My last post talked about Thai consonants. On first glance, you probably thought something on the lines of ‘omg 44 consonants too many to learn!’ But really, English is very similar in difficulty once you account for capitalized and lower case letters. And in English, some letters also have multiple pronunciations such as the letter ‘c’ in carrot, celery, and concert.

Thai vowels don’t quite work the way they do in English, in terms of how they are written. In English, words are pronounced from left to right as they are written. But in Thai, vowels can be found not just to the right of the consonant, but also to the left and even above and below. And vowels sometimes even consist of multiple letters that surround the consonant!

Each vowel has its own rule on where to find it with respect to a consonant. In the following list, you’ll see a dashed line ‘–‘ which represents where a consonant would go. For example, –าว is –aow. So ดาว is daow and อาว is aow. If you put a อ in to the ‘–‘ location, the vowel will make a pure sound (ie อ is silent). My recommendation is to practice these vowels by using consonants from the previous lesson.

Vowels in orange are extremely rare, and therefore not worth memorizing for a beginner.