I'm looking for a Thai-Thai dictionary to upgrade my Thai. If talking about English, I can name OED, Longman or Collins Cobild Learner's Dict. (I think Cobild is the best for non-English native speakers) But I have no idea about Thai-Thai dictionary. Any recommendation for dict which is good for foreigner with a lot of sample senteses?

Ken, how good is your Thai? If you are VERY fluent, then a Thai-Thai dictionary may be OK. But short of that, get a Thai-English dictionary (I say English vs. Japanese because there is more selection, and your English is awesome).

In spite of what people may tell you about "learn Thai only using Thai" (English only using English etc), the research on the topic says that this is absolutely not the best way to learn. The best language learners use their own language and bilingual dictionaries extensively. The trick is to then use Thai to communicate WITHOUT dictionaries, or to worry too much about form.

Actually, when I was studying in Italy, I was very gung ho! I used an Italian-Italian dictionary (at the time I was almost at the top level of the language proficiency tests, so I knew a lot of Italian then). What happened? Well, since I often could not understand 100% the definitions of the words I was looking up, I would then have to look up words in the definitions! It was an endless circle, and in the end, I learned a lot of words that ARE NOT USED at all in normal Italian. Don't waste your time doing that.

Just buy a bilingual dictionary to get the meaning of a word, then put the dictionary aside and use the words to communicate with Thai people (like that cute waitresses at the Thai restaurants in Tokyo Or, if you have lots of time, use the Thai-Thai dictionary AND a bilingual dictionary.

Sorry for the long post

There's a very good Thai-English English-Thai dictionary available for downloading FREE! you can find it here:

http://lexitron.nectec.or.th

If you can't read Thai, however, it will be useless.

Thank you Koi, chat with you later na ja.

Thank you Mike! I feel flattered if you use the word "awesome". Seems like we are same kind of personality, which can be called as "Language Gung-Ho". 555

But my Thai level is equevalent with 500 TOEIC on English. (I can read and write Thai but not as good as you, I guess) So, if I take your advice, do you have recommendation for Thai-Eng/Eng-Thai dictionary? I can't find good Thai-JP/JP-Thai dict, just as you imagine...

oh, khung_lung, you are also Mike! thank you, i will try that one.

Well, I'm a fan of electronic dictionaries, so that's what I'd recommend. They give you less info, but they are fast. But if you are somebody who learns from what you are exposed to in communication, then context fills in the gaps, so a basic definition is all you need.

Last time I was in Thailand, I got the CyberDict 9. It's about 11,000Baht so a bit pricy. Unfortunately, it has no word-memory function (since the dictionaries on the market now are not designed for foreigners wanting to learn Thai). But it's the best of the lot I found.

i just use a lonley planet 2 way dictionary, if i can't say it, i can show it, and it works both ways. took me awhile to find out what hew leao mai? meant haha

khun_lung! I signed up, downloaded the program and data and installed them already, but can't start the program! I uninstalled and try again, but same result...don't know what's going on...