Thai front-loads an enormous pile of pure memory work: 44 consonants, 32 vowel forms, three tone classes and five tones, almost none of which you can reason your way to. That is exactly the shape of problem spaced repetition was built for. Here is how to point it at Thai properly, and the one part of Thai it quietly cannot help you with.
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Most of what makes early Thai hard is not complicated. It is just a lot. There is no clever insight that tells you ข is called Khor Khai and sits in the high class. You either know it or you do not, and the only way to move it from one column to the other is to meet it again and again.
The catch is the timing. Meet a letter too often and you waste the session on letters you already know. Meet it too rarely and it is gone by the time it comes round. Spaced repetition solves that by tracking each card separately and showing it to you just before you would have forgotten it. Get one right and it goes away for longer. Get it wrong and it comes straight back.
Thai has a second feature that makes this pay off unusually well: the letters are not equally hard. ก and ม stick almost immediately. ญ, ฐ and ฒ do not, and the near-identical pairs like ค and ด, or ข and ฃ, will trip you for weeks. A fixed alphabet drill gives all 44 letters the same amount of your attention. A scheduler gives the awkward ones five times as much, without you having to notice which ones they were.
Every card carries an interval and an ease. Answer it well and the interval is multiplied by the ease and pushed further out. Answer it badly and the interval collapses and the card drops back into short minute-scale steps until you get it right again. That is the whole idea. Everything else in the settings screen is a knob on that one mechanism.
The classic version of this is called SM-2, and it is the algorithm most people mean when they say Anki. Newer Anki versions also ship FSRS, a more modern scheduler that predicts your forgetting curve from your own answer history. For a 44 card alphabet the difference is small. For a three thousand word vocabulary deck two years in, FSRS is the better tool. Do not let the choice stall you: either one is enormously better than no scheduler at all.
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The short version is that Anki's defaults are good and you should mostly leave them alone. They are the result of a very long argument among people who care a great deal, and your first week of Thai is not the moment to relitigate it. Here they are, with what each one does:
| Setting | Default | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Learning steps | 1 min, 10 min | A brand new card comes back after a minute, then ten, then graduates. |
| Graduating interval | 1 day | Where a card lands when it leaves learning. |
| Easy interval | 4 days | Where it lands instead if you press Easy on the last step. |
| Starting ease | 2.50 | What Good multiplies the interval by before the card earns or loses any. |
| Easy bonus | 1.30 | Extra multiplier on top of the ease when you press Easy. |
| New cards a day | 20 | How many unseen cards get introduced. This is the one to change. |
| Leech threshold | 8 | How many times you can fail one card before Anki flags it. |
That 20 a day cap exists to stop a ten thousand card deck burying you under a thousand reviews. It is a sensible default for a language deck you will still be using in 2029. It is a bad default for the Thai alphabet, because 44 consonants at 20 a day means you meet your last letter on day three and the cap has done nothing for you except add a wait.
For an alphabet deck, raise it or switch it off. For a vocabulary deck, leave it at 20 and resist the temptation. Adding 100 new Thai words on a Sunday feels wonderful and produces a reckoning on Thursday that ends a lot of people's Thai.
Good is the button. Again means you genuinely could not recall it, not that you got it slightly wrong. Easy is for instant, no hesitation, and using it liberally will push cards out to intervals you have not earned. Hard is for when you got there but it hurt.
The most common way people break their own deck is generosity. If you half-remembered ฎ and pressed Good because you wanted the number to go down, the scheduler now believes you know ฎ and will not show it again for a week. The algorithm is only as good as your honesty about what you actually recalled.
Keep them separate. This is the single most useful structural decision, and it is the one most beginners get wrong by dumping everything into one deck called Thai.
Shared decks for all of these exist on AnkiWeb and are worth a look before you build your own. Check the audio actually plays and that the tone marks render before you commit to one, because a deck with broken Thai fonts will waste a fortnight of your life. Building your own consonant deck is about an hour of typing and you learn a surprising amount doing it.
A word on its own is much harder to keep than a word in a sentence you have heard. Once you are past the alphabet, put a short real example on the back of every vocabulary card. It costs ten seconds and roughly halves how often the card comes back to bite you.
Here is the honest limitation, and it matters more for Thai than for most languages.
An Anki card shows you a prompt, you think, you press a key, and the answer appears. Then you rate yourself. That loop is excellent for recognition, which is the skill of seeing ฅ and knowing what it is. It does almost nothing for production, which is the skill of being handed the sound and drawing the letter correctly, with the loop in the right place and the strokes in the right order.
Those two skills genuinely come apart. Plenty of people can read a Thai menu comfortably and still cannot write their own name. That is fine if reading is all you want. It is a problem the moment you have to fill in a form, and it is a bigger problem than it looks while you are learning, because writing a letter by hand is one of the best ways to stop confusing it with the three letters that look like it.
Anki cannot close that gap on its own. It has no drawing surface, and it cannot tell whether what you produced was right. You can put a card on the screen and write on paper beside you, and honestly that works. It just relies entirely on your own marking, which is exactly the thing we established you are bad at.
GorGai is the other half of this. It runs the same scheduler, SM-2 on Anki's own default numbers, but the card is a drawing canvas instead of a text field. In Write mode you get the letter's name and draw it from memory, then reveal the real character and compare. In Read mode you get the bare character and recall the name, the sound and the tone class, which is the Anki-shaped half.
Two details we took seriously and which are easy to get wrong. Write and Read are separate decks, because drawing ก from memory and recognising it on a sign are different skills and scheduling them together lets one hide the other. And every scheduler number is editable, so if you already know exactly what your learning steps should be, you can set them.
There is no account, nothing to install and nothing to pay. If you already live in Anki, keep your vocabulary there and use this for the alphabet. That combination is genuinely better than either half alone, and it is what we would tell a friend to do. 😊
Start with tracing the consonants if the shapes are still new, then move to writing them from memory once the tracing feels easy. There is a short explainer of what each mode is for, and a day by day plan if you would rather be told what to do each morning.
Ten to fifteen minutes a day, and stop when the timer goes even if you are enjoying it. The point of spaced repetition is that tomorrow is part of the method.
By the end of week two you will be recognising most of the alphabet and getting genuinely annoyed at about six letters. Those six are the whole game. Everything after that is repetition doing its job while you get on with your day. 🎉
Yes, for everything that is pure memory: letter names, tone classes, vocabulary, vowel sounds. It is weak wherever the skill is production rather than recognition, because it grades on your own honesty and cannot see your handwriting or hear your tone. Use it for vocabulary, and use something with a writing surface for the alphabet.
Leave the defaults alone with one exception. Learning steps of 1 and 10 minutes, a graduating interval of 1 day, an easy interval of 4 days and a starting ease of 2.50 are all fine. Change the new cards per day limit, which defaults to 20: raise it or switch it off for an alphabet deck of 44 cards, and leave it exactly where it is for vocabulary.
Not on its own. Anki has no drawing surface and cannot check what you produced, so writing practice inside Anki depends on you drawing the character before you reveal the answer and marking yourself honestly. Paper beside the keyboard works. A canvas that shows you the real character to compare against works better.
Ten to fifteen minutes a day gets most people to recognising all 44 consonants in one to two weeks, and writing them from memory in two to four. The scheduler earns its keep in weeks three to eight, when the letters you learned first would otherwise quietly fade while you are busy with the ones you learned last.
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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