As you may know already, tone marks alone do not define the tone of the word. All consonants in each syllable influence the tone.

The actual influence is determined by the location of the consonants within the syllable, whether the consonant class is low, mid, or high, whether the syllable is open or closed, and whether the vowel is long or short. In some cases, a consonant in a previous syllable will influence the next syllable! In the end, you’ll have to memorize many rules and the class of each consonant, but for now I’ll just teach you a few easy to remember tricks to help you guess your way.

The most influential Thai consonant, in my subjective opinion, is ห. Its very often found at the beginning of many words, so its important to study this letter first.

Rule #1

If you see a ห in front of a word with no tone mark, you have about a 75% chance of it being a rising tone.

Rule #2

If the word has a ห in the beginning and a dead consonant at the end, usually a ก, the word is a low tone. When a ก is at the end, it’s always a mid or low tone.

Many of the words in Thai have been taken from the two dead religious languages of Buddhism, Bali and Sanskrit. When a Thai speaks a word from these languages, they always use the first tone. Listen to monks chant, and as chanting is only done in Bali, every word they say uses the mid-term.

So how do you identify a word as being Bali/Sanskrit? The first hint is the usage of the อ์ (การันต์, ga1land1) character somewhere at the end. The second hint is the use of one of the more rarely used letters, such as ฑ, ธ, ฐ, ฤ, ฅ, ฃ and ฦ. You know, the letters so rare that you can never seem to remember them . . .

Note: If an English word is written in Thai, you’ll often see the อ์ character, but you’ll never see a rare letter used. In Thai, English words won’t just use the first tone, so be careful.

Rule #3

For Bali and Sanskrit words, only use the first tone. Rare letters and the อ์ is a giveaway.

I think thats enough short tips for now . . . Try out this tone quiz I found online. Given my rules, it’ll take no more than one wrong guess to get all the words right.

As I said before, complete guessing will result in getting the tones correct 20% of the time, while using my tips will get you up to 75%. For the advanced readers that are probably rolling your eyes, you’re right, there is no short cut to being fluent. In the end, you’ll need to learn all of the rules and all the exceptions. But hopefully what you learned here will get you started in the right direction.