Which Thai App Uses Typing Instead of Multiple Choice?
TL;DR: Phayan has a typing card with nothing to pick from: it plays a Thai word and you spell it on a Thai keyboard. Out of the box, though, new words are answered on a pick-one-of-three card and only reviews are typed. Switch Word building off and all 94 words in the free levels are typed, each a 1 in 21,952 blind guess on a typical card instead of 1 in 3.
Which Thai app uses typing instead of multiple choice?
Phayan does, once you change one setting. Its Type what you hear card plays a word, shows no spelling and no options, and you build the word key by key on a Thai keyboard. By default a new word meets a three-way vowel pick first; turn Word building off and every new word is typed. Anki, with a deck you build, is the alternative.
Phayan is an app for learning to read Thai script. It adds letters one at a time from zero, so the typing card only asks for words made of letters the course has already taught, and every word has audio, which is what a dictation card runs on. Progress is kept on the device without an account, so the five free levels can be tried, and the setting changed, before anything is decided. The rest of this page is what each of its word exercises asks of you, measured on the course itself.
What does each Phayan exercise ask you to do?
One card asks you to produce the word and three ask you to recognise it. We read each card's option builder out of the app and ran it over every practice round in the free levels 0 to 4: 18 rounds holding 94 words, 75 of them different. The last column is the chance of a correct answer from tapping at random, which is the floor on what a correct answer can prove.
| Card (setting name) | What you get | What you do | Random guess, free levels |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type what you hear (Typing) | The word's audio only | Spell it on a 26 to 32 key Thai keyboard | 1 in 21,952 for a typical word, 1 in 676 for the easiest |
| Build the word (Word building) | The English meaning, the audio, the consonants | Pick the vowel form | 1 in 3 for all 94 words |
| Which word did you hear? (Listen & choose) | The word's audio | Tap the written word | 1 in 4 for 72 words, 1 in 3 for 18, 1 in 2 for 4 |
| Which one is it? (Picture match) | The Thai word and its audio | Tap the picture | 1 in 2 or 3; only 7 of the 94 words have a picture |
The typical typing word is กิน (gin, eat): three keys on a 28-key keyboard, 28 × 28 × 28 ways to fill it. The easiest in the free levels is ปา (bpaa, throw), two keys on 26, which is the 1 in 676. Both figures assume you know how many letters the word has, which is generous to the guesser only until you press Hint, because Hint tells you that and the first letter too. With it, กิน is 1 in 784, still close to two hundred times longer odds than a four-way tap.
Which card does a new word actually land on?
With the default settings, Build the word. A round keeps one queue of words, and a word leaves it after its first correct answer on whichever card served it. Build the word comes first in the round and takes every word that has a written vowel. In the free levels that is all 94, so each is answered once by a pick from three, and the round ends there unless reviews are due. Listen & choose and Picture match get none of the round's words. We checked this by running the app's own round logic over level 1's first round: มา, กา and ตา were each answered on Build the word and the round finished before the typing card came up.
The typing card is where due reviews go: the app serves them at that step and at none of the tap cards. Across the whole course of 662 words-in-rounds, the default sends 608 to Build the word, 53 without a written vowel to the typing card, and 1 to a flash card. With Word building, Listen & choose and Picture match off, 646 are typed. The other 16 sit in the two review rounds of level 9, which use a flash card that shows the word and asks you to pick its tone, whatever the settings.
Is typing better than multiple choice for learning Thai?
For remembering a word days later, yes, as long as a miss gets corrected. In a study by Kang, McDermott and Roediger (2007), students who took a short-answer quiz with corrective feedback did best on a final test three days later, ahead of those who took a multiple-choice quiz or reread the facts. Without feedback the order reversed and the multiple-choice group beat the short-answer group, so the harder format only pays when a wrong answer is put right.
Phayan's typing card puts it right by making you redo it. A miss reads Not yet, try again, and the word goes back into the round until you spell it; the round cannot finish while a missed word is outstanding. The three-way vowel pick still has a use, as a gentle first meeting with a word that also trains your eye on where the vowel sits. As a test of whether you know the word it proves little, and that is the card the default leans on.
How do you make Phayan typing-only?
- Open How you learn and find Exercise types in a round.
- Switch off Word building, the card that answers new words first.
- Leave Typing on. The app keeps at least one of the four word exercises on.
Listen & choose and Picture match come after the typing card in a round, so they only get a word the typing card has not cleared, and a missed word stays at the typing card until you spell it. Switching them off changes nothing for new words. Tone ID, which asks you to name the tone you heard, is a separate switch and never moves a word's schedule. That schedule is a ladder of 1, 3, 7 and 21 days: three correct answers in a row master a word and one miss sends it back to the start. How the ladder runs, and when reviews stop, covers the rest.
Where does typing from sound fall short?
Where two spellings make the same sound. Thai keeps several letters for one sound, so a word you hear can sometimes be written two ways and the audio cannot say which. In Phayan's course we found 8 such pairs, 16 of its 618 different words romanised identically: รถ (car) and รส (taste) are both rót, กด (press) and กฎ (rule) are both gòt, and ได้ (can) and ด้าย (thread) are both dâai. None of the eight pairs shares a round, so a typing card never puts both spellings of one sound in play at once.
Outside the app the pair is still there, and only meaning settles it. The fix is to learn which letters share a sound as a set, which the Thai letters that sound the same lays out. The other limit is the keyboard. It is the standard Kedmanee layout cut down to 26 keys, plus whatever letters the round needs, with the letters you know highlighted. That is enough to spell a word, and it is not practice for typing Thai on your phone.
What else lets you type Thai answers instead of tapping?
Anki does, with cards you make. The Anki manual describes a Basic (type in the answer) note type that compares what you typed with the card. You supply the deck, the audio and the order of the letters, and you type on your own Thai keyboard, which is real phone-typing practice. For spelling recall on a word list you already have, Anki is the better tool.
Phayan is the better choice when the letters themselves are what you are learning, because its typing card only asks for letters the course has taught and the order is set for you. If you are still choosing a method, the ways to learn the Thai alphabet, compared puts charts, mnemonics, video and apps side by side. Duolingo is not among them: its own course list has no Thai course.
Typing versus tapping: five quick answers
Is typing Thai words better than multiple choice for remembering them?
Yes, provided a miss gets corrected: in Kang, McDermott and Roediger's 2007 study, short answers with feedback beat multiple choice on a test three days later. Phayan's typing card returns a missed word to the round until you spell it. Anki's type-in-the-answer cards give the same kind of recall on a deck you build.
Does Phayan use multiple choice?
Yes, by default: a new word is answered first on Build the word, a pick from three vowel forms. In Phayan, every new word in a teaching round is typed once Word building is switched off in How you learn. Its two level 9 review rounds use a tone-picking flash card whatever the settings.
Do I need a Thai keyboard installed to use the typing exercise?
No. Phayan draws its own Thai keyboard inside the card, laid out like the standard Kedmanee keyboard, cut down to 26 keys plus the letters a round needs. To type Thai in other apps you still add the Thai keyboard in your phone's settings.
Does Anki let you type the answer to a Thai card?
Yes. Anki's manual describes a Basic (type in the answer) note type that compares what you typed with the card. Phayan differs in supplying the words, the audio and the letter order, so its typing card never asks for a letter you have not met.
Is Phayan's typing exercise free?
In levels 0 to 4, yes, with no account: 18 practice rounds holding 94 words. After that Phayan costs $14.99 a month or $79.99 a year on the web. Ling and Drops both list Thai courses of their own, while Duolingo has none.