Tones versus Tenses

Although I haven’t talked about it much on my blog, I’ve been taking Thai classes for the past two years pretty regularly. I’m still not great at speaking Thai (I’m probably a little above conversational) and I can read, write, and understand a little above that. And, quite frankly, learning to speak Thai isn’t actually that hard. Yet, so many people complain about its difficulty. So, this post will be about why Thai isn’t hard, especially compared to English. My next post, however, will be about the conundrum of what I like to call Thai homonyms.

1. Thai doesn’t really have tenses or conjugations. I  took French for five years and so I greatly appreciate the lack of tenses and conjugation. Who remembers conjugating “to be”, depending on the subject and tense? I wonder how much notebook paper is spent on writing and re-writing verb tenses and conjugations. One a website teaching English listed 14 different tenses! Thai, on the other hand, doesn’t really have tenses. They do have key words to indicate where in time you are speaking but you use the same verb regardless of the time.

Tense	English	Thai
Past	I went to the park	ฉันไปสวนแล้ว (Chan pbai suan leew)
Present	I am at the park	ฉันอยู่ที่สวน (Chan yuu thee suan)
Future	I will go to the park	ฉันจะไปสวน (Chan ja pbai suan)

2. Thai doesn’t require punctuation. Look at the paragraph above. I’ve used hyphens, apostrophes, periods, commas, question marks, exclamation points, semicolons, and parentheses. Granted, the punctuation does add value to my ability to read and understand, but, in Thai, I don’t need to worry about the Oxford comma or debate about putting punctuation inside or outside the quotation marks. (Ok, so I changed the paragraph above into a table because all that punctuation was just too much. Imagine the table in paragraph form with appropriate punctuation.)

3. Thai is an alphabetic language. Many people, myself included, first come to Thailand, see the writing and decide it is too unfamiliar for them to understand. Many, knowing a bit about other Asian languages, decide that it must also be a character based language (like Mandarin Chinese) and, therefore, too difficult. But, it’s not actually that hard to learn to read and write. For most English letters, there is a Thai equivalent (or many). Plus, Thai consonants have reminder words that go with them (like “A is for Apple” except they are standardized). Here are a few examples:

Consonants

English	Thai
B (ball)	บ (Bɔɔ, bai mai – tree leaf)
D (doll)	ด (Dɔɔ, dek – child)
F (flag)	ฝ (Fɔɔ, faa – pot lid) or ฟ (Fɔɔ, fan – tooth)
G (grape)	ก (Gɔɔ, gai – chicken)
H (house)	ห (Hɔɔ, hiip – trunk, chest)
J (jug)	จ (Jɔɔ, jaan – plate)
K (kite)	ค (Kɔɔ, kwaai – water buffalo) or ข (Kɔɔ, kai– egg)

Granted, Thai has a few consonants that we don’t have (ป pbɔɔ pblaa - fish, ต dtɔɔ dtaaw - turtle, ง ngɔɔ nguu - snake) but English has a few consonants that Thai doesn’t have (q, v, x, z).

Next post, Thai "homonyms", or the challenge with tones.