tonal languages are pretty intense looking to a tone deaf fella like me ?!!
The difficulty in learning Thai is the five tones employed to confer different meanings to the same syllable, so that the syllable mai can have five different meanings in this sentence: mái mài mâi mâi mãi? Which translates as "New wood doesn't burn, does it?" Although rather contrived, it does clearly demonstrate the point that for westerners, who have never come across tones except to express emotion, learning Thai can be quite challenging. The Thai script is another daunting barrier to learning Thai. Its origins are in Sanskrit by way of Khmer. There are 44 consonants and 32 vowels. Vowels can be before, after, above, below or surrounding consonants. Thai is also written without any spaces between words. Spaces are only used to separate sentences, which further complicates matters. Transliteration is an often cited problem when writing Thai in Roman script as there is no standard system, so you may see some variations on those given here.
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