Fantastic! Great Study Aid and User Friendly – Talking Thai <> English Dictionary+Phrasebook Review

I've been living in Thailand and taking basic Thai classes for a couple of months now. The classes are focused on spoken Thai, and I've been frustrated by a lot of the e-dictionaries and other apps that require Thai words to be entered in Thai script, which I can't read yet. The Talking Thai app allows me to search for words or phrases in three different ways - using the English word, the Thai word using a romanized script, or the Thai word using Thai script. It also allows me to create folders where I can store favorite words or phrases for later study. I have now done this with the vocabulary words from the first 15 chapters of my textbooks, so I can carry them with me and study at any time. The best part is that for each word (or short phrase), I can click an icon and hear the word spoken by a real Thai speaker. The tones are hard to get right if your mother tongue is not a tonal language, and getting the tones right can be critical to making yourself understood. The spoken Thai in this app is much better than Google translate, which I tried to use before for this purpose. I've found about 98% of the vocabulary from my textbook in this app. The ones that are missing are mostly multi-word expressions. Usually the dictionary has the individual component words, but may not have them placed together, usually because they have an alternate expression for the same thing, often one that is more commonly used. There are also lots of example phrases using basic grammatical forms. More than just a dictionary, I am finding Talking Thai to be a great study aid. I also stumble across a lot of new and useful words as I look up others. The other thing I like about this app is how user-friendly the interface is. When I look up a word, the search engine will give me all examples where that word appears in the entire app. In the English searches, it also shows words with similar spellings. So when I looked up "happy" in English, I found several Thai words for the adjective happy in the first entry, presented with both Thai script and romanized script. Placed next to each word is a little button I can push to have each word pronounced for me, and another button I can push if I want to save the word to one of my folders in Favorites. Below that, is another word for happy in Thai (referring more to being content) and then some words with similar spellings, such as happen, happily, happiness, etc. If I search the other way, using romanized Thai, I get the word for happy showing several synonyms in English to indicate its meaning, as well as the word used in phrases and sentences in various ways. Also, many of the example phrases come from folders dealing with specific subjects, such as Time, or Religion, or How We Feel. If you want to see what else is in that folder, you can just click on the tab immediately below the phrase, and the app will take you to that folder to see what else might be there. This is very helpful for studying the months or days of the week, for example. A feature I really like is the ability to grab just one word or a string of words from a sentence and search for it alone in the dictionary. They make this really easy. You tap the sentence, the app opens a new window where you can limit the words to just the one (or a few) you are interested in, then you can hit search and find the dictionary meaning for just that word or short phrase, or you can hit the "find words inside" command and it will break up the phrase into its constituent pieces and tell you the possibilities for what each individual word might mean. One really nice design feature is that when you hit the back button to return to the original phrase, you find yourself right where you left off within the list, rather than back at the top, having to scroll back down to where you left off. One more really nice feature of the app is the ability to resize the script on any page just by placing two fingers on the screen and moving them apart. Particularly helpful to those who have reached middle age. Whoever designed this app was really thinking about the user when they did so. A final feature I like are a set of symbols to tell the user whether a particular word is formal, primarily spoken only, or literary. This is nice when you look up an English word you want to use, because it immediately tells you which of several choices might, or might not, be appropriate in a particular situation. The symbols are only used for words that are primarily formal, or primarily spoken only, etc. I can't say enough about how useful this app is. The price is very reasonable considering the content. This app has been invaluable as a supplement to my Thai class. Knowing what I know now, I would have gladly paid more for this app. If the designers would like to make improvements, or perhaps create a Pro-version, they might consider adding a flashcard function whereby the words stored in a folder or group of folders could be randomized for study purposes. Also, there is a Thai-Japanese dictionary app where the Thai word can be typed in even if you don't know the exact "spelling" in roman script, and the app will present all possibilities. So if the word I hear sounds like "Kwaam-Suk" but I don't know if it is actually "Kwam-Suk" or "Gwam-Suk" or "Kwam-Suuk", the app will present all of these possibilities. If this app had a "Guess" mode, where it tried to find a word that sounded close to what the user types in, it would make the app even more valuable. Might be trickier to program with English but a feature like that would make this app even more valuable.
Review by Gaelyn V on Talking Thai <> English Dictionary+Phrasebook.