The Study Room

Before the games, or between rounds: every character in the set, laid out by tier, with its romanisation underneath. Tap one to hear it. Press the microphone and say it back to get a score.

Real voices, gradually

Every character starts out spoken by your device's text-to-speech voice. As native speakers record characters, those recordings replace the synthetic voice — here and in every game. The detail card for each character says which one you are hearing.

How the scoring works

Your speech is transcribed by the browser's speech recogniser and compared against the character, its spoken name and its romanisation. The result is a percentage based on how close the transcription is, and your best score per character is remembered so you can see which ones still need work.

Organised by the tests learners actually take

Japanese is grouped by JLPT level: every hiragana and katakana at N5, then the kanji new at each level from N5 to N1 — over two thousand in all, each with its readings and meaning. Chinese is grouped by HSK 3.0, the 2025 syllabus, from HSK 1 to HSK 7–9, with pinyin and a meaning for each of nearly three thousand characters. Thai, Vietnamese and English have proficiency tests too, but none of them assigns letters to levels — every learner needs the whole alphabet first — so those follow the order the games teach them: Thai's 44 consonants with their acrophonic names, vowels and tone marks; Vietnamese's 29 letters and every tone; English letters, numbers and symbols.

Stroke order and writing paths

Japanese characters animate their stroke order in the Study Room: tap a kana or an N5 or N4 kanji and it draws itself in writing order, with the centre guides the practice sheets use. That data comes from KanjiVG, used under CC BY-SA 3.0, and it records how the characters are really written.

Thai letters animate too, but the label is different and so is the claim. No open dataset of Thai stroke order exists, so these paths are derived from the letterforms: the centre line of each letter, walked from the head loop, which is where Thai handwriting starts and where the pen stays down as long as it can. It is a reliable guide to the shape and the direction of travel, and the app calls it a tracing guide rather than a stroke order, because that is what it is.

The three consonant classes

Thai tone is not written on the vowel — it falls out of three things at once: which of the three classes the leading consonant belongs to, whether the syllable is live or dead, and which tone mark (if any) sits on top. So every consonant in the Study Room now carries its class, and the letters are grouped by class rather than by how common they are: nine middle-class, eleven high-class, twenty-four low-class. The tone table itself is at the top of the Thai Study Room.

What a letter does at the end of a word

Thai letters often sound different closing a syllable than opening one, and this is where beginners misread words. ร closes as n, not r. ล closes as n too. ส, ศ and ษ all close as t. ฟ closes as p. Six letters — ฉ ผ ฝ ห อ ฮ — never close a syllable at all. Each letter's card says which it does, both ways round.

Printable handwriting sheets

Every group has a writing-sheet button. It produces a printable page — or a PDF, from the print dialog — with each character as a model, two grey copies to trace and empty boxes to write in. Japanese and Chinese get squared practice boxes with centre guides, one square per character; Thai gets a midline and baseline so vowels above and below have room; English and Vietnamese get four-line handwriting guides.

Browser support

Hearing characters needs a speech voice for that language installed on your device; the room tells you which voice it found. Speaking needs the browser's speech recognition, which works in Chrome and Safari and requires a secure connection. Everything else works everywhere.

Two ways to test yourself

Sentence Quiz. An everyday sentence in English, and four in the language you're learning — pick the one that means the same. Every option has a speaker button beside it, so you can hear a sentence you can't read yet; the right answer is read out once you've chosen. Rounds of ten, in every language Script Fall teaches.

Word Drop. An English word falls down a well in a block. Down the side are words in the language you're learning: tap the translation, or press its number, before the block lands. A wrong guess drops it further; a landing costs a life and shows you the right answer. It needs a real vocabulary, which is why it lives in Study rather than with the arcade games. Chinese draws on the first three levels of HSK 3.0 — over a thousand words.

Sentence Quiz · free accountCreate a free account to open the Sentence Quiz. Word Drop · free accountCreate a free account to open Word Drop.