So you’re just getting started with learning the Thai script or you are a language nerd and just want to learn something alittle new about Thai.
Great.
These are a list of the things I ended up learning when I learnt the Thai script, but wish I had some initial context for. For example, if I understand that I needed to learn the consonant “name” as well as the letter and sound then I could have avoided many incidents where someone tried spelling a word to me and I was completely lost.
Or I wouldn’t have felt so frustrated with the seemingly nonsense silent letters and endings of certain words. At least with some historical context, I can understand even if it is difficult to memorize.
Anyway, let’s dive into it.
Thai Script is Based on Sanskrit
The characters you will see might seem ornate and overly complex, but this is because Thai script traces its origins to the Old Khmer (modern day Cambodia) script, which was influenced by the Pallava script of India.
The Pallava script, derived from Brahmi, was used to write Sanskrit and Pali, the languages of religious and scholarly texts. While many everyday Thai spellings have been simplified over time, certain words related to Buddhism and the monarchy often retain their original (complex) spellings, reflecting their Sanskrit and Pali origins.
Actually, many Thais are inconsistent in their spellings and overall the amount of books being read seems to be lower than other countries. The literacy rate in Thailand is 94% [1] but it seems lik people are less of readers than other places.
The Name of Each Consonant is Followed by a Word Containing that Letter
For instance, the “g/k” sound will be spoken as “goh gai,” which is the sound of the consonant plus the word in Thai for chicken. Each consonant sound is followed by a word because there are multiple consonant characters for the same sound.
For instance, there are around four characters for the “S” sound. Think of this like the Thai version of saying “B as in Bravo.”
This is not true of vowels which just start with the word “sala” which means “vowel” followed by the actual vowel sound.
The reason this is actually important to learn is that you will be asking people how to spell things and you will need to know the letter name to do so.
You’ll be surprised how often you will need this so don’t skip it.
Consonants are Grouped into 3 Classes
Consonants are grouped into Low Class, Middle Class, and High Class.
These groupings help you apply general rules to figure out the tone for a specific word or syllable. These rules are a bit complex and include exceptions, so we’ll skip these for now.
The vast majority of consonants are low class (24 consonants), so you can just remember the high and low classes which are about 11 and 9 characters respectively. Anything else would be low class.
There are also 4 tone markers that we will cover a bit later on as well that interact and modify the consonant tone differently based on their class. This is a point where the rules get tricky but every learner will have to endure through getting used to it.
Anyway, you’ll naturally start to hear tones over time and we’ll revisit them when you’re a bit more advanced.
| Symbol | Name (Thai) | Transliteration | Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| ่ | ไม้เอก | mai ek | Indicates the low tone |
| ้ | ไม้โท | mai tho | Indicates the falling tone |
| ๊ | ไม้ตรี | mai tri | Indicates the high tone |
| ๋ | ไม้จัตวา | mai chattawa | Indicates the rising tone |
If you enjoy reading this article, then you check out this list of 5 reasons why learning Thai is HARDER than you think.
No Punctuation or Spaces Between Words
This effectively means that you will be recognizing clusters of characters that make up a word when you’re reading. Which can make getting started a huge PITA.
Early on, you will struggle to distinguish where a word begins and ends. You likely will also struggle at first to even identify the beginning and end of syllables within a word or sentence. This is unavoidable and most people practicing recognizing standalone words at first.
If you live in Bangkok for instance, you will know all of the BTS and MRT station names so can practice by reading them in Thai and checking yourself when it displays the English.
This will rapidly improve though!
Just do a little bit everyday.
Vowels Can Appear Before, After, Above and Below Consonants
Vowels can be long or short.
In the image below, the character “อ” is a placeholder which means that it will be used with vowels if there shouldn’t be any starting consonant sound.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any sound though as it is actually a vowel in itself with a “oh” sound when paired with a consonant or paired with itself.
Otherwise, the vowel placement sounds complicated, but it’s really not.
A specific vowel will always have a certain position relative to the consonant it’s attached to.
Each vowel is either long or short. Additionally, the differing placement makes it a bit easier to recognize syllables clusters within a sentence.
I know this is a lot to digest, but you’ll get more familiar with this with time so don’t stress too much in a beginner’s article.
Spelling is Hard in Thai
Even Thai people misspell words, and some words are inconsistently spelled by Thai people. So be patient and diligent.
There are even international students I know with foreign and Thai parents who will even prefer to text in English because they say it’s faster. If you start texting as a learner, you will feel his pain. It will take exponentially longer to text in Thai compared to English which can kill your motivation to text early on.
You will be rewarded and soon be able to explore parts of Thailand and Thai culture that otherwise would be completely inaccessible to you.
Not to mention that there are so Thai people that are keen to meet and become friends with a foreigner but simply don’t have the language skills, English or otherwise, to reach out.
You speaking and texting Thai will suddenly open up literally millions of more connections inside of Thailand.
No Verb Tense and Simple Sentence Structure
Thai has no verb tenses, articles, and has the same basic sentence order as English.
It is also not a gendered language like Spanish and French.
This is great news! Grammar, generally speaking, can be learned easily through usage and everyday exposure, which is not the case for many other languages. The only real difference a beginner should remember is that adjectives come AFTER nouns instead of before like in English.
One last point to make is that the vocabulary size of Thai is much smaller than languages like English and Korean. The standard Korean dictionary has about 511,000 words [2] and the Webster’s English dictionary has about 470,000 words.
Compare this to the standard Thai dictionary with around 41,000 words in the Thai dictionary.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these points will help you have a perspective about what learning Thai script will entail and some of the quirks of the Thai script.
Learning to read and write could be done in a single week of actively learning or over the course of a month being a bit less intense with your studying. That time will pass anyway, so might as well spend it learning something useful.
Anyway, if you are interested to get started with learning, then you can do so here.