Someone who sees the first Thai script may wonder and ask how to keep these characters apart. In fact, at first glance it is not easy to see some differences between each character. But there are minute differences we see the latest when we are writing. In the following two characters, for example,
ค and ด it is essential, where the "curl" is set, to make characters, that have nothing in common and are not pronounced similar. These subtleties are learned best when writing the character. Find this two characters at the Consonant-Details and click on them. Study, based on the animation, how the characters are written and try to write on a sheet of paper by yourself! Take care how appear these characters in other scrips. Hear the names and the mnemonics.

Do you have to look far? Same with me. Now that we are at the beginning, it seems to us all still very difficult. We must simultaneously learn several things to follow the following course components can be. This means that we can

It certainly requires a lot of time and hard work. But it must be. In parallel to this learning step, which will be facilitated by the following described equipment, you can address the following lessons already. But you will see, the more you come to learn the consonants, the easier it will be. To boost the learning process and to deal with it ourselves, let us look at the consonants more accurate at different points in time.

Let's find out once the differences (and similarities) of the characters. The following list is sorted according to similarities in appearance:

Exercise: Look for each of these signs on the Consonanten Details page. Call the detailed information (click). Look at how the letter is named and listen to the sound. Compare the characters with others, see the differences. Describe the differences on paper, like: The XX is distinguished from YY by ...

Remark: I should be able to describe everything here - but without a little cooperation it will not work. We need to deal with the characters. That is the goal of these tasks. I remember how I had to search every single character on the keyboard at the beginning. Now I know we can learn it only by training.

As several consonants have the same sound, it is not enough to simply say A or B, when a consonant is called individually. We have to speak the consonant sound together with a sound like "a:w" and a example word in which the letter appears.

Listen to the consonants 1-6: ก ข ฃ ค ฅ ฆ

A noticeable difference can possibly hear at the First. That is why we say the example word to clarify which "k" is meant.

The mnemonic that is listed in the details at every consonant eases the memorization of the order, if you want to recite the "Thail ABC". Although this is needed not every day in later life, but it is a convenient tool for learning. Just as we had to recite the alphabet in elementary school, children also learn the order of the consonants in Thailand. Of these key sentences are several known, is our only one of them, no better and no worse than others.

Summing up the consonants, resulting in the same sound, only 28 different sounds are remaining. Without distinction of "hard" and "soft" version of an otherwise identical sound, it would be even less.

Listen to the consonants again. Find out what separates the hard from the soft version of a sound.

The following tasks must be done now:

1. Stay on this page and look at all the consonants. Listen to the sound samples, in particular the mnemotechnic verse several times and try to repeat what you hear, by imitating the intonation as well as possible. The mnemotechnic verse is important to recite all consonants in the right order.
2. Download the provided worksheets "consonants" in PDF format and print them out. These worksheets include for each consonant a whole page of information, writing lines, and sample characters.
3. Enter yourself the mnemonic on top of each worksheet. Listen to the mnemonic and write it down as you think it's right.
4. Have a look at the word by word translation of the mnemonic. You can incidentally learn these words by the way. Try to imagine the main word of the sentence.
5. Write, whenever you can, one line of each consonant in the worksheets. Not the whole page at a time! Read on every page that you make to the mnemonic first and try to remember the consonant along with an image of the character. From time to time, check the pronunciation online.
6. If you know the consonants a bit and can recognize and name some of it, download the video and watch it in a relaxed situation several times. Memorize every consonant together with his image and his mnemonic.
7. If you are so far that you have the corresponding character of every consonant "in mind", download the MP3 soundtrack of the video and listen to it in a relaxed situation with closed eyes as often as you can.

To learn the consonants the following materials are ready to download:

1. Worksheets consonants in PDF format. One page for every consonant. 470 KByte
2. Video in AVI format. Notation for all 44 consonants, with sound. 15 MByte
3. Superlearning Audio in MP3 format, 6,8 MByte. This is the soundtrack from the video only..