thumbulator.blogspot.com is thumb only for now, but could be easily modified for thumb2 (which would definitely improve your education of the instruction set). Has less features than qemu, but far greater visibility, and considerably simpler to modify, basically the only peripherals and I/O are the ones you add. Thumb2 is mostly thumb with some new instructions. Most of a thumb2 education is just learning thumb. All thumb2 processors are quite happy with the thumb instruction set. Not unlike learning arm7 before learning arm11 instructions. thumbulator will help with the thumb instruction set, the basics, but not thumb2 additions unless you choose to implement them.
There is also the armulator which is/was arms instruction set emulator, which you can find included in things like gdb. Not any more useful at learning that qemu is, but simpler than qemu if you want to try to watch what is going on. gdb itself may be the platform you are interested in as it has that visibility along with an instruction set emulator.
Qemu is good for say simulating a linux build for some arm/thumb target (and having it run fast). Where drivers are in place, etc. But starting from scratch, just to get where you can see the handful of lines of assembler you will have to some I/O, and may struggle just to get qemu to boot and run your code, might be counter productive to what you are doing. ymmv