Sabai The Thai tone rules
Three things decide a tone and nothing else: the class of the initial consonant, the tone mark if there is one, and whether the syllable is live or dead. Learn these fifteen lines and you can read the tone of a word you have never seen.
The whole system on one grid
Find the row for your consonant, then the column for what follows it. Marks a class cannot take are left empty.
long: falling
The two low-class dead outcomes are the rule most learners forget: รัก rak is high because the vowel is short, มาก maak is falling because it is long.
Step 1, the consonant's class
Every Thai consonant is mid, high or low class. There are 9 mid, 11 high and 24 low. The class is a property of the letter and has nothing to do with pitch by itself. All 44, grouped by class.
Step 2, live or dead
A syllable is dead if it ends in a stop sound (k, p, t) or if it is open with a short vowel. Everything else is live: open with a long vowel, or ending in a nasal or glide (m, n, ng, y, w).
Step 3, read it off the table
Rather not do it in your head? Type a syllable into the tone finder and it walks you through the same table.
Tone practice with a mic, in the app
Free, like the other 33 chapters.
What free includes