There are a total of 44 Thai consonants in the Thai language. Two of these Thai consonants are pretty much obsolete except for their occurence in a very limited number of thai words.
However with the memory system presented in “60 Minutes to Learn the Thai Alphabet“, you’ll be able to learn these letters in seconds anyway, with no effort – it’s as easy as looking at a picture, and being able to recognise that picture again!
So all 44 thai consonants are presented and dealt with, in “60 Minutes to Learn the Thai Alphabet.“
The real complications in learning Thai consonants are caused by the so-called classes or groups, that the consonants are divided into. The 44 Thai consonants are divided into 3 different classes or groups. Class one is called low class consonants, then you have medium class consonants and high class. Why they decided to call the classes low, middle and high, is beyond those with a logical turn of mind, as it only serves to confuse some beginners into thinking that a word beginning with a “low consonant”, will automatically have a “low tone”.
Such is not the case unfortunately – that would make things far too simple! Instead the names of the classes is just a way of breaking the letters into three distinct groups.
: not only must you learn that such-and-such a shape equals a certain sound, you must also remember that the sound belongs to a certain group of consonants. The groups might as well have been called group 1, 2 and 3, as there are a set of rules that will help you to determine the correct tone, and these rules are quite a bit more complicated than low class consonant means low tone.
As an example, the rules can be like this: you identify that the syllable begins with a high class consonant, and that the syllable doesn’t end abruptly (end in b, p, t etc), but instead has an open or extendable sound (ends in a vowel, m or n). This combination of “high class” + “extendable syllable” = “rising tone”.
