What you see above is NOT the entire Thai alphabet!  It is what makes the language so difficult to read, write and speak.  It is actually the list of vowels along with the tone marks.   What you don’t see on the list is the 44 consonants in the Thai Language.

I took Japanese for an entire year and I can tell you, as a native English speaker who can read/write Spanish Japanese is far easier to learn than Thai.  Japanese is very systematic and orderly.  The two sets of Syllabaries in Japanese the hiragan and katakana were easy to remember as each consonant sound had 5 vowel sounds for example ka, ki, ku, ke, ko.  It makes it easy to read, write and speak basic Japanese (w/out Chinese characters).  Japanese is not a tonal language so you can say it pretty much any way to ge the point across.

Thai Vowels

The chart above has all the Thai vowels.  Confusing right?  You don’t even know the half!  You see the dash which is surrounded with a red dot?  That is where the consonant is supposed to be.  So for example what the vowel above is “sa-ra aah”.  Sa-ra aah is the name of the vowel as all vowels, consonants and tone marks have.

The name usually includes the sound the vowel makes as well as something else.  I will get into that more with consonants.  There are 44 consonants which all make different sounds.  A simple example is adding the first consonant people learn which is called gaw Gai, which means means chicken and makes the g sound.

So you see all the vowels above right?  Some have symbols on both sides, above and below the consonant.  This makes reading very difficult as you must look a group of a bunch of symbols which is complicated by the addition of tone marks and the fact that there are no spaces or punctuation!

Thai Tone Marks

The Thai language is a tonal language.  This means that words that are spelled the same phonetically and sound relatively the same in Western ears, mean something COMPLETELY different in Thai.   For example if you say mai in Thai 5 with the 5 different tones (no tone mark = no tone) it could mean either mile, new, not, right? or silk.  Maybe now you can realize the difficulty of speaking and understanding Thai.

The tone marks are located on the top right of consonants.  To complicate matters, sometimes different vowel and consonant combination have automatic tones which do not have a tone mark!

Thai Consonants

Thai consonants are probably the easiest part of the Thai alphabet to master compared to the vowels but this doesn’t mean they are easy at all.  There are 44 Thai consonants but some look very similar and some make the exact same sounds as others!

What makes Thai consonants complicated is each letter, has a name, a sound, and a meaning.  The name, for example is like double U (W).  The name means nothing and has nothing to do with the sound but in Thai the names has the sound as well as a meaning.

For example the first character, gaw gai (above) means chicken and makes the g sound.  Like I already mentioned, it gets confusing because some look very similar and some sound exactly the same.

Speaking Thai

Speaking Thai is easy if you are reading the phonetic spellings w/out taking into consideration the tone marks.  The problem with this is, it is completely worthless as you are not speaking right.  You may as well be speaking Chinese.

Speaking the words with the correct tones even slowly is difficult and speaking it fast like the people in the street is virtually impossible at this point.  I want to go back to Japanese because it’s about 1/10th as frustrating.

My Class

My class at Language Express is pretty fun.  The structure of each class is pretty much exactly the same for this beginning section.  The first hour is spoken in English.  We start off by going over new consonants and vowels, how to say and right them and their meanings.  Then we have listening exercises then finish the first hour with a game.

The 2nd hour is the speaking hour in which the teacher speaks Thai the entire time.  We listen and read a set of words and phrases then say them outloud in the class.  Next we get in partners and read these conversations in which we have to substitute words we are supposed to memorize which gets very frustrating.

The interesting thing about the class is the demographics.  Even though the teacher speaks perfect English over 1/2 of the class is from non-English countries.   My classes which have different people from time to time had a student from, USA (2 counting me), Australia, France, Japan, Italy, India, Singapore and China last time.  Even though many people use English as a second language there seems to be no problem with the class being taught in English.

Below is a List of the Thai Consonants.

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