Learn to read Thai - Tutorial 23

Review

I've only written 21 fairly short tutorials so far (unlucky 13 wasn't included) and we have already covered all the Thai consonants, all the short vowels, and the tone rules.

I wouldn't be confident about learning to read Chinese or Japanese because my perception is that there is just too much to learn (I could be wrong), but Thai is relatively easy. You have to be pretty stupid or pretty lazy (perhaps both) if you've been living in Thailand for a while and can't read a bit of basic Thai.

I doubt that these tutorials will go beyond 30. All I'm planning to do after this is some longer vowels and then I will get a bunch of photos of real signs so that you can practice your reading.

As I have already said, there are different stages involved with learning to read Thai. If you learn purely from books then you will to need to learn to read the fonts used in the real world later. By showing you photos of real world signs, this will save you time.

Firstly though, I need to cover a few other things before I get on to longer vowels and reading practice.

Unusual Characters

There are some characters that appear neither in lists of Thai consonants, nor lists of Thai vowels. I'm not even sure what they are called. As always, if I find out later I will make updates to these pages.

I am tempted to say that you can ignore them but one will be seen often by English-speaking learners of Thai so it can't be ignored.

ฤ

This character makes an ri sound, as in 'grit'. My Se-ed Thai-English dictionary says it is a vowel adopted from Sanskrit but it isn't regarded as a Thai vowel, and the sound it makes is actually a consonant/vowel combination.

I think I only know two words that use this character. The first is the Thai adjective for things pertaining to England:

อังกฤษ

ung-grit

The other is for season (of the year):

ฤดู

ri-doo

This character can be combined with another unusual character to give:

ฤๅ

The only word I am aware of that uses these characters is the name for one of the 's' consonants (Tutorial 10)

Be aware that the following characters are also a part of written Thai but I will be very surprised if you come across them:

ฦ

ฦๅ

Ror Reua

As we learnt in Tutorial 2, ror reua makes an 'r' sound if used as an initial consonant, and an 'n' or 'orn' sound if used as a final consonant. It has some other uses though that you need to be aware of.

When you see two consecutively written ror reua consonants they can act as a vowel if they are in the same word. Of course, they can be written consecutively but they may be in different words because there are no spaces used between Thai words.

รร

This combination of two consonants is now a vowel and is known as ror hun. If it comes at the end of a word it makes an un sound but if it is mid-position it simply makes an u sound, functioning exactly like mai-hun-aagaat (Tutorial 2).

This is completely unnecessary but there are obviously historical reasons why it is used.

ธรรมดา

In the word above ror hun is used in mid-position. We have tor tong (Tutorial 15), ror hun, mor maa (Tutorial 8), dor dek (Tutorial 6), and sara aa (Tutorial 7).

The Thai word tum-muh-daa means 'usual' or 'normal'.

When you see tor tuh-haan and ror reua together, it doesn't make the consonant cluster 'tr' but becomes an 's' instead (to add to the other four 's' characters). This sounds weird but it is really no more weird than putting 'p' and 'h' together in English to get 'f' when you already have a perfectly good consonant to make an 'f' sound.

ทราบ

The Thai word saap is one verb 'to know', the other verb is roo. Both words have the same meaning. It is common in Thai for the same verb or noun to have several different words. Here is roo:

รู้

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.