Vocabulary

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Lesson Transcript

สวัสดีค่ะ, ดิฉันปรารถนาค่ะ! Welcome to Thaipod101.com’s ตัวอักษรไทย Made Easy!
The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn the Thai alphabet: ตัวอักษรไทย!
In the last lesson you learned the letters ท and ฮ, and the vowels สระ เอะ and สระ เอ. Do you remember how to write them all?
In this lesson, you’re going to learn about 2 low class consonants and a pair of vowels.
The first new letter is ร (raaw ruuea). The word เรือ means "boat". The sound of ร as an initial consonant is "r" like the double R in "burrito" when spoken by a native Spanish speaker. In other words, this is an R sound with a trill. Not everyone can make this sound easily, but you can get better with practice. When ร is the final consonant in a syllable it makes the sound "n" just like น. You might remember that this is one of the live ending sounds.
Let's practice writing ร together. Start with the head at the bottom, curve up to the left and hook back to the right. ร
The next letter is also another low class consonant. It's called ล (laaw ling). Do you know which animal ลิง (ling) is? It's a monkey!
The sound of ล as an initial consonant is "l" like the L in "little". When it's the final consonant in a syllable, ล also makes an "n" sound just like ร did. What’s great about this consonant is it actually looks like a monkey! So, when you write ล, think of a little monkey with a curved tail sticking up.
Let's write ล together.
Start with the head, a small curve to the right, and a larger curve to the left. ล
Take a look at this word written using ล.
This is actually a word from English. Can you recognize it?
It's the word "bill", but we read it in Thai as บิล (bin). Thai doesn't naturally have the sound of letter L at the end of a syllable. So it changes to sound like the letter N.
บ, สระ อิ, ล... บิล
Now let's quickly review the vowel pair that we learned in the last lesson. They were สระ เอะ and สระ เอ. We can see that they are the same except for the สระ อะ written at the end to indicate a short vowel. Most of the remaining vowel pairs that we'll be learning follow the same pattern. The long and short versions will look the same except for สระ อะ added to the end of the short vowel.
The two new vowels in this lesson are สระ แอะ (sà-rà àe) and สระ แอ (sà-rà aae).
They are written with a double สระ เอ before the consonant. Then for the short vowel, สระ อะ is added after the consonant.
The sound of สระ แอะ and สระ แอ is like the A in "cat".
Let's write these:
สระ แอะ (sà-rà àe)
สระ แอ (sà-rà aae)
One very common word that is written using สระ แอะ is และ (láe), which means "and". และ is a high tone because it has an initial low class consonant, with a short vowel, and a dead stop.
A word using the long vowel, สระ แอ, is แรง (raaeng), which means "power". แรง has a low class consonant and a live ending, so it is pronounced mid tone.
Let's write both of these words:
สระ แอ, ล, สระ อะ... และ
and
สระ แอ, ร, and ง. ...แรง
One last word for this lesson. Can you read it? The first thing written on the left is สระ แอ, but we need to look to the right of that to find the initial consonant. In this word, the initial consonant is ม. The vowel sound แอ (aae) gets attached to it, so then we have แม (maae). Finally, the letter ว comes at the end. It makes a W or O sound that blends with the vowel to give us the word แมว (maaeo). If you think แมว sounds like the noise a cat makes, that's because แมว (maaeo) means "cat" in Thai.
Let's write "cat" -- สระ แอ, ม, ว... แมว
Now it's time for Pradthana's Points.
Many modern Thai fonts used in print media alter the shapes of some letters, often to mimic the shape of an English letter. If you are trying to read something in Thai, and you see what looks like the letter S, it is actually the letter ร.
ร might also look a little like the letter S in people's handwriting because it's faster to write it that way
Do you know the Thai word for "year"? In the next ตัวอักษรไทย Made Easy Lesson you'll learn how to say it, and most of all, how to write it! See you there! สวัสดีค่ะ!

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