This is obviously the promised follow-up to my previous post on my project of learning the Thai language this year. Hopefully it’ll be more interesting as I’ll be trying to focus on the language itself. The usual disclaimers apply. I’m still very much a beginner so there is still a lot for me to learn. Plus as the Thaipod101 website does explain but is rarely appreciated outside of Thailand, what most foreigners learn is the Bangkok version of the language, or the national standard. Thailand is a pretty big country so there are multiple regional dialects so some words in common usage seem to be very different in different parts of Thailand.

All that said, after these few months of trying it out, I think that Thai is generally a very easy language to learn. It sounds and especially looks daunting but it has almost no grammar and has very consistent spelling and pronunciation rules. There are no verb conjugations, no tenses and no articles. Overall I would rate it as just a notch in difficulty above the famously easy Malay and Indonesian languages. Furthermore those who already know Chinese probably have a leg up due to similarities in some words, those for numbers in particular, shared concepts such as the extensive use of classifier nouns and most importantly of all, an ingrained understanding that different tones of the same syllables can mean different things. English helps too due to the large number of loan words that are directly transliterated into the Thai alphabet. Again, this is probably very subjective but most language experts do seem to rate the Thai language as being very easy to learn.

The first major hurdle to learning to speak are of course the famous five tones. For this, there is no substitute to repetitive practice at both listening and speaking. I suppose this must be extra difficult for those who only know English but for Mandarin speakers it’s really just a matter of adding one more tone, the so-called low tone, to those that we already know. It still takes a lot of practice especially when it comes to listening as in casual conversation, Thais do use verbal shortcuts and don’t fully pronounce some tones sometimes. But after a while the five tones are downright easy and I find myself being flummoxed by what I feel are subtler elements such as exactly how long a vowel should be or words that are written differently but pronounced very similarly. An example would be เขา, meaning he or she, and ขาว, meaning the color white. There’s a difference in how long the sound is drawn out, but it’s too subtle for me to make out most of the time. Finally Thai has some sounds which aren’t present in English, such as the uue vowel. That’s not too bad for someone who speaks French but you’d need to put in the extra practice as well.

I would also suggest taking the time and effort to diligently learn the consonant classes, tone rules and tone marks. My own initial temptation was to skip over these for later as they seem like parts of such a complicated system. You can get by at first by ignoring them and going for forced memorization of words and how they are pronounced. But you’d be handicapping yourself long-term because the whole system is so consistent that it makes pronunciations much easier to remember once you can internalize the rules. This is unlike a language like English in which how a word is written has little relationship to how it is spoken. The system is also simpler than it seems. For example, every high class consonant has a low class equivalent and two of the four tone marks are only ever used for middle class consonants. For the remaining two tone marks, both middle and high class consonants follow the same rules. Once you can get the whole picture, there are fewer rules to memorize than it seems at first and everything kind of just falls into place.

The Thai script famously has 44 consonants and 32 vowel forms, all written in symbols that would be completely unfamiliar to most people, unless you know a related language like Lao. But again, this is less daunting than it seems at first. Only a subset of all of these consonants are commonly used. A couple are obsolete and never used at all, a few others are only used for some very specific words. Furthermore though there are still quite a few consonants, many share the same sounds which I suppose is both good and bad. But the upshot is that the variety of possible sounds in Thai is not that big given the limited number of sounds and the limited ways in which consonants can combine. This is in contrast to English which allows consonants to combine in unlimited ways. It’s still a pain to learn the entire Thai alphabet but it’s definitely doable.

But what really frustrated me and what really motivated me to write this post is the Thai writing system. The language does in fact consist of stringing letters together to form words and words together to form phrases and sentences. Yet the writing system formally does not employ spaces in between words or any form of punctuation whatsoever. That’s why when you see Thai text, it’s just a long string of characters joined together. Consider also that some words are compound words, with each word having a distinct meaning but meaning something else entirely when joined together. In English, we might use a hyphen to separate the two words or no spaces between them but we would have spaces to separate the whole word from other words. In Thai, there is no recourse other than to work out what is being meant from the context. Spaces are sometimes used to denote the ends of sentences but I’m not sure if it’s consistent. All of that makes written Thai extremely difficult to read.

As with anything else, you do get better with practice. For example sometimes you get the familiar vowel constructions that nicely encapsulate a word. But other times you don’t and a consonant could denote the end of a word or the beginning of the next one. One example might be ตากลม. There are two ways to break this apart into two words and the correct one depends on the context. Having a large vocabulary helps a lot so you can instantly pick out a string of letters as a discrete word. But it gets worse again when you consider loan words from other languages, some of which can be extremely long and include silent letters. Or the real nightmare, recognizing which part of a sentence is actually a name since there are no capital letters to distinguish them from other words and no spaces around them either.

That’s why although it’s incredibly pretentious for a foreigner who is so new to the language to say so, I believe that it would be so much better if they could get around to formally reforming the script to allow for spaces and punctuation. I don’t think this is an unpopular or impossible idea either. Thai does have some special characters to denote a repeating word or that a word is a shortened form of a longer phrase. From what I understand, in the past, they also had some symbols to denote the end of stanzas in a poem and such. I believe that some modern texts do include English-style punctuation just to make things easier.

Finally I found that Thai letters themselves may be hard to distinguish when they’re too small. Sometimes the difference between two letters is down to the direction or position of the little circle that forms the head of Thai letters. In most cases that’s not a problem but they can be really small and hard to read on mobile devices. Another related problem is that some designers like to redesign the fonts to look more stylish, typically to make the letters look more like English and in the process minimize some of the features that distinguish one letter from another. Those are really hard to read too!

Anyway these are my thoughts on the language itself so far. No doubt it will be revised as I improve but it’s been an interesting journey.