Writing the low consonants

The fourteen paired letters

The everyday ones are ค, ช, ซ, ท, พ and ฟ. ฅ is obsolete (modern spelling uses ค). ฆ, ฌ, ฑ, ฒ, ธ and ภ spell words from Pali and Sanskrit, such as เมฆ mek (cloud), วัฒนธรรม watthanatham (culture) and ภาษา phasa (language). ฮ appears mostly in loanwords and sounds.

The ten unpaired letters

These are the letters for m, n, ng, y, r, l and w: sounds you can hold, which is why the same letters close live syllables. ณ and ฬ are the Pali and Sanskrit spellings of n and l. ญ is a y at the start of a syllable and an n at the end of one, and ร and ล are both read n at the end: อาหาร aahǎan (food), ผล phǒn (fruit, result).

Their sounds

Low-class letters cover every kind of consonant: aspirated stops (ค kh, ช ch, ท th, พ ph), fricatives (ซ s, ฟ f, ฮ h) and all the sonorants. There is nothing in the class an English speaker has not met, except ง at the start of a word: the ng of “singer” moved to the front, as in งู nguu (snake). Say “sing-oo” and drop the “si”.

ร deserves a word. In careful speech it is a tapped or trilled r, but in everyday talk many Thais say it as l, and in clusters such as ปร or กร it often disappears: ประตู (door) can sound like “patuu”. Learn the careful form, and do not be surprised by the casual one.

How to write them

• Head first, one stroke. As with the other classes, start at the loop and keep going. ธ is the only low letter with no head, so it has no loop to start from; follow the start point in a writing book.
• Learn by family. ค and ด differ in which way the head turns; ฅ is ค with a notch in its top. ช and ซ are ข with a rising tail, ซ with a notch in its head as well. พ and ฟ differ by the tall tail of ฟ. ฮ is อ with a tail. ฬ ends in a tall tail too.
• Mind the bottoms. ญ hangs a tail below the line, like the high-class ฐ, and fonts drop that tail when a vowel goes underneath.
• Tell ม from ฆ, ท from ฑ, and ร from ธ by the shape of the top. These are the pairs that trip readers most often in small or loopless type.

Loopless faces, common in advertising and on screens, make some of these pairs harder to tell apart. Each letter page shows the letter in every font in the collection, looped and loopless, so you can learn the shapes that stay constant.

Ways to remember them

• Learn the other two classes instead. Twenty letters are mid or high; the remaining twenty-four are low. You never need a list of the low class.
• The sonorant sentence. งูใหญ่นอนอยู่ณริมวัดโมฬีโลก, ngu yai non yu na rim wat mo li lok: “a big snake lies at the edge of Wat Moli Lok”. Its consonants are the ten unpaired letters: ง ญ น ย ณ ร ว ม ฬ ล.
• Twins by sound. Every paired low letter shares its sound with a high one you already know: ค with ข, ช with ฉ, ซ with ส, ท with ถ, พ with ผ, ฟ with ฝ, ฮ with ห.

What the low class does to tones

The low class is the only one where vowel length changes the tone: a dead syllable is high with a short vowel and falling with a long one, as in นก nók (bird) against มาก mâak (much). Its letters never take mai tri or mai chattawa. The tones it cannot spell (low and rising) come from the high-class twin for paired letters, and from a silent ห for the unpaired ones: นา naa (rice field) is mid, หนา nǎa (thick) is rising.

Practice that works

1. Read every twin pair aloud with the same vowel: ขา and คา, ถา and ทา, ผา and พา, สา and ซา. Same consonant sound, different tone.
2. Read the sonorants with and without a silent ห: นา and หนา, มา and หมา, ลาย and หลาย.
3. Practise dead syllables in pairs that differ only in length: คะ and คาด, นก and นาก.
4. When all three classes are comfortable, read a page a day aloud and check the tones against a recording. The tone rules page is the reference to keep open.