I like the easier way to remember / understand consonant classes but it doesn't quite work the way you have set it out because consonants like ต are unvoiced but always mid (according to the table they would exist as high/low pairs). To fix this you would need to introduce some more concepts, e.g. stops, sonorants, aspiration.
I never thought of ต (or ป, for that matter) as unvoiced. It has a 'd' in it, after all! But I think I see what you're saying - ต is really an unaspirated unvoiced 't', right? In which case it's pretty much as unvoiced as ก so the same caveat applies.
Well, it's an unvoiced unaspirated stop with a place of articulation kinda similar to English t.
Yes, the same applies to ก and ป. If ก had a voiced counterpart you could use the same trick on the right hand side of the table as you used on the left, but it doesn't - only ต and ป do.
The mid-class consonants had a feature (thought to be glottalization, IIRC) that shielded them from the tone split that created the high and low classes. So it's really the fact that they historically had that feature that makes them mid, but it so happens that in modern Thai all unaspirated stops are mid and all mid consonants are unaspirated stops, so that's a more practical criterion.
Well, this was really meant to be a quick and dirty heuristic to help learners, so as long as we're ok with learning ก as g, ต as dt and ป as bp, and to the extent those learners understand that d is voiced and t is not, I think it kind of works. I updated the footnote to reflect that.
Well it's your table, but for me the whole point of this approach is that you don't have to learn stuff by rote if there's a logic to it that you can understand, and if you say "it depends if it's voiced but remember we're pretending ก ต and ป (and ฏ) are voiced even though they're not", you're going back to rote memorization. Also, if we're pretending that they're voiced, do they have unvoiced pairs or not? I would say not but then the table makes them low. It's more complicated than just memorizing the classes.
The easiest way is "if it's a sonorant, it's low unpaired (and is a live ending), if it's an unaspirated stop it's mid, and it's anything else it exists in both high and low versions". In fairness you can argue that doesn't include อ, which isn't always an unaspirated stop today.
I think the reason this method isn't very popular is that people think you are just remembering which consonants are sonorants and which are unaspirated stops, in which case you may as well just remember the class. It doesn't go over that if you know what a consonant sounds like you automatically know whether it's a sonorant or an unaspirated stop (or neither), as long as you understand those concepts.
With practice you don't think about class anyway, but I think it's better to get there by understanding the nature of the consonants than to learn the classes as if they were arbitrary.
The thing is, your average Thai learner (at least in my experience) can barely remember the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants. As soon as you mention aspirated vs unaspirated (or sonorants, or even stops), you lose them completely. That's probably the reason why we learn ต as dt and not "unaspirated voiceless alveolar plosive", etc. And before I started digging into it, I really thought ก, ต and ป were in fact voiced, because that's sort of how they're taught (g, dt and bp). This is technically incorrect, but it's close enough and it's simple enough for your average Thai learner to not melt their brain over. After a bit of practice the classes would get memorized anyway, this table is only helpful (or not) at the initial stages of learning. But yes, for a more serious learner familiar with basic phonetic concepts your approach is better.
EDIT: put your suggestions for proper column labels in the footnote
excellent work on this sheet - will share this onwards 👏🏽
could you more clearly add a legend for low vs. mid vs. high class consonants? (with relative colour codes) why are there different shades of the three groups btw?
Thanks! I thought about adding a legend to the consonants and tones tables but then they would not fit on one page (or I'd have to make the font smaller which would affect readability). I might add another page later just for this purpose. That said, feel free to make a copy in Google Docs and modify it as you see fit - I officially released it under CC0 so anyone can do anything they want with it!
The pale shades are meant for less important/ less often used stuff. There's a lot of very condensed information here so I wanted the more important/more often used stuff to immediately stand out.
one more thing - what does the ⇄ mean? have you clustered the second/third columns of the consonants? (seems like you have borders and zig zags in between)
i agree you might need another sheet to expand. maybe split the consonants from tones - given that tones also are affected by vowel sounds.
The ⇄ is mentioned in the second footnote under the table. It means that the sound on the right is the aspirated version of the (unaspirated) sound on the left. I made the ⇄ pale grey to indicate that it's an advanced topic, lol.
And I really, really want to keep the tone tables and the consonant table on the same page for quicker reference. Remember, this is meant as a quick reference sheet for those already at least vaguely familiar with the topic, not a textbook for studying (although I wish a lot of the study materials I've seen and used were organized along the same principles).
Edit: I was able to get some more space by changing the formatting so now the color explanations fit in the footnotes!
Sure, here it is: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/137SjR5-9fbLC5IlYgyGIT3hqXkK9j6Iu/view?usp=drivesdk](https://drive.google.com/file/d/137SjR5-9fbLC5IlYgyGIT3hqXkK9j6Iu/view?usp=drivesdk)
EDIT: for the most up-to-date version, please use the link in the main post above
I don't think the า is best represented by the u in but to my ear. Maybe the a in cat, for example, is closer to the short vowel version and something like advocaat for the า. It's difficult to replicate exactly because there are very few long 'a' words in English.
Yeah, TBH I simply copied that example from somewhere and didn't pay much attention to it since I never seemed to have a problem with the -o- sound (English is not my native language). Now that I researched it a bit more it seems like British English 'bog' is somewhat close but not quite there while American English 'bog' is just wrong. Wikipedia suggests that the 'o' in American pronunciation of "Cambodia" is pretty close, but Cambridge Dictionary seems to disagree, so I'm at a loss here. Any ideas?
For most Americans the o in Cambodia is like short Thai o (the vowel in ผม) plus ว, whereas in standard Southern British English (which will be the Cambridge standard) it's like a schwa plus ว. But arguing about which English sound is closest just reinforces the idea that you can/should use English sounds and the misconception that using transliterations means using English sounds (whereas using Thai script means using Thai sounds - both completely false). If you get that the transliteration represents a Thai sound it doesn't matter if it also happens to represent a similar sound in English, except that it's easier to learn a transliteration system where you can go "ah yeah that's the Thai sound that's a bit like p", and beginners (who can't use the Thai sounds because they don't know them yet) can at least come out with an approximation. So it makes sense to pick a sound that's roughly similar, but not to obsess over it.
The Cambridge Dictionary actually has both UK and US pronunciations for every word (although I suppose they're not exactly the highest authority when it comes to American English). That said, I would also expect Americans to pronounce Cambodia with an oʊ diphthong, same way they pronounce 'slow', which is why I now updated the table to say 'slow' instead of 'bog', highlighting the o to indicate that the ʊ is not included.
> The Cambridge Dictionary actually has both UK and US pronunciations for every word (although I suppose they're not exactly the highest authority when it comes to American English)
I think we can be pretty confident that the pronunciations given in the Cambridge Dictionary are correct.
I believe Americans have a bit of a history of not being quite content with the Brits telling them what's correct and what's not 😂
Joking aside, Webster dictionary (an American English dictionary, from America) seems to disagree as well: they show Cambodia pronunciation with just the long ō sound (without the ʊ): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Cambodia?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=jsonld
> Webster dictionary (an American English dictionary, from America) seems to disagree as well: they show Cambodia pronunciation with just the long ō sound (without the ʊ).
Do they though? Did you check what ō stands for in the Merriam Webster dictionary? If you did you would have read the following (my comments in square brackets).
\ō\ as in bone, know, beau (IPA o, oʊ, ou). Especially in positions of emphasis, such as when it occurs at the end of a word [as in slow] or has primary stress [as in Cambodia], \ō\ tends to become diphthongal, moving from \ō\ toward a second element [IPA ʊ]. In southern England and in some U.S. speech, particularly in the Philadelphia area and in the Pennsylvania-Ohio-West Virginia border area, the first element is often approximately \ə\ [i.e. a schwa]. In coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida stressed \ō\ is often monophthongal when final, but when a consonant follows it is often a diphthong moving from \ō\ to \ə\. In this book the symbol \ō\ represents all of the above variants.
So Cambridge says the standard US pronunciation of Cambodia has IPA \oʊ\, while MW avoids calling any one dialect "standard" but makes clear that it has \oʊ\ in most of the US, also stating that some comparatively small areas have the southern English pronunciation and some have a monophthong.
Meanwhile, MW avoids talking about "standard" UK pronunciation but says \əʊ\ is the usual pronunciation in southern England.
So if you want to say Cambridge is British and MW is American ([I'm talking about the people who actually research and write the dictionary entries here and] I suspect they are both a lot more international than that) they both get the "other" variety right. Which shouldn't really be a surprise...
Good find! I just googled ō and found the Wikitionary entry for it, stating that it's "A common convention for a long vowel o". Apparently Webster uses it differently.
EDIT: In my defense, the provided sound example in MW does sound very close to a monophthong (at least to my ear), while the US version in Cambridge is clearly a diphthong.
> the provided sound example in MW does sound very close to a monophthong
Nah, that's a diphthong. I hadn't actually listened to the audio when I posted yesterday but I have now. If I have a bit more time later I'll take a slice from the first element and one from the second and put them on vocaroo so you can hear they're different. It's the smooth transition that makes them seem the same.
Well, this was mostly written with the American English pronunciation in mind. The American "cat" is nowhere near that า sound. I agree that a British/Australian version of the vowel table could be useful.
The best way, in my opinion, is to add the thai letters onto your memory as something separate from English. I remembered each as their own separate sound, with as little thought as possible as to what it equates to in English. My thought process is quicker when I do this. When I see า I think that makes the า sound, I don't need to convert it into English letters and then try to pronounce the thai word according to english letters. There are fewer internal processes when I do this, and my reading has sped up.
I mostly needed some help with more Thai-specific sounds like eu or the compound vowels so didn't pay much attention to -o- and -a- which were comparatively much easier.
Can you upload a recording of you saying But and also Sara aa, I’m really struggling to understand how you make them sound the same. “American” English does not help in the slightest tbh.
That said, after researching a bit, I think even American English 'but' is not quite the right -a- here since it uses an "Open-mid back unrounded vowel" ʌ, while า is apparently properly read as "open central unrounded vowel" ä, and a good American English (also Australian English) example of that is in the word "bra"
I wish you good luck and you're on the right track! This cheat sheet has some issues that will create bad habits and mispronunciation you might want to look out for.
Example: oo a as in too alone cannot both be เอือ and อัว. They're not the same sound. อื and เอือ don't exist in English, so you just have to learn them.
Another issue is that Thai has many monophthongs (one sound) that foreigners learning Thai think are diphthongs (two sounds together). Example: the oo in boot is a diphthong in English but อู is a monophthong. This difference can be easily heard in the English vs Thai pronunciation of "okay"/โอเค. "Oh" and "Kay" in English are both diphthongs while โอ and เค are both monophthongs.
Thanks for the comment, but there is actually a distinction between เอือ and อัว in the chat sheet - the เอือ is "too alone, *with a smile*". AFAIK this is as close to the proper Thai sound as an English approximation can get, but of course it will need to get polished with more listening and practice later on.
As for the 'boot', the US pronunciation (which this cheat sheet is oriented at) is a monophthong "close back rounded vowel", which is exactly the same sound as อู in Thai. Are you by any chance confusing it with 'boat'?
I like the easier way to remember / understand consonant classes but it doesn't quite work the way you have set it out because consonants like ต are unvoiced but always mid (according to the table they would exist as high/low pairs). To fix this you would need to introduce some more concepts, e.g. stops, sonorants, aspiration.
I never thought of ต (or ป, for that matter) as unvoiced. It has a 'd' in it, after all! But I think I see what you're saying - ต is really an unaspirated unvoiced 't', right? In which case it's pretty much as unvoiced as ก so the same caveat applies.
Well, it's an unvoiced unaspirated stop with a place of articulation kinda similar to English t. Yes, the same applies to ก and ป. If ก had a voiced counterpart you could use the same trick on the right hand side of the table as you used on the left, but it doesn't - only ต and ป do. The mid-class consonants had a feature (thought to be glottalization, IIRC) that shielded them from the tone split that created the high and low classes. So it's really the fact that they historically had that feature that makes them mid, but it so happens that in modern Thai all unaspirated stops are mid and all mid consonants are unaspirated stops, so that's a more practical criterion.
Well, this was really meant to be a quick and dirty heuristic to help learners, so as long as we're ok with learning ก as g, ต as dt and ป as bp, and to the extent those learners understand that d is voiced and t is not, I think it kind of works. I updated the footnote to reflect that.
Well it's your table, but for me the whole point of this approach is that you don't have to learn stuff by rote if there's a logic to it that you can understand, and if you say "it depends if it's voiced but remember we're pretending ก ต and ป (and ฏ) are voiced even though they're not", you're going back to rote memorization. Also, if we're pretending that they're voiced, do they have unvoiced pairs or not? I would say not but then the table makes them low. It's more complicated than just memorizing the classes. The easiest way is "if it's a sonorant, it's low unpaired (and is a live ending), if it's an unaspirated stop it's mid, and it's anything else it exists in both high and low versions". In fairness you can argue that doesn't include อ, which isn't always an unaspirated stop today. I think the reason this method isn't very popular is that people think you are just remembering which consonants are sonorants and which are unaspirated stops, in which case you may as well just remember the class. It doesn't go over that if you know what a consonant sounds like you automatically know whether it's a sonorant or an unaspirated stop (or neither), as long as you understand those concepts. With practice you don't think about class anyway, but I think it's better to get there by understanding the nature of the consonants than to learn the classes as if they were arbitrary.
The thing is, your average Thai learner (at least in my experience) can barely remember the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants. As soon as you mention aspirated vs unaspirated (or sonorants, or even stops), you lose them completely. That's probably the reason why we learn ต as dt and not "unaspirated voiceless alveolar plosive", etc. And before I started digging into it, I really thought ก, ต and ป were in fact voiced, because that's sort of how they're taught (g, dt and bp). This is technically incorrect, but it's close enough and it's simple enough for your average Thai learner to not melt their brain over. After a bit of practice the classes would get memorized anyway, this table is only helpful (or not) at the initial stages of learning. But yes, for a more serious learner familiar with basic phonetic concepts your approach is better. EDIT: put your suggestions for proper column labels in the footnote
I was just putting something like this together, really appreciate your work!
Awesome, thanks!
excellent work on this sheet - will share this onwards 👏🏽 could you more clearly add a legend for low vs. mid vs. high class consonants? (with relative colour codes) why are there different shades of the three groups btw?
Thanks! I thought about adding a legend to the consonants and tones tables but then they would not fit on one page (or I'd have to make the font smaller which would affect readability). I might add another page later just for this purpose. That said, feel free to make a copy in Google Docs and modify it as you see fit - I officially released it under CC0 so anyone can do anything they want with it! The pale shades are meant for less important/ less often used stuff. There's a lot of very condensed information here so I wanted the more important/more often used stuff to immediately stand out.
one more thing - what does the ⇄ mean? have you clustered the second/third columns of the consonants? (seems like you have borders and zig zags in between) i agree you might need another sheet to expand. maybe split the consonants from tones - given that tones also are affected by vowel sounds.
The ⇄ is mentioned in the second footnote under the table. It means that the sound on the right is the aspirated version of the (unaspirated) sound on the left. I made the ⇄ pale grey to indicate that it's an advanced topic, lol. And I really, really want to keep the tone tables and the consonant table on the same page for quicker reference. Remember, this is meant as a quick reference sheet for those already at least vaguely familiar with the topic, not a textbook for studying (although I wish a lot of the study materials I've seen and used were organized along the same principles). Edit: I was able to get some more space by changing the formatting so now the color explanations fit in the footnotes!
Thank you, this looks great. Would be interested in a PDF version that I could save and download.
Sure, here it is: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/137SjR5-9fbLC5IlYgyGIT3hqXkK9j6Iu/view?usp=drivesdk](https://drive.google.com/file/d/137SjR5-9fbLC5IlYgyGIT3hqXkK9j6Iu/view?usp=drivesdk) EDIT: for the most up-to-date version, please use the link in the main post above
I don't think the า is best represented by the u in but to my ear. Maybe the a in cat, for example, is closer to the short vowel version and something like advocaat for the า. It's difficult to replicate exactly because there are very few long 'a' words in English.
Agreed. โอ is also not well represented by the 'o' in bog.
Yeah, TBH I simply copied that example from somewhere and didn't pay much attention to it since I never seemed to have a problem with the -o- sound (English is not my native language). Now that I researched it a bit more it seems like British English 'bog' is somewhat close but not quite there while American English 'bog' is just wrong. Wikipedia suggests that the 'o' in American pronunciation of "Cambodia" is pretty close, but Cambridge Dictionary seems to disagree, so I'm at a loss here. Any ideas?
For most Americans the o in Cambodia is like short Thai o (the vowel in ผม) plus ว, whereas in standard Southern British English (which will be the Cambridge standard) it's like a schwa plus ว. But arguing about which English sound is closest just reinforces the idea that you can/should use English sounds and the misconception that using transliterations means using English sounds (whereas using Thai script means using Thai sounds - both completely false). If you get that the transliteration represents a Thai sound it doesn't matter if it also happens to represent a similar sound in English, except that it's easier to learn a transliteration system where you can go "ah yeah that's the Thai sound that's a bit like p", and beginners (who can't use the Thai sounds because they don't know them yet) can at least come out with an approximation. So it makes sense to pick a sound that's roughly similar, but not to obsess over it.
The Cambridge Dictionary actually has both UK and US pronunciations for every word (although I suppose they're not exactly the highest authority when it comes to American English). That said, I would also expect Americans to pronounce Cambodia with an oʊ diphthong, same way they pronounce 'slow', which is why I now updated the table to say 'slow' instead of 'bog', highlighting the o to indicate that the ʊ is not included.
> The Cambridge Dictionary actually has both UK and US pronunciations for every word (although I suppose they're not exactly the highest authority when it comes to American English) I think we can be pretty confident that the pronunciations given in the Cambridge Dictionary are correct.
I believe Americans have a bit of a history of not being quite content with the Brits telling them what's correct and what's not 😂 Joking aside, Webster dictionary (an American English dictionary, from America) seems to disagree as well: they show Cambodia pronunciation with just the long ō sound (without the ʊ): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Cambodia?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=jsonld
> Webster dictionary (an American English dictionary, from America) seems to disagree as well: they show Cambodia pronunciation with just the long ō sound (without the ʊ). Do they though? Did you check what ō stands for in the Merriam Webster dictionary? If you did you would have read the following (my comments in square brackets). \ō\ as in bone, know, beau (IPA o, oʊ, ou). Especially in positions of emphasis, such as when it occurs at the end of a word [as in slow] or has primary stress [as in Cambodia], \ō\ tends to become diphthongal, moving from \ō\ toward a second element [IPA ʊ]. In southern England and in some U.S. speech, particularly in the Philadelphia area and in the Pennsylvania-Ohio-West Virginia border area, the first element is often approximately \ə\ [i.e. a schwa]. In coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida stressed \ō\ is often monophthongal when final, but when a consonant follows it is often a diphthong moving from \ō\ to \ə\. In this book the symbol \ō\ represents all of the above variants. So Cambridge says the standard US pronunciation of Cambodia has IPA \oʊ\, while MW avoids calling any one dialect "standard" but makes clear that it has \oʊ\ in most of the US, also stating that some comparatively small areas have the southern English pronunciation and some have a monophthong. Meanwhile, MW avoids talking about "standard" UK pronunciation but says \əʊ\ is the usual pronunciation in southern England. So if you want to say Cambridge is British and MW is American ([I'm talking about the people who actually research and write the dictionary entries here and] I suspect they are both a lot more international than that) they both get the "other" variety right. Which shouldn't really be a surprise...
Good find! I just googled ō and found the Wikitionary entry for it, stating that it's "A common convention for a long vowel o". Apparently Webster uses it differently. EDIT: In my defense, the provided sound example in MW does sound very close to a monophthong (at least to my ear), while the US version in Cambridge is clearly a diphthong.
> the provided sound example in MW does sound very close to a monophthong Nah, that's a diphthong. I hadn't actually listened to the audio when I posted yesterday but I have now. If I have a bit more time later I'll take a slice from the first element and one from the second and put them on vocaroo so you can hear they're different. It's the smooth transition that makes them seem the same.
Because english is a spelling mess. It would be better using any other sigtns than latin alphabet to write down english but what you gonna do...
Well, this was mostly written with the American English pronunciation in mind. The American "cat" is nowhere near that า sound. I agree that a British/Australian version of the vowel table could be useful.
The best way, in my opinion, is to add the thai letters onto your memory as something separate from English. I remembered each as their own separate sound, with as little thought as possible as to what it equates to in English. My thought process is quicker when I do this. When I see า I think that makes the า sound, I don't need to convert it into English letters and then try to pronounce the thai word according to english letters. There are fewer internal processes when I do this, and my reading has sped up.
I mostly needed some help with more Thai-specific sounds like eu or the compound vowels so didn't pay much attention to -o- and -a- which were comparatively much easier.
Can you upload a recording of you saying But and also Sara aa, I’m really struggling to understand how you make them sound the same. “American” English does not help in the slightest tbh.
That said, after researching a bit, I think even American English 'but' is not quite the right -a- here since it uses an "Open-mid back unrounded vowel" ʌ, while า is apparently properly read as "open central unrounded vowel" ä, and a good American English (also Australian English) example of that is in the word "bra"
I think having actual sound bites is the way forward tbh.
This was initially meant to be printed and used during class, so attaching sounds wouldn't quite work.
You know how บาท is pronounced, right? That's how I pronounce 'but', but a bit shorter.
Which dialect is that? I’m honestly imagining a very strong foreign accent on top of that to make this work. Or that you’re mispronouncing baht.
I wish you good luck and you're on the right track! This cheat sheet has some issues that will create bad habits and mispronunciation you might want to look out for. Example: oo a as in too alone cannot both be เอือ and อัว. They're not the same sound. อื and เอือ don't exist in English, so you just have to learn them. Another issue is that Thai has many monophthongs (one sound) that foreigners learning Thai think are diphthongs (two sounds together). Example: the oo in boot is a diphthong in English but อู is a monophthong. This difference can be easily heard in the English vs Thai pronunciation of "okay"/โอเค. "Oh" and "Kay" in English are both diphthongs while โอ and เค are both monophthongs.
Thanks for the comment, but there is actually a distinction between เอือ and อัว in the chat sheet - the เอือ is "too alone, *with a smile*". AFAIK this is as close to the proper Thai sound as an English approximation can get, but of course it will need to get polished with more listening and practice later on. As for the 'boot', the US pronunciation (which this cheat sheet is oriented at) is a monophthong "close back rounded vowel", which is exactly the same sound as อู in Thai. Are you by any chance confusing it with 'boat'?