Thailand is a land of smiles. And the Thai people are easy to approach, you will see they will be all smiling when you try to speak to them in Thai, which will add to your pleasure during your stay in Thailand.

If you want to learning to speak Thai, there is one important thing you should remember that is the Thai language has five tones with four tonal marks. They are the mid tone, low tone, falling tone, high tone and rising tone.

There are many groups of words which have the same sound but with different tones and meanings. For example, the word suai can mean bad luck (suai), bribe (suai1) or beautiful (suai4), the words meaning is depending on the tone.

To prevent you from pronouncing with the wrong tone and unintentionally cause misunderstanding to the listeners, Thai teachers will use four numbers to represent four tones: 1 = low tone, 2 = falling tone, 3 = high tone and 4 = rising tone. The mid-level tone syllable will be unmarked.

By official system, the Thai language has 8 vowel and 14 diphthong phonemes and 19 consonant phonemes. The Thai language has fixed tones like many oriental languages. Foreigners who are interested in learning the correct tones are advised to learn from a native speaker.

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