Learn it once.
Keep it for good.

A lesson

Four to six new words, ten minutes, and every one arrives inside a phrase rather than on its own. You hear a native recording before you see any romanisation, because reading mai pet silently teaches you a pronunciation Thai people will not recognise.

Practice inside a lesson mixes listening, matching and building sentences out of words you already have. Roughly seven in ten items are new material and the rest are drawn from earlier lessons, so nothing you learned in week one is left to rot.

There is no way to fail a lesson. Getting something wrong schedules it to come back sooner, which is the point of the whole system.

The memory engine

Underneath everything is spaced repetition, the same approach serious language learners use in Anki. Each word carries its own schedule. Answer easily and the gap before you see it again grows: one day, three, a week, three weeks, and onward. Hesitate and it comes back tomorrow.

The effect is that your review load stays roughly flat even as your vocabulary grows, because well-known words drift out to long intervals and stop competing for your time.

Why the alphabet comes first

A0 starts with the Thai script, which surprises people who expected to begin with "hello". Two weeks of fifteen-minute sessions is enough to read slowly, and it pays back for the rest of your studying.

The reason is tone. Thai spelling encodes which of the five tones a syllable takes, through the consonant class, the vowel length and any tone mark. Romanisation almost never carries that information, so it can only ever be a lossy copy of the word.

Checkpoints and tests

Every module ends with a checkpoint of twelve to fifteen mixed questions drawn from what you have just covered. No new vocabulary appears in it. Fall below eighty per cent and you get a short rescue session on the items you missed rather than a locked door.

Each level ends with a longer test, around thirty questions sampled across the whole level. Passing it earns a certificate that states exactly what you did — the things you can do, and that it measures vocabulary and recognition. It is not an accredited qualification and does not claim a CEFR level, because there is no official CEFR framework for Thai and we cannot test speaking. It is the thing worth having, so it is the thing that is actually difficult.

What you need

Twelve to fifteen minutes a day, and headphones or a quiet room, because the audio is not optional. Core Thai runs in any browser and installs to your home screen. There is no app store download and nothing to keep updated.