SornSabai (สอนสบาย, “teach with ease”) is what happens when a very stubborn Thai student and a very patient Thai teacher decide the tools they wished existed should exist.
The 440-hour student
I'm Sampsa — a Finnish digital builder from Helsinki. For over a decade I've run a one-person digital agency and co-founded software products, which is a fancy way of saying I spend my days making things on the internet work.
And for more than six years, I've been learning Thai. Not casually: 440 hours of one-on-one online lessons with Thai tutors (I have the certificate to prove it), plus the apps, the books, the flashcards, and the humbling street-market conversations.
Four hundred and forty hours on the student side of the screen teaches you something nobody talks about: how hard online Thai teachers work outside the lesson. Every worksheet hand-made. Every audio clip self-recorded. Every romanization typed out by hand — differently each week. My teachers were brilliant at teaching, and most of their evenings went to formatting documents.
I couldn't fix my tones for them, but I could fix that. So I built a transliteration engine that romanizes Thai with correct tone marks automatically, then lessons with built-in audio, exercises, and print-ready worksheets — so teachers can spend their evenings teaching, not preparing.
The teacher who keeps it honest
None of this would be trustworthy without a real Thai teacher at the table. Palm Samran has taught Thai to foreigners since 2015 — exactly the teacher SornSabai is built for. She runs palmsamran.com, is the author of the Story of Palm bilingual book series for Thai learners, and shares lessons on her YouTube channel.
Here she reviews and shapes everything: the lessons, the exercises, the Thai-language content, and the steady stream of “a real teacher would never do it that way” feedback that makes the product honest. If something on this site teaches well, it's because Palm insisted on it.
What we believe
- Teachers are the product, not the obstacle. Apps try to replace teachers; we build tools that make great teachers even better.
- Tones from day one. Every Thai word on this site carries its tone — in the romanization, in the colors, in the audio. No flat Thai.
- One romanization system, everywhere. A word never changes its spelling on you between pages.
- Built by real people. A student and a teacher build everything here by hand — not a content farm.
Get in touch
Email us at [email protected] — or use the form below. Teachers especially: we build this around your feedback, and we answer everything.