Writing the mid consonants

The nine letters

Seven of them do all the everyday work. ฎ and ฏ have the same sounds as ด and ต and turn up mostly in words from Pali and Sanskrit, such as กฎ kot (rule) and ปฏิทิน patithin (calendar). อ is a special case: at the start of a syllable it is silent, a carrier for a vowel that has no consonant of its own, as in อา aa or อ่าน àan (to read).

Their sounds

The mid class holds the sounds English speakers find slippery: unaspirated stops. ก, ต and ป are k, t and p said without the puff of air English puts after them at the start of a word. Hold a hand in front of your mouth and say “pin”, then “spin”: the p of “spin” is Thai ป. The same goes for ก (the k of “skin”) and ต (the t of “stop”). จ is the matching ch, between the j of “jam” and the ch of “chin”.

ด and บ are true voiced d and b, much as in English. At the end of a syllable all of these lose their release: ก becomes an unreleased k, ด, ต and จ an unreleased t, บ and ป an unreleased p. The mouth closes for the sound and stops there.

How to write them

Thai letters are written in one continuous movement wherever possible, and most of them start at a small loop, the head (หัว). Find the head, start there, and keep the pen on the paper until the letter is done. A few general rules cover nearly every letter:

• Head first. ด, ต, บ, ป, จ and อ all begin at their loop. Thai teachers describe heads as turned in (towards the body of the letter, as in ด and อ) or turned out (as in บ). Getting the direction right is half of telling similar letters apart.
• ก has no head. It is one of only two headless letters (the other is ธ). Start at the foot of the left stroke, go up and over the top, and come down the right side.
• Tails and hooks last. ป finishes with its tall tail rising above the line. ฎ and ฏ finish with a hook below it, which is the one thing that tells them apart from ด and ต.
• Small notches matter. ต is ด with a dip in the top stroke; ฏ is ฎ with the same dip. Draw them large until the difference is automatic.
• Keep the letters on the line and the same height. Vowels and tone marks go above or below later, so leave room.

Learn to write in a looped style, the one Thai schools teach, even if you mostly read loopless faces on screen. The loops make the stroke order obvious. Compare a looped face such as Sarabun with a loopless one such as Kanit on each letter page, where every letter is shown in every font in the collection.

Ways to remember them

• The class sentence. Thai schoolchildren learn the mid class with ไก่จิกเด็กตายบนปากโอ่ง, kai chik dek tai bon pak ong: “the chicken pecked the child to death on the rim of the jar”. Its first letters are ก จ ด ต บ ป อ. It is grim, which is why nobody forgets it. ฎ and ฏ ride along as the twins of ด and ต.
• The name words. Learn each letter with its name: ก ไก่ (chicken), จ จาน (plate), ด เด็ก (child), ต เต่า (turtle), บ ใบไม้ (leaf), ป ปลา (fish), อ อ่าง (basin). The class sentence reuses three of them.
• Pairs that differ by one stroke. บ and ป (the fish has a tall fin), ด and ต (the turtle’s shell has a notch), ฎ and ฏ. Learn the pairs together; the mnemonics guide has more of these.

What the mid class does to tones

The mid class is the only one that takes all four tone marks, so it is the only class that can spell all five tones on one consonant:

With no mark, a mid-class syllable is mid if it is live (ending in a long vowel or in m, n, ng, y or w) and low if it is dead (ending in a short vowel or in k, t or p): ดี dii (good) is mid, ปาก pàak (mouth) is low. The tone rules give the full table.

Practice that works

1. Write each letter ten times large, saying its name aloud: “ko kai, ko kai”.
2. Combine the nine letters with า to read real syllables: กา, ตา, ปา, ดา, จา, บา. Then add the marks: ก่า, ป่า, ป้า, ต้า.
3. Type them: on a Thai keyboard ก is D and า is K, so the first word most people type is กา. The on-screen keyboard works with your own keys.
4. Move on to the high class once you can read ปา ป่า ป้า ป๊า ป๋า without stopping.