Writing the Thai Language

I feel like I should justify why I'm not a whole lot better at Thai. Particularly at being literate in Thai. So here goes.

Writing Thai makes no sense.

I'm going to scratch the surface of the complexity of reading and writing Thai. This is just an introduction to the craziness. There are 44 consonants, like 25 vowels, 5 tones, and no spaces between words. Buckle your seatbelt, this is more than you've ever wanted to know about Thai!

First off, in English we do this thing where one sound follows another, and we just write the sounds down in that order. Makes sense, right? Well, Thai doesn't do that. We'll use my name as an example.

 The sound 'k' (one of many)

The vowel that says 'a' as in 'pale' (but a long 'aaaaaaa' not a short 'a')

The sound for 't'

The sound 'ee' as in, 'Katie' + a tone marker

If it was English, you'd put the whole thing together like this.

But it's Thai. And there's no way that you can just put the letters in the order that you say them! So it looks like this

Or, in English

Now I'll give you an example.

This sentence says 'Katie is going to an island with a friend.' (literally 'Katie go island with friend)

If it was English it would look like this.

All the letters are there, if you can figure out where they're supposed to go. And that's a lucky case! Sometimes you don't get the pleasure of having vowels in your words.

The Thai word for road is

Transcribed it would be 'tay known'. Two different vowels - 'a' as in 'pale' and 'o' as in 'go'

But how is it written?

No vowels. 

(If there's no vowel, there are 3 different sounds that it could possibly be, depending on a number of factors)

And believe me, figuring out the consonants and vowels is CAKE compared to figuring out the tones in written Thai. Just imagine this blog post as the pinky finger nail on the monster gourilla of the Thai language.

*Truth be told, I absolutely love Thai, even the craziness of the writing system. It's kind of like a giant puzzle. But it's fun to rant about why I have such trouble learning it!