Fifteen minutes a day for a month, and on day 30 you sit down with a Thai menu and read it. Not guess at it. Read it. Here is exactly what to do on each of the thirty days, and the free tool to do every one of them in.
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Let us be specific about the promise, because most plans are not. After thirty days of this you will be able to:
What you will not be able to do is read a Thai novel, or read at speed, or understand most of what you decode. Decoding and comprehension are two different projects and this month is the first one. That is fine. The first one is the wall, and once you are over it everything else is just vocabulary. 🎉
Handy while you work: A and D move between cards, Space reveals, W plays the sound, S clears the canvas, F toggles shuffle. Learn those five and you never touch the mouse.
Recognition only this week. Do not try to write from memory yet, and do not worry about tones at all. You are building the raw shape to sound link, nothing more.
| Day | What you do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The 9 mid class letters. Trace each one over the guide until your hand stops hesitating. | Learn mode, Mid chip |
| 2 | The 11 high class letters, same way. Then two minutes back on yesterday's mid nine. | Learn mode, High chip |
| 3 | Mid and high together, cold. Say the name out loud before you reveal. | Read mode |
| 4 | First twelve low class letters. Tap Edit and paint just those twelve into your set. | Learn mode, Edit |
| 5 | The other twelve low class letters. | Learn mode, Edit |
| 6 | All 44, shuffle on. It will feel like a mess. It is supposed to. | Learn mode, All |
| 7 | All 44 cold, then run the Wrong chip and clean up whatever you missed. | Read mode, Wrong chip |
End of week 1 you should be getting maybe 30 of 44 right cold. If you are getting 20, you are fine. If you are getting 44, you are lying to yourself on the Got it button. 😄
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An ad was meant to go here. Ads are what keep GorGai free, and not one of them is allowed inside the practice area, so nothing ever pops up while you are tracing.
This is the week that makes the letters permanent. Drawing from memory is a completely different task from recognising, and it is what stops ค, ด and ต blurring into each other forever. Expect it to feel much harder than week 1 did.
| Day | What you do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | Mid class, from memory, no guide. Reveal and grade yourself honestly. | Write mode, Mid chip |
| 9 | High class, from memory. | Write mode, High chip |
| 10 | Low class, first half. | Write mode, Edit |
| 11 | Low class, second half. | Write mode, Edit |
| 12 | Whatever you got wrong. This is the highest value session of the week. | Write mode, Wrong chip |
| 13 | All 44, shuffled, from memory. Take the whole fifteen minutes. | Write mode, All |
| 14 | Paper and pen. Write all 44 in order without looking, then check against the chart. Two weeks in and you just wrote a whole alphabet from memory. 🎉 | Alphabet chart |
Thai vowels do not queue up politely after the consonant. They sit after it, above it, below it, in front of it, or in two places at once wrapped around it. Learning them by position rather than by list is what makes this week work, which is why the vowel filters are grouped that way.
| Day | What you do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | Vowels that sit after the consonant, then the ones that sit above it. | Learn mode, After and Above chips |
| 16 | Vowels below, then vowels that come before the consonant. That second group is the one that breaks brains, because you read it after a letter it is printed in front of. | Learn mode, Below and Before chips |
| 17 | The multi position vowels, the ones that wrap around. | Learn mode, Multi chip |
| 18 | Short then long. Pay attention to the pairs, because vowel length changes meaning and feeds the tone rules later. | Learn mode, Short and Long chips |
| 19 | Vowels from memory. Yes, all of them. It goes better than you expect. | Write mode |
| 20 | Vowels cold, shuffled. | Read mode |
| 21 | Easy day. Run the Wrong chip on consonants and vowels and nothing else. | Both, Wrong chip |
Here is where it comes together and starts feeling like reading rather than like flashcards.
| Day | What you do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 22 | Trace whole words over the guide. Pick the food category, because it is the one you will use first. | Words, learn mode |
| 23 | Spell those words from memory, then check. | Words, write mode |
| 24 | Thai first, meaning hidden. Tap any character you cannot place to hear it and see what it is. | Words, read mode |
| 25 | Tone rules, part one: consonant class, and live versus dead syllables. Read slowly, this is the payoff for week 1. | Tone rules |
| 26 | Tone rules, part two: the four tone marks and what each does on each class. | Tone rules |
| 27 | Tone quiz until you hit 8 out of 10 without stalling. | Tone quiz |
| 28 | Loopless day. Real signs use type with the loops removed, and it will throw you if nobody warned you. Now somebody has. | The signs post |
| 29 | Search Google Images for เมนู อาหารไทย and decode five real menus. Messy handwriting, weird fonts, all of it. | Anywhere |
| 30 | Read something you never practised. A label, a receipt, a shop sign, a friend's Instagram caption. Then go and tell somebody, because this is a genuinely big deal. | The real world 🎉 |
The worst thing you can do on day 31 is stop. Reading is a use it or lose it skill and you have just spent a month building something worth keeping.
Ten minutes a day from here, on rotation:
And read the tone rules walkthrough properly now that the letters are solid. It goes through twelve real words step by step, and it lands very differently once you can already name every consonant in them.
Three decisions in the plan are deliberate and worth explaining, because if you understand them you can adapt the plan instead of abandoning it.
Consonants before vowels. Thai vowels are written relative to a consonant. A vowel form on its own is close to meaningless, so learning them before you can identify the letter they attach to is learning them twice.
Recognition before writing. Writing from memory is a harder task and it fails badly on letters you do not yet recognise. Week 1 makes week 2 possible. Doing them the other way round is how people end up hating this.
Tone rules last. Tone rules are built on consonant classes and vowel length. Trying them in week 1 means learning two things at once, and it is the single most common reason people bounce off Thai. Everything in weeks 1 to 3 is quietly setting up week 4.
That order is also why GorGai has the three modes it has. Trace it, write it from memory, then read it cold. It is free, there is no account, and it works on a phone, which matters because fifteen minutes a day realistically happens on a phone.
You can learn to decode Thai in 30 days, meaning you can work out what a written word says letter by letter. That is a realistic target at fifteen minutes a day. Fluent reading, where you take in a whole word at a glance, takes months on top. The month gets you from seeing shapes to seeing words.
Fifteen is enough, and it beats one long weekly session by a wide margin. Letter recognition is a memory task, and memory responds to short frequent exposure. Two hours on a Sunday is also the schedule people abandon first.
Consonants first. Thai vowels are written around a consonant, so a vowel form makes little sense until you can identify the letter it is attached to. Consonant classes are also what the tone rules are built on, so the consonants pay for themselves twice.
Carry on from where you stopped. Do not restart. Missing a day costs almost nothing, and deciding that a missed day has ruined the plan is what actually ends it. Miss three or more in a row and just repeat the last day you did before moving on.
Tracing letters gets you far! A person who corrects your tones gets you further. These are teachers I know and recommend.
Hi, I’m Mimi! I’ll be your friend (not just your teacher) and get you reading, writing and actually speaking Thai, the fun and stress-free way.
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An ad was meant to go here. Ads are what keep GorGai free, and not one of them is allowed inside the practice area, so nothing ever pops up while you are tracing.