Anki for Thai: cards that work

Why spaced repetition

Two findings from memory research make Anki worth the effort. Spreading practice out over time gives far better long-term retention than the same amount of practice crammed together; a large review of the research found the effect across hundreds of experiments (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006), and a study of flashcard use found spacing beat cramming for most learners, even though they believed the opposite (Kornell, 2009). And actively recalling an answer strengthens memory more than reading it again (Karpicke and Roediger, 2008). Anki does both: it makes you answer before it shows you, and it spaces each card according to how well you knew it.

Anki is free and open source on Windows, macOS and Linux and on Android (AnkiDroid); the iPhone app is paid. Since version 23.10 it can schedule with FSRS, a newer algorithm fitted to your own review history (its approach is set out in Ye, Su and Cao, 2022), which you can switch on in the deck options.

Cards for the script

• Letter to name. Front: ข. Back: kho khai (egg), high class, kh at the start and k at the end. Learn to recognise first.
• Name to letter, later: front kho khai, back ข. Write the letter on paper before you turn the card.
• Vowels on the carrier. Front: เอือ. Back: long uea, written around the consonant. Then front เมือง, back mueang, town: the same vowel in a word.
• Colour the class. Style the letter by class (gold, vermilion and white on this site) so the class sticks without a separate card.

The alphabet page has every consonant’s name, class and sounds in one table, ready to copy into a deck.

Cards for tones

• Spelling to tone. Front: a word you have not learned yet, such as ค้าง. Back: high tone, because ค is low class and has mai tho. These cards drill the tone rules until you apply them without thinking.
• Audio to tone. Front: a recording only. Back: the word and its tone. These train your ear, and they are worth more than a dozen spelling cards once the rules are clear.
• Tone sets. One card per set of words that differ only in tone or length, such as ขาว, ข่าว, ข้าว: play the audio and pick which one you heard.

Cards for vocabulary

• Thai on the front, in Thai script. Never learn a word from romanisation alone; you lose the tone.
• On the back: the meaning, a tone-marked romanisation, a recording, and a short sentence you met the word in.
• A reverse card (English to Thai) for the words you need to say, not just recognise. Add the type-in field ({{type:Thai}}) to practise typing Thai at the same time.
• Sentences beat word pairs. A cloze card that blanks one word in a real sentence teaches the word with its particles and its grammar.
• One idea per card. If a card keeps failing, split it.

Making Thai look right

Thai with its vowels and tone marks needs a larger size and more line height than Latin text, and a phone’s default font may not be the one you want to learn from. Anki lets you ship a font with your deck: put the font file in the collection’s media folder with a name that starts with an underscore (so Anki keeps it when it tidies media), and load it in the card styling. A looped font such as Sarabun shows the letters the way they are taught; every font in the looped collection can be downloaded here, and their licences allow this kind of use.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Sarabun";
  src: url("_Sarabun-Regular.ttf");
}
.card {
  font-family: "Sarabun", sans-serif;
  font-size: 28px;
  line-height: 1.7;
}
.thai {
  font-size: 48px;
}

<div class="thai" lang="th">{{Thai}}</div>
{{tts th_TH:Thai}}

Settings and habits

• Keep new cards low, ten to twenty a day, and do your reviews every day. Missing days is what makes the pile grow.
• Leave the target retention near the default (about 90 percent) unless you have a deadline.
• Grade honestly. If you got the tone wrong, you got the card wrong.
• Suspend what you do not need. A word you will never use is a daily cost for months.
• Feed the deck from real Thai. The words you meet in stories and conversation are the ones worth keeping.

Anki keeps what you have learned; it does not teach you to understand or to speak. Use it for twenty minutes a day, and spend the rest of your Thai time listening, reading and talking.

References

• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., and Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
• Karpicke, J. D., and Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968. doi:10.1126/science.1152408
• Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317. doi:10.1002/acp.1537
• Ye, J., Su, J., and Cao, Y. (2022). A stochastic shortest path algorithm for optimizing spaced repetition scheduling. Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 4381–4390. doi:10.1145/3534678.3539081