This page describes how you can reduce the amount of word data you need to remember, when memorising individual Thai words. The technique takes advantage of the natural structure of the Thai tonal system, so that you can memorise simple rules instead of individual tones. The idea is to make it easy to write out the words and remember them, more like learning European words. The Western brain is much more geared up to remembering European words.

Writing short and long vowels

The first thing to get out the way is how to represent the vowel length. The vowel length partly governs the vowel tone. We want a system that avoids funny symbols if possible as these are very hard to remember (if you are used to learning European words). The system that seems easiest to remember is simply doubling up the leading vowel letter.

mai (short sound – sounds like English word ‘my’)

maai (long sound – the ‘a’ is held longer)

It is also natural because it is always the first part of the vowel sound which is lengthened. So you say

maaaaai and not maiiiiiiiii

About the only sound which can cause potential confusion is the ‘oh’ and ‘ooh’ sound. Both are pronounced like a capital ‘O’. The second is not pronounced ‘oo’

Remembering the tones, syllable-by-syllable

In the usual Thai text’s you are given all the words with their tones included. For example, the Thai word for ‘excuse me’ is

ขอ โทษ (kaaw^R tooht^F, excuse me)

It is pronounced KOR(long rising sound)-TOTE(long falling sound)).

You have to memorise that the first syllable is rising and the second syllable is falling. However, suppose you knew that words starting with ‘k’ and followed by a long vowel are nearly always rising, and suppose you also knew that a words starting with ‘t’ and followed by a long vowel and a ‘t’ sound are nearly always falling. In this case, all you really need to remember is:

kaaw tooht

which looks much more like learning a European word (just do not say ‘toot’). Also, for those who know about Thai pronunciation, the final ‘t’ sound in tooht is actually barely audible (it is a ‘dead’ consonant) and the word sounds more like TOH.

It is actually not quite as simple as that, as the initial consonants are split into 3 groups called low, mid and high and each group has its own tone rules and the low and high groups overlap completely. So, to cut a long story short, you need to memorise

1) All the consonants that are mid (there are only 6 of them)

2) All the other consonants can be either low or high, and you need to use some marker to indicate which group it is in

For the marker, in this website we use a trailing symbol ø which is easy to scribble down when writing out the words for self-testing. The above word actually needs to be written as

kaawø tooht

You may wish to use a leading symbol økaaw tooht or another symbol altogether. I use the trailing symbol as the most important part of the word is the sound, and the second most important is the tone.

If you can work out the tone of a Thai word, simply by looking at the English letters, then this would, in principle, save you a lot of learning effort compared with a normal text book. This is because every word has one of 5 possible tones and the tones are presented in an arbitrary way which assumes that there is no relationship between the word sound and the tone.

As it happens, there is actually a standard (albeit) complex rule that will allow you to work out the tone for many common Thai words. The rule is summarised in this table below.

Initial Consonant vs Final sounds	Ends In a long vowel Ends in a live consonant	Ends in a short vowel Ends in a short vowel + a dead consonant	Ends in a long vowel plus a dead consonant
Low Class	Mid tone	High tone	Falling tone
Mid Class	Mid tone	Low tone
High Class	Rising tone	Low tone

On its own, this information does not offer much help. However there is some additional information you can take advantage of.

1) The mid class consonants can only be one of these sounds K, J, D, DT, B, BP and any leading vowel sound. So if you memorise these sounds then you know if the word is mid-class or not

2) If a word starts with a vowel sound it is also a mid-class word.

3) It is not possible to work out if a consonant sound falls into the low or high categories as the sounds are interchangeable. However if you are prepared to memorise one special extra character which must be memorised along with the high class words, then you are in a position to apply the tone rules for high or low words. For example, we have kaawø above where we have used the characters ø to indicate this is a high class consonant.

4) A consonant is live if the final sound is m, n, ng. It is dead if the sound is t, k, p. There are no other possible consonants end sounds. Again these are small in number so easy to learn.

5) Vowel duration is indicated by the doubling of vowel letters. The above two words are long because kaawø has a double ‘aa’ and ‘tooht’ has a double ‘oo’.

Exceptions to the rules

Although the above table covers a lot of Thai words, there are still plenty of exceptions which break the rules. The rules are broken due to tone marks and also irregular words (common words which simply do not follow the normal rules). For these exceptions you must embed and remember the tone information. I use the following trailing characters as they are easy to type on a standard keyboard \ (falling), / (rising), _ (low), ^ (high).

Source of rules

The table below is a summary of the one presented at http://www.thai-language.com/ref/tone-rules which you should read now.

Initial Consonant Class	Long Vowel or any vowel with live consonant	Short vowel or short vowel with dead consonant	Long Vowel with dead consonant	Tone ‘	Tone S1	Tone S2	Tone +
Low	M	H	F	F	H
Mid	M	L		L	F	H	R
High	R	L		L	F

If you use these rules, do you need to learn less information?

Please note the following analysis is hypothetical and not proven. It assumes that a European brain will store the syllable (letters and vowel length) separately from the tone symbol.

Suppose you want to learn 1000 syllables which are using the standard tone rules (i.e. no tone marks). This accounts for the majority of possible words. If you are simply trying to learn all the words and the tone, then the possible space of sounds your brain needs to allow for is:

1000 syllables x 5 tones = 5000 possible things.

However, if you know the standard rules are being followed and you know the consonant class is high or low then you only need to remember 2000 possible things.

1000 syllables x 2 classes = 2000 possible things

If you know the consonant is mid class then you only need to remember 1000 possible things

1000 syllables x 1 class = 1000 possible things

At the end of the day, you are still learning 1000 syllables in each variation. It is up to you whether you believe it is harder to remember the syllables and the tones versus the syllables, class and tone rules. I personally think it makes learning the Thai words easier and more satisfying to follow the natural structure of the language.