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Learn to read Thai - Tutorial 1

These tutorials are aimed at people who currently have zero knowledge of written Thai but who wish to learn. The objective is to teach people who have no ability now how to read signs and menus, etc. This is not intended for intermediate or advanced readers of Thai; and reading books and newspapers, etc., is beyond the scope of this exercise.

The benefits of being able to read Thai should be obvious. It gives you freedom in Thailand and allows you to be more dependent, not having to ask Thais where buses are going, etc., all the time. You can also read messages on your girlfriend's phone from her Thai boyfriend.

It's good walking into hole-in-the-wall restaurants, browsing the menu written on the wall, and ordering from there. Thais never expect foreigners to be able to read their language, even though they know some foreigners speak a few Thai words.

Probably the best thing about being able to read Thai, though, is that is gets you away from god-awful transliteration. This is the practice of writing Thai words using the English alphabet, which is known to Thais as 'Karaoke' language.

If you are trying to speak Thai from a phrase book which uses this type of transliteration and no one understands you, it is because the transliteration used in these books is hopeless. You only start to become aware of how hopeless it is once you start to understand how written Thai works.

The Thai written language - just like English - is made up of vowels and consonants. There are more consonants than English (44 compared to 21) but many aren't used, or are used only rarely. There are more vowels than English but Thai vowels are much more consistent than English vowels.

'But' and 'put' use the same vowel and should rhyme, but they don't. For these two different vowel sounds, Thai has two different vowels. 'Book' and 'boot' should rhyme, but they don't. For these two different vowel sounds, Thai also has two different vowels.

Technically, English only has five vowels but the inconsistencies with pronunciation mean there should really be a lot more. I am telling you this so you understand why there are lots more Thai vowels but don't let anyone convince you it is a more difficult language to learn just because it has more characters.

Written Thai can be both easy and difficult. Pure Thai is a monosyllabic language and thus most words are quite straightforward. However, there are lots of pitfalls. The written language doesn't incorporate spaces so words appear to be joined together.

Many vowels are voiced but not actually written, while some are written but not voiced. Sometimes there is a special symbol to indicate that they aren't voiced, but sometimes not. There are rules to learn (just like English) and there are certain things that you need to know (just like English).

How does a foreigner know that Leicester is pronounced Lester? They just need to know and this can't be taught.

I'm planning to do this in bite-size chunks. I haven't got time to write everything I know, and spewing out everything at once would only put people off. If you were teaching someone how to read English you might start with C-A-T and explain what sound the different letters make.

I'm going to do a similar thing. Already, with that example, you can see why English is such a difficult language for foreigners to learn. If you explained to someone that the 'C' in 'cat' makes a 'K' sound, they would then have problems the first time they met the word 'ceiling'.

You would then have to explain that sometimes a 'C' makes an 'S' sound but then they would have problems the first time they met the word 'cello'.

The 'A' in 'cat' is pronounced one way, but is different to the 'A' in 'about', which is more commonly known as 'schwa'. Thai is a lot more consistent than English although there are still of inconsistencies.

For beginners I recommend getting wall charts (link opens pop-up image) with the Thai consonants and vowels. This picture is of my first attempt at a wallchart when I first started learning and now I would write some things differently. These are made for Thai kids learning Thai and are very cheap and easily available in Thailand but they could be difficult to get outside of Thailand. Wallcharts aren't essential but the ones I have stuck next to my desk have been a great help.

Resources for Thai kids learning Thai are excellent resources for foreigners learning Thai, and they cost next to nothing. Also worth getting are some kids' join-the-dots books (link opens pop-up image) for practising how to write Thai characters.

On your wall chart of Thai consonants you need to write the name of the character, what the initial and final consonant sounds are, and what class it is. The consonant class is only for tone purposes which I will cover later (if this is worth continuing). First, learn about what basic sound the word makes and start thinking about tones later.

It's important to remember that many Thai consonants change sound dependent on whether they start or end a word or syllable. In the Thai greeting sawut-dee, the 's' and 't' in 'sawut' use the same Thai letter. Books with bad transliteration ignore this fact and tell readers that the Thai word for 'police' is tamruaj. This is why so many phrase books are a complete waste of money.

Here's the first example and this is where I will finish today. I'm not planning to do this in any particular order apart from initially only covering commonly used letters. My other plan is to cover the characters in such an order as to build useful words. All will become clear soon and subsequent entries to this one will be quite short.

ก

Name in Thai: ก ไก่
Name in English: Gor Gai (chicken)
Initial: g (as in 'gate', not as in 'giraffe')
Final: k
Class: Mid
Usage: Very common
Comments: The shape of this consonant forms the basis for several other Thai consonants. The different characters may look the same - or similar - to beginners but the sounds they make are very different.

This consonant is often transliterated (when an initial consonant) as 'k'. This is one of my pet hates. Defenders of this practice insist that 'k' is an unaspirated sound (like a 'g') whereas 'kh' is an aspirated sound (like a 'k').

My opinion is if it sounds like a 'g', why not just write 'g' and eliminate any doubt? If we applied this rule to English words, the word 'khaki' would sound the same but any word beginning with a 'k' not followed by an 'h' would need to be converted to a 'g' such as 'ging' for 'king' and 'geep' for 'keep'. We would also need to write 'key' as 'khey' and 'gate' as 'kate'. Crazy.

Consonant Names

There are several Thai consonants that make the same sound, so each has a name to distinguish it from other similar sounding consonants.

The first part of the name is a word that begins with the consonant sound and rhymes with 'or'. The second part of the name is a word that begins with, or uses, the consonant in question.

As an example, there are two consonants that make a 'y' sound:

yor ying and yor yuk.

yor is purely the sound of the consonant so applies to both but the actual name differs. ying means woman, and yuk means giant.

Thai Alphabet Soundboard

To hear the sound of the Thai alphabet, click on individual consonants using the Thai Alphabet Soundboard. Thanks to David Tang for creating this.

Text Books

There are lots of books aimed at English learners of Thai but the vast majority are hopeless. The transliteration used is so bad that if you try to pronounce Thai words as they suggest, you will not be understood in Thailand in a million years.

The two books below are highly recommended. I have these books and the two authors have taught me almost everything I know about the Thai language.

Their transliteration is a lot better than most so you stand a chance of being understood before you are able to read Thai. Much more importantly though, they take you on the first steps of learning to read Thai.

Once you can read Thai you can then put the transliteration systems where they belong - in the bin.

Recommended books

If you are serious about learning how to read Thai, I highly recommend the following two books. These two books taught me almost everything I know and I still use them almost every day for reference purposes.

Most of the phrase books and text books for beginners that I have bought sit on my bookshelf accumulating dust. They are next to useless and good only to fuel the fire, except that it is never cold enough here to need a fire. However, if a sudden cold snap happens to descend, I will be grateful to Lonely Planet.

If you want to learn how to speak Thai, learning to read Thai will assist your pronunciation enormously. If you are trying to learn to speak Thai from books that use hopeless transliteration systems you are wasting your time because Thais won't be able to understand you.