Learning Thai

I finally started making a more serious effort to learn Thai. Since I arrived in Thailand, I’ve learned bits of the language on a need-to-know basis. I can order food in a restaurant, give directions to taxi drivers, bargain for a lower price, and handle basic greetings. But recently I finally bought a good book and have been working on learning the Thai alphabet and writing system. It’s so confusing! Not only is it a new set of sounds (not to mention tones), but also a whole new world of totally different characters. The Thai alphabet has 44 consonants and 32 vowels. (So far I’ve memorized reading and pronouncing a whopping 12 of them.) Thai is phonetic, meaning that once I know all of the letters, their classes (high, middle or low), the tone marks (low, falling, high, rising), then supposedly I’ll be able to read Thai with decent pronunciation. Learning the letters and distinguishing the tones will be the tough part. But some things in Thai are actually much simpler than English. In Thai, for example, there are no tenses (same verb for past, present, future), no conjugations for different subjects (same verb for I, you, they, we…), and no differentiation between singular and plural. So all of that should make this a simple, manageable project once I learn the other 60+ letters of the alphabet!