How to learn Thai by reading

Thai script is beautiful and intimidating in equal measure: 44 consonant letters, vowels written before, after, above and below them, and no spaces between words. Many learners never get past romanization. That’s a pity, because Thai script is logical, and it carries exactly the information romanization leaves out: the tone of every syllable.

The grammar, meanwhile, is friendly. Verbs don’t conjugate, nouns have no plural endings, and there are no articles. Once the script is yours, reading opens up a literature that runs from Sunthorn Phu’s verse epic Phra Aphai Mani to Kukrit Pramoj’s family saga Four Reigns and today’s novelists.

What makes Thai hard to read

• Vowels all around the consonant. A vowel can sit before, after, above or below its consonant, or around it: เก (ke), แก (kae), โก (ko), กา (ka), กิ (ki), กุ (ku), เกา (kao). A vowel written before a consonant is pronounced after it.
• Tones from several clues. Thai has five tones: mid, low, falling, high and rising. The script shows them through a combination of the consonant’s class (high, mid or low), the vowel’s length, how the syllable ends, and four tone marks. Consider ไม้ (máai, wood), ใหม่ (mài, new), ไม่ (mâi, not), ไหม้ (mâi, to burn) and ไหม (mǎi, the question particle).
• No spaces between words. Thai runs the words of a clause together and uses spaces where English would use commas or periods. Finding word boundaries is a skill that grows with your vocabulary.
• Silent letters. A small mark, ◌์, silences a letter, often in words borrowed from Sanskrit or English: จันทร์ (jan, Monday, or the moon) is written with letters that aren’t pronounced.
• Classifiers. Counted nouns take a classifier after the number: หมาสามตัว, “three dogs,” is literally “dog three body”; หนังสือสองเล่ม, “two books,” uses the classifier for volumes.
• Particles and pronouns. Polite particles end many sentences: ครับ (khráp) for men, ค่ะ (khâ) for women. Pronouns change with status and closeness, and stories have their own: นาง, an old literary word for “she,” still appears in tales.
• Numbers, dates and shortcuts. Thai has its own digits (๑, ๒, ๓…), still used in some formal and older texts alongside the familiar ones, and dates follow the Buddhist Era, which runs 543 years ahead of the Western calendar: 2026 is 2569. A small mark, ฯ, shortens long names, as in กรุงเทพฯ, Bangkok.
• Two vocabularies. Everyday words are mostly native Thai, while formal and technical words often come from Pali and Sanskrit: ประเทศ (prathet, country), วิทยาศาสตร์ (witthayasat, science).

Our guide to learning a new script has practical tips for getting started with the Thai alphabet.

Thai reading at each level

Level by level, this is what Thai text looks like on the CEFR scale:

• A2, elementary. Short clauses with everyday words, common classifiers, the time words แล้ว (already), กำลัง (in the middle of) and จะ (will), and simple polite particles in dialogue.
• B1, intermediate. Longer sentences joined with ที่ (that, which), เพราะ (because) and ถ้า (if), verbs chained together (เดินไป, “walk on, walk there”; เอามา, “bring”), and more pronouns in dialogue.
• B2, upper intermediate. Formal vocabulary from Pali and Sanskrit, the passive with ถูก, literary pronouns, and long sentences with several clauses.
• C1, advanced. Close to the original, with some passages condensed. C2 is the complete book.

Our guide to CEFR levels explains the scale as a whole.

Hansel and Gretel at A2 and at B2

From Grimms’ tale, written for this page at two levels. Notice that the spaces fall only between sentences or clauses, and around the repetition mark ๆ:

A2

ฮันเซลกับเกรเทลหลงทางในป่า เด็กทั้งสองคนเดินไปเรื่อย ๆ จนเจอบ้านที่ทำจากขนม

Hansel and Gretel got lost in the forest. The two children walked on and on until they found a house made of sweets.

B2

แม่มดแสร้งทำเป็นใจดีและเชิญเด็กทั้งสองเข้าไปในบ้าน แต่ที่จริงแล้วนางวางแผนจะขังฮันเซลไว้และขุนให้อ้วนก่อนจะจับกิน

The witch pretended to be kind and invited the two children into the house, but in fact she planned to lock Hansel up and fatten him before eating him.

The A2 text shows a classifier at work, เด็กทั้งสองคน, literally “child both two person,” and the repetition mark ๆ, which doubles the word before it: เรื่อย ๆ, “on and on.” The B2 sentence adds แสร้งทำเป็น (“pretend to be”), the literary pronoun นาง for the witch, ขัง…ไว้ (“lock up and keep”), and ขุนให้อ้วน, “fatten,” a word normally used for livestock, which tells you exactly what she has in mind.

A daily Thai reading routine

1. Learn the script first, with sound. Spend your first weeks on consonants, vowels and the tone rules, always with audio. Everything below works best once you can sound out a syllable.
2. Read along with the narration. Start a section and follow the highlighted words as they’re spoken. Watching the highlight move across unspaced text shows you where each word begins and ends.
3. Tap to find word boundaries. When a run of letters won’t break into words, tap it. The card shows you the word and its meaning in context.
4. Reread aloud. Read a few lines after the narrator. Tones become automatic through your mouth as much as your eyes.
5. Keep the tone rules close, then let them go. For the first months, check a word’s tone against the rules when you’re unsure. With enough reading, you’ll simply know how a word sounds, the way native readers do.

Choose your level carefully. Hu and Nation (2000, “Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension”) put the threshold for understanding fiction adequately without help at about 98 percent of the words known. In Thai, an unknown word also hides the boundaries of the words around it, so text that’s slightly too hard becomes hard to read at all. Start easy, and move up when you rarely need to tap. More in the 98% rule, reading while listening and extensive reading.

Classics to start with

• Grimms’ Fairy Tales are short, complete and familiar, ideal for building reading speed at A2.
• The Jungle Book is vivid and episodic, full of animals and forest life, at A2 or B1.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is simple, bright and clearly structured, a good first novel.
• Treasure Island is fast and full of dialogue, at A2 or B1.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes gives you twelve short cases, each finished in a sitting or two, at B1 and B2.

Reading Thai in Lexo

You can tap any word in Lexo, even though Thai doesn’t separate words with spaces, and the card shows what that word means in that sentence and its part of speech. It also spells the word out in Latin letters, which shows at a glance which syllables belong to the word you tapped, and playing it gives you the tone. If it belongs to a longer phrase or idiom, the card explains the phrase too, and the whole sentence is translated into English. Words you want to keep go into your Words list.

Every word can be played on its own, so you hear its tone exactly when you need to, and the whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted word by word as it’s read. You can enlarge the type when vowel and tone marks get small, and sentence-by-sentence mode shows one sentence at a time with its audio and translation.

Levels run from A2 to the complete book at C2, chosen per book. If no one has asked for a book in Thai at your level yet, Lexo writes the edition for you: chapter 1 arrives in a few minutes, the rest keeps coming while you read, and the first reader keeps a dated “First edition” mark. Books stay on your iPhone or iPad for offline reading, and there’s no account to create.

For two more tonal languages, see Vietnamese and Chinese.

Lexo is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Get notified at launch.