Helping farangs to speak better Thai

Have you noticed that some farang struggle to pronounce Thai words well?  Or are you a farang who has struggled to read from a menu in Thailand written in Roman script? 

“Last week I went to Suvarnaboomee Airport on my way to Fooket and Coe Samui for a weekend drinking Singer Beer.”

Some of my Thai friends call it karaoke Thai.  You know, every time you go to a karaoke bar and are about to launch into a Bird or Palapon classic, an array of Romanized words will stream across the bottom of the TV screen to aid the non-Thai reader?  Trouble is that trying to pronounce Thai words from Karaoke Thai is pretty difficult. 

Please understand na!  It is not because we farang are stupid.  Just that Thai characters and sounds don’t correspond precisely to the sounds made in Roman languages.  For example, Thai has some sounds which Roman languages don’t, such as por-plaa and tor-tao.

Well spoken Thai sounds really nice and melodious to the ear.  So I have a number of suggestions on how English speaking farang can improve upon their pronunciation of Thai words that are written in Roman script.

If it is spelled with TH pronounce it T

The Thai characters which express the sound "t" (thor-thahaan, thor-theung, thor-thong etc.) are normally written as "th" in Roman script. This results in many farangs pronouncing the sound "th" as in "the", "that", "them" etc. which is incorrect.

If it is spelled with a K pronounce it G 

The Thai character which expresses the sound “g” at the start of words (from kor-kai) will be written as “k” in Roman script.

When pronouncing the word “Goh” which means Island, the “o” sound should be soft as in “hot” or “pot” rather than hard, as in “hole” or “Coke”.

Do you prefer your vowels long or short?

Most Thai words written in Roman script do not distinguish between short and long vowels (Mai han akard and sala-aa; sala-ooh and sala-oo etc.) meaning that farang often default to the short vowel sounds such as “a”, “u” or “I” without using for example “aa”, “ar” and “oo”.

Watch the extra R

Some Thai words conjoin the consonants “s” (sor-seua, sor-saalaa etc.) and “r” (ror-reua) to produce a single “s” sound.  But when the words are translated into English they will still be spelled with “sr”, causing confusion for us poor farangs.

Help us with old spellings please

Some names, based on old Thai spellings, will include consonants and vowels at the end which are spelled in the Romanized version of the word but are not actually pronounced.

If it is spelled V pronounce it W.

The Thai character expressing the sound “w” (wor wen) will often be written as “v” in Roman script.

And if it is spelled Ph pronounce if F

Back to that old favourite, Phuket. The Thai character which expresses a soft “p” sound (por-peung, por-paan etc) will normally be written as ‘ph’ in Roman script.  However, to most farangs, this will produce the sound ‘f’.

I will save the complexities of tones, tor-tao and por-plaa for another blog. Puad hua laew!

Please also see my related blog on the usefulness of learning to read Thai: http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/poomjai/2007/11/18/entry-1

Chork dee na khrap.