Learning the Thai Alphabet is a Waste of Time

Last week I started to really focus on learning to read and write Thai. Problem is the Thai language uses an alphabet that has descended from Khmer language, so the Thai alphabet doesn’t look anything like the Latin alphabet I use to write this post

Most courses in reading and writing Thai start out by teaching you the alphabet, the order of the letters and the items associated with the consonants (someone once decided to associate the Thai consonants with items to make them easier to remember. All the Thai consonants are therefore associated with items like a chicken, a cow, a ring and so on).

As far as I can see it’s not necessary to learn all that. You need to focus on learning the sounds of the letters and nothing else. If you know the sounds of the letters, you can pronounce words and that’s the only thing required to read Thai (that is, if you know what the words you pronounce mean).

It’s faster to learn to the letters this way since you have to remember less information. You will especially be saving time when it comes to all the letters with the same sound (and there are quite a few of these in Thai).

An example: Instead of learning the order and items of the letters ถ, ท and ธ, you just need to learn to recognize them and remember that all of the have a “t” sound.

Eventually, you probably need to learn the order of the letters, so you can lookup words in Thai dictionaries. But at that time you should be able to recognize all the letters, so the order will be much easier to learn than when you started out and didn’t know any letters at all.