Thai Reading & Writing Classes

As mentioned on my homepage FAQs for Advanced Thai Learners, there are 44 Thai consonants and 32 Thai vowels. This is a whooping 3 times more alphabet than the English alphabet! 🤯🤯 The Thai Alphabets can be broken down into:

• High Consonants (11 Consonants)
• Mid Consonants (9 Consonants)
• Low Consonants (24 Consonants)
• Long Vowels (12 Vowels)
• Short Vowels (12 Vowels)
• Special Vowels (8 Vowels)

If you are not confused enough, do bear in mind that this is apart from all the crazy exceptions in Thai writing such as:

• Adding a silencer ( -์ ) on top of a consonant negates it. I.e. That consonant is not part of the pronunciation of the word 😒
• There are two ways to write the “ay” vowel – ไ and ใ (NOTE: it is not written as ัย)😖. ใ is used only for 20 words, albeit very common words, and you have no choice but to memorize the exceptions 😖😖
• Adding high consonant “hor hiip / ห” in front of any low consonant turns the low consonant into a “pseudo high consonant” that follows the tone rules for high consonants 🥵. Hence for example, หนู (=mouse) is a rising tone instead of a mid tone 🥶

Please see my blog on the five Thai tones

Thai words are most-of-the-time not pronounced the way it is spelled 😱

• For example, แสดง (=acting) is pronounced as “sa-daeng” instead of “sae-dong” 😨
• สามารถ (= ability) is pronounced as “samaat” and not “samarot” or “samarata”. The “r”/ร sound is not pronounced even though there is no silencer above the consonant 😰
• ญาติ (= relative) is pronounced as “yâat” and not “yâa ti”. The “i”/ ิvowel is not pronounced 😭. Same as ชาติ (= nation) is pronounced as châat and not châa ti

And to make life even harder, there are no spaces nor punctuations between Thai words. 🤪🤪🤪

Clearly, learning the Thai alphabet will be a lot harder than learning to speak Thai. This writing system needs a serious revamp. But for now, written Thai is what it is. 🥺🥺