a) You just sit down and learn which tone for which word (I do this trying to invent little stories in my head why this special word uses this tone(s)). This can be very helpful if you deal with only very few words or words that after a long time still make problems for you. This method is inefficient when learning many words though. b) When learning a lot of vocab I use the free Anki Application for Windows/Linux. I either download vocab stacks with sounds or use the AwesomeTTS plugin which downloads the pronunciation from google translate (sounds a little robotic but OK). When learning words with this method I hear the words every day and am quite confident which one uses which tones after having heard them several dozens of time. c) When you already know quite a lot of words (my guess would be about 3500 to 5000) you can start to listen to mp3 podcasts or youtube videos from different sources in Thai. I usually download the useful ones and then listen to them with VLC in reduced speed (70% or 80%). That way you will hear all the words in context used again and again. Hope that helps Robert

I'm Thai native speaker. When I was in kindergarten and start learn how to read. We learn from mix voice of alphabets vowels and tone marks together repeatedly over and over again until we get the ideas of voice tone of each alphabet. So my suggestion would be practice speaking and listening. I know it doesn't help but please try. Thank for learn Thai. I'm glad people interested in my mother language.

I'm using colour-coding to get used to reading the tones in written Thai. I also remember a podcast for Chinese numbers, where the English numbers were said using the respective Chinese tone. Perhaps that could be applied to remembering tones for Thai numbers? I'm also keen to hear any good advice. :)