Thai language looks like "cake decoration." haha

Learning to read a bit of Thai has become something I am quite proud of. There are a lot of people that can speak Thai to a reasonable level but learning to read it for some reason has been quite fun for me. People tend to be more impressed when you can do this so I've been working on it a bit.

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I don't immediately recognize all of these and there is a good reason why that is. While their alphabet does contain a lot of consonants there are many of them that are rarely ever used. The 4th one above, that is referred to as "gha" isn't used at all and doesn't appear in ANY words. I do not know why they still teach it to people in the books and it is a bit stupid that they do seeing as how there are zero words that it appears in. I guess we are hanging onto history here.

The "double decker" consonants that look like they are two letters joined together are also very rarely used to the point where I regularly forget what they sound like in the off chance that I see them. Basically it works like this: The more elaborate/ complicated the letter is, the less frequently it is used. While i am sure there were times when these consonants were actually used in the past, I think that over the eons people stopped using the more complicated ones. I only ever see some of these in official documents that are too complicated for me to be able to read anyway.

Mostly I am just trying to be able to read a menu or a kid's book, I'm not trying to be able to read the newspaper.

I was reading a book in English recently where an author named David Sedaris referred to the Thai language as "cake decoration" and that was really funny to me because he is right. You remember those cursive letters that were made of sugar and you could spell whatever you wanted on a cake?

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I suppose he has a point that David does. When I started to make the comparison between cursive in English and Thai letters it occurred to me that I don't really remember how to write in cursive anymore and would probably make a lot of mistakes if I tried. I wonder if cursive is even taught in schools anymore? I don't suppose there is really much reason to do that anymore and we should just be taking typing lessons instead.

I remember that it was something we focused on quite heavily when I was in elementary school but does it really make sense to teach this anymore? I always had terrible penmanship and now when I do actually write something it is a mix of upper and lower case letters and it is rather embarrassingly sloppy. I guess I forwent being good at that and opted to have a knack for math instead, which I suppose is more useful anyway.

So if you are ever thinking about learning the Thai language I would say don't bother unless you live here. It is a niche one-country language and is quite complicated. If I didn't live here there would be no reason for me to bother with it.