Links to other tutorials

Learn to read Thai - Tutorial 2

Today I will cover another consonant and our first vowel. I will also introduce tone rules.

ร

Name in Thai: ร เรือ
Name in English: Ror Reua (boat)
Initial: r
Final: n
Class: Low
Usage: Very common
Comments: This letter has quite a rolled 'r' sound when used as an initial consonant or as part of a consonant cluster. As a final consonant it becomes an 'n' sound. The Thai word for food (ahaan) ends with this letter.

With some words, however, it becomes 'orn' when used at the end of a word. Porn, a popular Thai girl's name, is one example. There are also a few weird uses involving this letter that I won't cover now.

It is also a letter that many Thais have problems pronouncing. In colloquial Thai it either gets left out completely (kup instead of krup for the male polite particle) or changed to an 'l' sound (haa loy baht for Bt500).

Now on to our first vowel.

ะ

The Thai word for vowel is sa-ra and vowels are referred to as sa-ra plus the vowel sound. Therefore, this is known as sa-ra uh.

The sound is like an 'u' as in 'cup' or 'but'. However, it is often transliterated as 'a'. It sounds neither like the 'a' in 'cat' or the 'schwa' in 'about' so I consider this wrong.

It's a very short sound and when written in this form it ends the syllable. It is written after the consonant in the same way as English vowels are written after the consonant.

If this vowel is written between two consonants it is written another way (called mai-hun-aagaat) and it is written above the first consonant but the sound is the same.

อั

CัC (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant)

Cะ (Consonant-Vowel)

Now, if we take all the letters learned so far, we get:

กระ

The first two consonants form a consonant cluster 'gr'. This is not always as obvious as it seems in Thai because of implied (unwritten) vowels in between consonants but more about that later.

These three letters make a short, sharp gruh sound. If you start to say the word 'grub' but stop before you get to the 'b' that should be quite close. This syllable comes at the start of many Thai words.

You probably know that Thai is a tonal language and you may be wondering what tone this syllable is, and how to work it out.

The syllable has no tone mark above the initial consonant. The initial consonant is mid class, it uses a short vowel, and the syllable is dead. When you say gruh, you cannot continue voicing the sound, as you can with a sound like laa. This is how we know it is dead.

I summarised the tone rules previously in my blog on Sunday 2nd December 2007 but here they are again:

When you apply the rules for this combination, you can see that we get a low tone.

The table above is from the excellent 'Teach Yourself Thai' by David Smyth.

Once you have acquired wall charts (link opens pop-up image) and Thai kids' books (link opens pop-up image), your next acquisitions should be this book and also Benjawan Poomsan Becker's 'Thai for Beginners'. Anything written by either of these authors is worth buying but be wary of many other books.

The word (or syllable) above is one in which the uh sound ends the syllable. Here's an example of where this sound comes in between two consonants in a mid-position. When used this way, it is known as mai-hun-aagaat.

กัด

The first consonant is gor gai (Tutorial 1), and this is followed by mai-hun-aagaat. The final consonant is called dor dek. As an initial consonant it makes a 'd' sound but as a final consonant it makes an unreleased 't' sound (Tutorial 6).

This word means 'bite' and is pronounced gut but you mustn't fully release the final 't' sound. The tone rules for this word are the same as the one above. There is no tone mark used. The initial consonant is mid class, and it is a dead syllable that uses a short vowel. It is therefore also pronounced with a low tone.

In the next lesson, we shall finish off the word I had in mind and then continue with more Thai characters. Easy, isn't it? If you have any questions so far, please let me know.

Also, if you can already read Thai and spot any mistakes or misunderstandings on my part, please let me know.

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.

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.