writing system is not arbitrary but logical — a map of where sounds are made in the mouth — which is why Phasa teaches it properly rather than asking you to skip it. Drag to watch the loops open and close; your choice persists across the reader, the dictionary, and the alphabet.
phaa-sǎa
language
sà-wàt-dii
hello
khɔ̀ɔp-khun
thank you
jai
heart, mind
The same words, top loops opened and closed. Switching is one of the small acts of respect the product is built on.
ivThe room · reader, dictionary, mining, extension
The reader holds the dictionary inside it.
Tap a word and its entry opens in place — meaning, romanization, an example, and a button to save the whole sentence to review. The same popup follows you onto the subtitles of any video and any Thai on the open web, through the browser extension. Reading and listening with subtitles is the most effective input there is; sentence mining turns it into review material that’s actually yours.
From the reader · tap a word
ผมอ่านหนังสือภาษาไทยทุกเช้า
I read Thai-language books every morning.
Word-by-word, instant lookupSave any sentence to reviewAudio paired with the textThe same popup on YouTube & Netflix
No sign-up needed to try this. The drills are open and the dictionary is full — that part is always free.
Beyond the pageThe same popup follows you onto the subtitles of any video, and any Thai on the open web, through the browser extension.
เธอพูดภาษาไทยได้ไหมCan you speak Thai?
vThe record · a ledger, not a scoreboard
What you read, what you reviewed. Nothing more.
Phasa keeps a quiet record of the work you do — minutes read, sentences saved, cards reviewed, words marked known. Review runs on FSRS, the open-source spaced-repetition scheduler that learns how you personally forget and shows each card at the last useful moment — materially fewer reviews than the old algorithms for the same retention. There are no streaks demanding to be fed, no badges, no public profile. If you take a week off, the ledger says so, and that is the only consequence.
| Week | Min. read | Sent. saved | Cards rev. | Words known |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| W17 · 21–27 Apr | 144 | 22 | 210 | 1,840 |
| W18 · 28 Apr–4 May | 102 | 16 | 198 | 1,902 |
| W19 · 5–11 May | 168 | 24 | 241 | 2,012 |
| W20 · 12–18 May | 185 | 27 | 233 | 2,054 |
| W21 · this week | 112so far | 19 | 203 | 2,108 |
21 weeks · kept honestlyExportable as a CSV
Daily review · FSRS
Cards come from the sentences you mine.
Mining, under your control
From YouTube and Netflix subtitles, or your own audio.
No scoreboard
The record is for you, not for anyone to perform.
viTwo reference works · the dictionary & the alphabet
Open while you read, open on their own.
phasa.app/dictionary
A Thai–English dictionary, hand-curated.
At the depth of the largest open Thai lexica, hand-curated and growing daily. Searchable in Thai, in English, or by what a word contains.
ใจ
/tɕaj/ · jai
noun
- the heart, as the seat of feeling and intent.
- the mind, especially as the seat of thought.
ขอบคุณจากใจ — thank you, from the heart.
phasa.app/alphabet
Forty-four consonants, three tone classes.
An alphabet course of a kind nobody has made: every consonant with its acrostic name, its tone class, and its stroke order in a hand we drew ourselves.
- Name
- ก ไก่· ko kai · “chicken”
- Class
- Middle
- Sound
- /k/ · unaspirated
กขฃคฅฆงจฉชซฌญฎฏฐฑฒณดตถทธนบปผฝพฟภมยรลวศษสหฬอฮ
The invitation
ห้องสำหรับ
ภาษาไทยของคุณ
A daily room for your Thai. Open it once, and come back every morning.
Sign in to keep a record of your progress. Until then, the drills are open and the dictionary is full — no trial timer, no card on file.
No card needed during open beta · pricing not yet decided