Thai vowels are considerably different to their english couterparts, at first glance. In many ways though, they are actually easier and more consistent. While english has five official vowels, Thai actually has a total of 32 different vowel configurations. Don’t be shocked at this though – on closer inspection the differences begin to dissolve.
While english has 5 official vowels, there are far more vowel sounds. Many of these extra vowel sounds arise from the combination of individual vowels into little gangs, that will change the vowel sound. These little groups of vowels are known as diphthongs (for those linguistically inclined). An example is the combination “ai”, as in “air”, or “aisle”. When you start adding up all the different sounds that can be created by combinations of individual vowels in english, you end up with a lot of vowel sounds.
This is essentially why there are apparently more vowel in thai – because each vowel represents a vowel sound. Hence diphthongs don’t appear in Thai the way they do in english, as the diphthongs essentially come pre-packaged in the symbol for the vowel. One example of this is thai, is the symbol that represents the “ai” sound in “aisle”. This is represented by one symbol, not a combination of two different symbols “a” and “i”.
The reason that Thai vowels are easier than english vowels, in certain respects, is because they are consistent. The symbol that represents the “ai” in “aisle”, always sounds like “ai” in “aisle”. Whereas in english the combination “ai” can have entirely different pronunciations depending on the word that you find it in: “air” vs. “aisle”.
The other thing that takes the sting out of learning “32” different vowels, is that there are only slight variations between some vowels and others. These variations are caused by adding an additional symbol after the vowel which just makes the sound shorter. It doesn’t change the essential characteristics of the sound, just the length of it: like a “long a” vs. a “short a”.
The net impact of the above is that you’ll only really have to learn around 20 individual vowel shapes, and their corresponding sounds. The rest can be logically derived from these.