Thai has five tones (mid, low, falling, high, rising) and they distinguish words the way vowels do in English. But the writing system never marks pitch directly. Each syllable's tone is computed from: the class of its initial consonant (middle / high / low — a fixed, arbitrary property you memorise per letter), whether the syllable is live (open long vowel, or ends in n / m / ng / y / w) or dead (ends in a stopped p / t / k, or a short vowel), and any of four optional tone marks.

Unit ๑ stays inside middle class with no tone marks, so only two outcomes exist:

Honesty note: the full system (three classes × two endings × four marks, plus vowel length) is genuinely more work than anything English asks of a reader. But it is a finite table, not a per-word lottery — unlike English spelling, Thai pronunciation is almost fully predictable from the page once the table is yours.

Say "pin", then "spin", with your palm in front of your mouth. "Pin" throws a puff of air onto your hand; "spin" doesn't. You already produce both p-sounds every day — English just treats them as the same letter, so you've never had to hear the difference.

Thai splits them into different letters, and swapping them swaps words:

• ป = the p of "spin" (romanised bp). The puffed p of "pin" is a different letter, พ (ph).
• ต = the t of "stop" (romanised dt). The puffed t of "top" is ท (th).
• ก = the k of "ski" (romanised g — it sits between English g and k). The puffed k of "key" is ค (kh).

Classic stakes: ไก่ gài is chicken; ไข่ khài is egg. The only difference is the puff.

จ (j) is the affricate version of the same trick: like the j in "jeep" but with the voice switched off — closer to the ch in "itchy" said with no puff at all.

อ (aw) vs โ- (oo). English "aw" in "saw" is Thai aw — jaw open, lips loose. English "o" in "go" starts near Thai oo but then glides into a w. Thai oo is that starting position frozen: say "go" and stop the vowel before your lips finish rounding. กอ gaw and โก goo are different syllables.

แ- (ae) vs เ- (ee). ae is the vowel of "air" (or a long "a" as in "ham"). ee is the "ay" of "day" with the y-glide amputated — hold the very first instant of "day" and don't move. English speakers hear both as "long a"; Thai spells and hears them as two vowels.

Length is real. This set uses long vowels (written double in romanisation: aa, ii, uu…). Thai also has short versions, and length alone can separate words — hold long vowels genuinely long, about twice what feels natural in English.

Say "cap", but stop with your lips still closed — never let the p go. That unreleased p is exactly how Thai final stops work. English usually releases finals (a tiny "cap-uh"); Thai never does.

In this set, five letters can close a syllable, and they collapse to three unreleased sounds:

• บ ป at the end → p (lips close, no release)
• ด ต at the end → t (tongue closes, no release)
• ก at the end → k

A syllable ending in one of these is dead — which, with a middle-class initial, is what drops the tone to low. Hearing the stop is hearing the tone rule.

Vowels orbit the consonant

Thai vowels attach after (◌า), above (◌ี), below (◌ู), or before (เ◌ แ◌ โ◌ ไ◌ ใ◌) the consonant they follow in speech. The preposed ones are the trap: in แปด bpàet "eight", your eye meets แ first but your mouth says bp first. Read the consonant, then wrap the vowel around it.

อ works two jobs

At the start of a syllable, อ is a silent seat — Thai syllables must open with a consonant letter, so pure-vowel syllables borrow อ as a placeholder (อีก ìik "again"). After a consonant, the same character is the vowel aw (บอก bàwk "to tell"). ออก àwk "to exit" uses both jobs at once.

Finals transform

Letters keep their full sound only at the start of a syllable. At the end they reduce to unreleased stops (see "Finals that stop short") — so ด is d at the front of แดด but t at the back of the very same word: dàet.

One vowel, two symbols

เ◌า is a single vowel, ao, written as a wrapper: เ before the consonant, า after it. เอา ao "to take" is เ + silent-seat อ + า — three characters, one syllable, no consonant sound at all.

Say the middle-class names out loud: gaw gài, jaw jaan, daw dèk, bpaw bplaa. Flat. Now the high-class ones: khǎw khài, chǎw chìng, thǎw thǔng, phǎw phûeng. Rising.

That isn't decoration. Each letter's name is a live syllable with no tone mark — so the name is the tone rule, demonstrated on itself. Middle class comes out mid; high class comes out rising. If you can remember how a letter's name sounds, you already know its class.

Note the third chip: on a dead syllable, middle and high class behave identically. Half of the new class is free.

You spent Unit ๑ learning to keep the air in. Four of the high-class letters are the same sounds with the air let out — and they're the ones English speakers produce by default, which makes them the easy half of this unit.

th and ph are never English "th" or "ph". ถ is not the th of "think" — Thai has no such sound. ผ is not the ph of "phone" — that's ฟ. The h in this romanisation means puff of air, nothing else.

The remaining high-class letters have no Unit ๑ twin: ฝ f, ส ศ ษ s, ห h.

All three are pronounced s, all three are high class, and no rule tells you which a word takes — you learn it with the word, the way you learned that English "sea" and "see" split the same sound.

Compare the three glyphs above rather than memorising a stroke rule — the shapes are genuinely distinct, they just happen to share a sound.

As a final, all three read as an unreleased t: อากาศ aa-gàat (weather), รส rót (taste).

ฃ (khǎw khùat, "bottle") and ฅ (khaw khon, "person" — low class) fell out of use in the early 20th century, partly because the first Thai typewriters had no room for them. They're still taught in the alphabet song and still sit in the character set, but you will not meet them in a modern book, sign, or menu.

They're in this drill for one reason: so that when you see ข, you can be sure it's ข. The difference is a small extra notch in the upper curve of ฃ.

Two more letters, ฤ and ฦ, are vowel-like leftovers from Sanskrit; ฤ survives in words like ฤดู rue-duu (season), ฦ is gone.

Thai has four tone marks and five tones, and their names overlap in a way that traps every beginner. The marks are mái èek, mái thoo, mái dtrii, mái jàt-dtà-waa — literally "stick one, two, three, four". The tones are sǎa-man (mid), èek (low), thoo (falling), dtrii (high), jàt-dtà-waa (rising).

Same words. Different things. Mái èek does not mean "èek tone." It means "apply rule number one", and what rule number one produces depends on the class of the initial consonant.

For the two classes you know, the names happen to line up:

They stop lining up with low-class initials, where ◌่ gives falling and ◌้ gives high. That's the single biggest reason Thai tone feels arbitrary at first — and it isn't arbitrary, it's just a third row of the same table.

Where the mark sits: above the initial consonant, always — even when the vowel is below it (ปู่) or in front of it (ไก่). If an upper vowel is already there, the mark stacks on top of it (จี้).

This is the entire tone system of Thai on one grid. You've been taught the top two rows. The third is greyed out — it's the next thing you'd learn, and it's shown so you can see there's a floor to this.

One asterisk on the low row: on a dead syllable it splits by vowel length — high after a short vowel, falling after a long one. It is the only cell in the entire table that needs a fourth variable. Units ๗–๙ cover this row.

Notice how much of the grid is shared. Middle and high class differ in exactly one cell — live, no mark. And notice the low row's two mark columns: ◌่ gives falling where the others give low, and ◌้ gives high where the others give falling. The marks invert. That single fact is why Thai tone looks arbitrary before you see this grid.

ป่า and ป้า are the pair to feel in your mouth. One mark apart on the page; forest and aunt in the world.

One caveat about "all five tones"

This unit technically unlocks every tone — but two of them barely appear yet. High and rising are reachable here only through ◌๊ and ◌๋, the two rarest marks in the language. Across Units ๑–๖ there are exactly two high-tone words in this app, and both carry mái dtrii.

That isn't a gap in the app; it's a fact about Thai. High tone becomes ordinary in Unit ๗, where low-class dead syllables with short vowels produce it constantly — รัก rák, วัด wát, คิด khít. If high tone feels theoretical right now, that's why, and it's temporary.

Until now, "dead syllable" meant "ends in p, t or k". Here's the other half of the definition: a short vowel with nothing after it is also dead.

So vowel length isn't a subtle accent detail you can approximate. It changes whether the syllable is live or dead, which changes the tone, which changes the word. Length is structural.

English does have long and short vowels, but they differ in quality more than duration ("bit" vs "beat" are different vowel sounds, not the same sound held longer). Thai length pairs are genuinely the same vowel, one held about twice as long. That's the new skill.

Every word here uses only letters from Units ๑–๒. Say each pair aloud back to back — the long member should feel almost comically drawn out.

Both members of every pair are dead syllables with the same class, so both take low tone. The tone is identical — only the length differs. These pairs isolate the one variable.

The short a is written ◌ะ after the consonant — but the moment a final consonant needs that spot, the vowel moves upstairs and becomes ◌ั (mái hǎn-aa-gàat):

The same displacement happens to เ◌ะ แ◌ะ โ◌ะ เ◌าะ, and in one case the vowel vanishes completely: short o with a final is simply not written. Two bare consonants in a row, with nothing between them, are read with an unwritten short o.

Every final you've used so far — ก ด บ — stops the air and kills the syllable. These five don't. They're sounds you can hold: hum an m, hold an n, sustain an ng. A syllable ending in one is live, exactly as if it ended in an open long vowel.

These five letters are all low class — but that fact is irrelevant here, because class only ever comes from the initial consonant. A final has no class. It's the cleanest example of why Thai reading is positional: the same letter does different jobs at different ends of a syllable.

ng is the one to practise

English has the ng sound but never starts a word with it, and Thai does (งู nguu, snake). At the end it's easy: สอง sǎwng is the ng of "song", nothing new.

ย and ว are half vowels

Final ย adds an i-glide and final ว adds an o/u-glide, so they build diphthongs rather than consonant endings: ขาย khǎai, ขาว khǎao. Still live.

Thai has 44 consonants but only eight possible syllable endings. At the end of a syllable, whole groups of letters collapse into one sound — which is why Thai spelling is predictable to read and hard to write from hearing.

The practical consequence: seeing an unfamiliar letter in final position, you can usually guess its sound from the group it belongs to. Twelve different letters, one t.

Why you meet some letters out of order

A few words in this unit — อาหาร, บาท, ตลาด — end in ร, ท or ล, which aren't formally taught until Units ๗ and ๘. That's deliberate: a final has no class and only one possible sound, so you can read it correctly long before you learn what it does at the front of a word. You meet each of these shapes twice, several units apart — spacing, not repetition.

Some two-syllable words are written with no vowel at all in the first syllable. Two consonants sit together, and the reader supplies a short a:

And then the first consonant lends its class

In ตลาด, the second syllable starts with ล — a low-class letter. But it doesn't behave like one. The middle-class ต in front of it governs the whole word, so ลาด takes middle-class rules: dead syllable, low tone, làat.

The same thing happens in ถนน thà-nǒn (road) and ขนม khà-nǒm (snack): high-class ถ and ข hand their class to the น that follows, producing rising tones on syllables that would otherwise be mid.

This pattern is called อักษรนำ (àk-sǎwn nam, "leading consonant"), and it's the same mechanism as the silent ห in หมา mǎa. Three words in this unit use it, flagged in the drill. Treat them as a preview, not a rule to master yet.

Thai puts no spaces between words. Nothing in ดินสอ tells you it's one word (pencil) rather than two (ดิน earth + สอ). You segment by recognising vocabulary, which means early reading is slow in a way that has nothing to do with the script.

Two structural hints do help:

• Preposed vowels signal a boundary. เ แ โ ไ ใ can only begin a syllable, so wherever you see one, a new syllable starts there.
• Finals can't start syllables. A vowel mark appearing after a consonant means that consonant is an initial, not somebody else's final.

Spaces do exist in Thai text — they mark the end of a clause or sentence, roughly where English uses a comma or full stop. So a space tells you something bigger has ended, not that a word has.

Every phrase in this unit is short, and none of them work quite the way the English translation suggests.

Notice how much shorter the right-hand column is. Thai omits everything the situation already supplies, which is why a sign can be two words and a full sentence can be three.

You can't wait until you know every word. Four structural cues narrow the possibilities before meaning does:

• Preposed vowels start syllables. เ แ โ ใ ไ are written before their consonant and can never be finals — so one always marks a fresh start. In ตากแดด, the แ tells you where the second word begins.
• Some letters never end a syllable. ข ฃ ฉ ผ ฝ ห อ among others only ever open one. Meeting a ข mid-line means a boundary just before it — that's how you split กินข้าว.
• Tone marks ride initials. A mark sits above the consonant that starts a syllable, so it points at the beginning, not the end.
• Vowels can't stand alone. A vowel symbol always belongs to the consonant next to it, which tells you that consonant is an initial rather than someone else's final.

Worked example

ขายอาหาร — you see ข (initial-only, so the line starts here), then า, then ย. ย can be a final, so ขาย may be complete. Next comes อ, which can only open a syllable, so the seam is confirmed: ขาย + อาหาร, khǎai aa-hǎan, 'sells food'.

This gets fast, but it never becomes automatic the way English word-spacing is. Fluent Thai readers are doing it too — they just have the vocabulary to guess right the first time.

These are small marks doing large jobs. Two of them change how a word is read; two are conventions rather than rules.

◌็ mái dtài-khúu — the shortener

It never touches the tone directly. It shortens the vowel, and vowel length then feeds the rules you already know. Watch it work:

◌์ gaa-ran — the silencer

Marks a letter as written but not spoken, often taking the letter before it as well. Read up to the killed letter and stop.

Almost always a sign of a borrowed word — from Sanskrit, Pali or English. The dead letters preserve the original spelling.

ๆ mái yá-mók — say it again

Repeat the word before it. Written with a space in front. Repetition can mark plurality (เด็กๆ children), variety (ต่างๆ various), or intensity.

ใ — the ai used in exactly twenty words

Identical in sound to ไ. There is no rule for which words take it; Thai schoolchildren memorise the twenty as a verse. Four of them are among the most common words in the language: ใน nai (in), ให้ hâi (give), ใหญ่ yài (big), ใหม่ mài (new). Everything else with an ai sound takes ไ.

Thai numbers are built by multiplication and addition, with no irregular teens of the English "eleven, twelve, thirteen" kind. Say the digits and you have the number.

The two traps

The เอ็ด rule keeps going: 21 is ยี่สิบเอ็ด, 101 is ร้อยเอ็ด. The ยี่ form does not — thirty onwards is regular again (สามสิบ, สี่สิบ).

Thai numerals

๐ ๑ ๒ ๓ ๔ ๕ ๖ ๗ ๘ ๙ — used for the unit numbers on this page. You will meet them on temple signage, government forms and some price lists, but Arabic numerals are far more common in daily life.

This is not a unit. It is a filter across everything you have learned, showing only the words tagged very common — the ones that appear in a large share of anything you will read.

Nothing here is new. Every item has already been taught in its own unit, with its own tone derivation. What the shortlist buys you is concentration: instead of meeting ได้ once every few hundred questions in Mixed, you meet it constantly.

How to use it

• Work a unit until Progress calls it ready, then spend a few rounds here before moving on.
• Use it when you have five minutes and don't want to start a new unit.
• Watch the core vocabulary meter in Progress — it counts how many of these are genuinely sticking (review box 3 or higher), not merely seen.

Mixed review already leans this way on its own, drawing very common words about two and a half times as often as rare ones. This is the same bias, turned up.

These are the vowels the course had been avoiding, kept back so that every earlier unit could use only shapes you'd already met. They introduce no new tone machinery at all — class, length and live/dead work exactly as before.

Two pairs that differ only in length

The sound has no English equivalent: make an oo as in "boo", then pull your lips back flat while keeping the tongue high. An oo with the rounding removed.

Two wrappers that differ only in the middle

The one that hides a consonant

◌ำ ends in an m sound by itself, so a syllable using it is always live and never needs a final letter. It's the only vowel in Thai that behaves this way — which is why น้ำ is náam rather than nám.

The one that contracts

เ◌อ (oe — the vowel of "her" with no r) drops its อ when a final consonant follows, and a small mark appears above instead: เธอ thoe has no final, เดิน doen does. Same vowel, two spellings, decided by what comes after.

Two overdue payoffs

ส has been called sǎw sǔea since Unit ๒ and ร has been raw ruea since Unit ๗. Both anchor words use เ◌ือ, so neither was readable until now. They are, respectively, เสือ tiger and เรือ boat.

At the end of Unit ๑๐ you can take an unfamiliar Thai word and produce its correct pronunciation and its correct tone, from rules, without a transliteration. That is the whole goal of a phonics course, and it is genuinely most of the difficulty of the Thai script.

What that does not give you

• Meaning. You will read ธนาคาร as thá-naa-khaan flawlessly and have no idea it says 'bank'. Decoding and comprehension are separate skills; only one of them is finished.
• About half the vowels. ◌ือ ◌ัว เ◌ีย เ◌ือ ◌ำ เ◌อ and their short partners still need learning — but they obey the tone rules you already have.
• Speed. Deriving a tone in three steps isn't reading. Progress measures this deliberately: the gate is 90% and a median under three seconds.
• Listening. Reading tones off a page is not the same as catching them in fast speech.

The next honest step isn't another rule — it's volume. Signs, menus, chat messages. The system is complete; the vocabulary is a lifetime.

Low class is the biggest of the three — 24 letters, more than the other two combined — and it is where the tone system stops looking tidy. Two rules are new.

1. Dead syllables split by vowel length

For middle and high class, a dead syllable is always low and the vowel length is irrelevant. For low class it is the deciding factor:

This is the only cell in the entire tone table that needs a fourth variable. Everywhere else, three facts are enough.

2. The tone marks invert

Both take mái èek. One is low, one is falling, and the only difference is the class of the initial consonant. If you have ever wondered why Thai tone rules feel like they don't hold, this is why — and it does hold, on a bigger table than you were shown.

The name trick, corrected

Unit ๒ said a flat name means middle class and a rising name means high. Low-class names are also flat — naw, maw, raw, law. So: a rising name still reliably means high class, but a flat one is now ambiguous between middle and low, and you have to know which. Sorry.

Thai spreads several of its sounds across all three consonant classes. The sound is identical; only the tone behaviour differs. This is the single most useful table in the unit:

Read a row across: ก is the unaspirated g, and then ข and ค are the same aspirated kh sound in two different classes. Choosing between them when writing is vocabulary. Reading them is free — you just need the class to get the tone.

Worked pair: ขาด khàat (torn) is high class, dead → low. คาด khâat (to expect) is low class, dead, long vowel → falling. Same sounds, different letters, different words.

Ten low-class sonorants have a problem: being low class, they can't produce a rising tone, and their dead syllables come out high or falling rather than low. Thai solves it by parking a silent ห in front, which hands over its high class and then says nothing.

หง หญ หน หม หย หร หล หว

อ does the same thing in exactly four words

อยู่ yùu (to be at) · อย่า yàa (don't) · อย่าง yàang (kind, sort) · อยาก yàak (to want to). The silent อ makes ย middle class, so all four come out low. There are no others — learn them as a closed set.

How to spot a silent leader: ห or อ followed immediately by another consonant with no vowel between them. If the ห were a real h you'd see a vowel attached to it.

True clusters — both sounds are heard

Only three letters can be the second member: ร ล ว. The tone always comes from the first consonant's class.

In fast speech the ร of a cluster is very often dropped altogether — ครับ khráp becomes kháp, จริง jing. This is normal, not sloppy.

False clusters — one letter is silent

A handful of pairs are written as clusters but read as a single sound, with the second letter ignored. There is no rule; you learn them as words.

Either way — true or false — the first letter's class sets the tone. That rule never breaks.