Do I have to learn the Thai script, or can I stay with romanisation?

You can start speaking without it, and most learners who stay with romanisation stop improving at roughly the same place. The systems disagree with each other, and almost none of them write tone in a way you can act on, so each word is stored without the feature that decides its meaning. Thai spelling does the opposite: it predicts the tone. Learners here speak from the first session and begin reading inside the first month.

No rate is printed anywhere on this page, because none has been set for Thailand yet and an invented figure helps nobody. What we can tell you is what moves it. An hourly rate is what gets advertised here, while a booking is made as a sitting, so the length of that sitting is agreed first. After that the figure moves with travel, with in-person against online, and with how often you meet. You get the number in writing ahead of lesson one, and it only shifts when you shift something yourself: two sittings a week where there was one, or work documents brought into a course that began with the alphabet.

I have lived here for years and speak some Thai, but I cannot read a word. Where does that start?

With a listening audit rather than a beginner course. The tutor works through the words you already use daily and marks which tones have settled wrong, because those are the ones that will argue with the spelling later. The script then goes on top of vocabulary you already own, which is considerably faster than learning sound and spelling at the same time.

How long before I can read a notice from my child's school?

That depends on your week far more than on your talent, and nobody honest will hand you a date. What a tutor can do at the start is tell you what the first three months will cover, then put the same notice in front of you at the end of them. Short real texts appear early here rather than being saved for an advanced stage.

Can I skip tones and rely on context?

Context carries you a long way in a restaurant and abandons you exactly where it costs most: numbers, names, places, prices and directions. มา, ม้า and หมา differ by tone alone, and so do ไกล and ใกล้, which is the pair that sends a driver to the wrong side of the city. Tone belongs to the word itself rather than sitting over it as a mood.

My tutor and I would not share a first language. Does that work?

It works when the tutor can explain clearly in a language you both handle, which is why the screening call is held in that language. English is the usual choice. Tell us at the start if your lessons need to run in another one, and we will say plainly whether we can match it rather than promising and then improvising.

Do you come to me, or is it online?

Both, and in Bangkok the commute usually decides. Pairing you with someone who already rides the same rail line you do is what makes a weekday evening hour possible at all; a tutor coming over from the far side of the river cannot hold it. Online removes the journey entirely and gives you a shared screen, which turns out to suit Thai script better than paper does.

Can my partner and I learn together?

Two to four people who already know each other can share one tutor. It works well when you are at a similar stage. It goes badly when one of you already converses and the other is on lesson one, because correcting tone needs the tutor's ear on a single voice at a time.

Which Thai do you teach?

Central Thai, the Thai of Bangkok, of school and of broadcasting. If the household around you speaks Isan or Southern Thai, say so at the start. Your tutor will not teach you that dialect, and they can tell you which of the forms you keep hearing at home are regional, which saves months of quiet confusion.

My child attends an international school and has Thai classes there. Is this the right page?

Usually not. Thai inside an international school is a timetabled subject with its own assessment, and the Ministry of Education requires Thai-national students there to study Thai while foreign students spend at least an hour a week on Thai culture. That belongs on the Thai for International School Students page. This one is written for adults coming to the language from outside it.

When is a good time to start?

Any week, since adult Thai lessons sit outside the school calendar. The two calendars around you are still worth knowing: Thai national schools open in mid-May and finish in March, while Bangkok international schools run August through June. If your Thai is aimed at a school office or a parents' group chat, beginning a couple of months ahead of the term you care about gives you the vocabulary before you need it.

Languages

Thai for Foreigners

Name: Thai for Foreigners - Edulom
Brand: Edulom

You can already hear that Thai has tones. What you cannot hear yet is which one you just produced, and that is the thing a tutor corrects in the second it happens. Sessions run one tutor to one learner, at your place in Bangkok or over video.

Request a Thai tutor Ask about your level first

Quick Guide

What is Thai for Foreigners?

Thai for foreigners is one-to-one tuition in Thai for people who did not grow up with the language.

A tutor works with a single learner on the five tones, the 44-letter script, and the Thai that is actually spoken on a Bangkok street, in person at home or online, in sessions arranged around the learner's own week.

Key Points

Tone is treated as part of the word from the first lesson, never as a decoration added later
The script is taught by consonant class, so spelling predicts tone instead of being memorised whole
Reading practice uses unspaced real text: a notice, a receipt, a LINE message you were sent
Lessons are explained in a language you already handle, agreed before the first session
Three entry points: no Thai at all, speaks but cannot read, and reads slowly but stalls in conversation
In person around Bangkok and the provinces beside it, or online anywhere

Services

Three ways a Thai lesson can be arranged

The choice is usually settled by your commute and by how much correction you want in the room.

The tutor comes to you

Your home, a condo lobby, or a quiet café near your line.

60, 90 or 120 minutes per session

Real things to read: your post, your bills, the notices in your lift
The tutor hears your Thai in the room where you actually use it
Travel is agreed before the weekly slot is fixed
An evening hour on a weekday survives when tutor and learner sit on one rail line

Online, one to one

Video with a shared screen for spelling and handwriting.

60 or 90 minutes per session

Thai script is easier to demonstrate on a shared screen than on paper
The tutor's model pronunciation can be recorded and replayed midweek
Works from any province, and keeps running when you travel
Easiest format to hold to the same hour every week

Two to four people who already know each other

A couple, a household, two colleagues on the same posting.

90 minutes per session

Works when everyone starts at roughly the same place
Dialogue practice with the person you will speak Thai with anyway
One shared written note after each session
Tone correction gets slower as the group grows, which is the honest trade

Mastery Ladder

Four ways people arrive at Thai, and four different first months

The starting diagnosis matters more here than in most subjects, because what has to be undone differs completely.

Starting from zero
ผู้เริ่มต้น
1/4
No Thai at all. The ear and the script run side by side from the beginning, so the first few hundred words go into memory with their tone already attached to them.
Subjects:
The five tonesConsonant classesSurvival phrasesNumbers and prices
Focus Areas:
- Hearing a tone before being asked to produce it
- Reading short syllables aloud by the end of the first month
- One phrase per session recorded and repeated during the week
Speaks, cannot read
พูดได้ แต่อ่านไม่ออก
2/4
Several years here, a working spoken Thai picked up at home or on site, and a blank wall at every sign, form and group message. The tones have usually settled into a private version that Thai listeners decode with effort.
Subjects:
Tone repair on words you already useThe script, laid over vocabulary you ownEveryday documents
Focus Areas:
- An audit of which tones have set wrong and which are fine
- Re-anchoring familiar words to their spelling
- Reading, at first, only sentences you could already say
Reads slowly, stalls in conversation
อ่านได้ช้า พูดไม่ทัน
3/4
The course book is finished and an ordinary Bangkok exchange still runs past you. Classroom Thai is enunciated; ordinary speech drops syllables, merges words and leaves the pronoun out entirely.
Subjects:
Listening at conversational speedUnspaced readingRegister and softeners
Focus Areas:
- Recognising reduced and merged forms of words you know in full
- Answering before the sentence in your head is perfect
- Moving between polite and casual without sounding like a form
Reading documents and news
อ่านเอกสารและข่าว
4/4
Written Thai draws on vocabulary that spoken Thai rarely touches, much of it built from Pali and Sanskrit roots. A lease, a school notice and a news headline each have their own habits of phrasing.
Subjects:
Written and formal vocabularyNotices, contracts and formsHeadline grammar
Focus Areas:
- Compound words assembled for the page rather than the mouth
- Reading one contract clause slowly and correctly instead of five quickly
- Keeping a personal word list tied to the documents you actually receive

Program Syllabus

What a Thai course actually contains

Six strands, running together rather than one after another. The proportions are set by your starting diagnosis.

A learner who already speaks usually spends the first month almost entirely inside strands two and three. A learner starting from nothing spends it inside one and two. The order is decided after the tutor has heard you speak, never before.

Module 01

The five tones, by ear first

The ear has to separate five things that an English-speaking ear files as mood. Work is done on minimal pairs and on recordings of the learner's own voice.

Topics Covered

The five tones alone, then held inside a whole sentence
มา (come), ม้า (horse), หมา (dog): one syllable, three words
ไกล (far) against ใกล้ (near), the pair that sends a driver across town
Keeping a tone intact once the sentence speeds up
Hearing your own recording next to the tutor's, in the same session

Who It Is For

Who is usually sitting on the other side of the table

Four situations that need Thai for different reasons, and therefore need different first months.

Adults who arrived recently

The first year in Thailand, when everything is still being set up and Thai is needed for errands before it is needed for conversation. Thailand's population of high-skilled foreign workers grew by roughly 9.3% a year between 2020 and 2024, and by 13.4% in early 2025, so this group is larger each year.

Recommended:

Starting from zeroIn person at home90-minute sessions

Long-stay residents who never learned to read

Years of getting by in spoken Thai, then a form, a contract or a hospital sign stops everything. The spoken Thai is an asset here; it just needs its spelling attached to it.

Recommended:

Speaks, cannot readTone audit in the first sessionReading from your own paperwork

Foreign parents whose school communicates in Thai

Thai and bilingual schools send notices, timetables and parent group messages in Thai script. Reading a week ahead of the group message is worth more to this parent than fluent small talk.

Recommended:

Reading before speakingSchool vocabularyWeekly slot through term time

Partners and family members

Married into a Thai family, following about half of the table and addressing the elders slightly wrong. Kin terms and register do more work here than vocabulary size.

Recommended:

พี่ and น้อง firstTwo to four learners togetherListening at family speed

Featured

What lands in your inbox after each Thai session

Language progress is invisible week to week, which is why it gets written down in a form you can revise from.

Report Features

The session note, in Thai script

Every word and sentence pattern covered, written in Thai script with the same romanisation your tutor used out loud. One spelling for one word, so revision reinforces the lesson instead of competing with it.

The tone corrections you actually needed

A short list of the words whose tone slipped that session, with the contrast word beside each one. This is the part that stops a wrong tone hardening over the following week.

A reading log

Which real text was read, whether a notice, a receipt or a group message, and which letters or vowel signs still slow you down. It is the clearest evidence of movement a beginner gets.

Two things to use before next week

Two or three forms chosen to be usable outside the lesson, in a shop, a lift lobby or a group chat, because a form used once in the wild sticks better than ten drilled at the table.

A quarterly re-read

Root cause

Those particles are the final layer. The politeness a Thai listener registers first is which word you used for yourself and for them, and that choice follows relative age and role. Textbook ฉัน and คุณ aimed at someone older lands oddly, however carefully the particle is added.

Edulom solution

Learn พี่ and น้อง and the situational pronouns early, and practise them against the real ages and roles of the people in your week rather than against a dialogue in a book.

None of this is an argument for waiting until you are ready. It is the reason a tutor listens to you speak before deciding what your first month contains.

Reasons to Choose Us

What this arrangement gives someone learning Thai

Process promises only. Edulom has no Thai results to show you yet, and will not borrow anyone else's.

One tutor, one learner
In a shared beginner class the quietest person speaks for a few minutes an hour. Tone has to be corrected in the second it is produced, and that needs a tutor listening to exactly one mouth.
Corrections happen inside the session
A wrong tone written down for review next week has already been rehearsed wrong for seven days. Your tutor interrupts, which is uncomfortable for about two sessions and saves months.
The script starts in the first month
Reading is treated as pronunciation work rather than as an advanced luxury, because Thai spelling is the only notation that tells you the tone of a word you have never met.

A written note after every session
Words in Thai script, the tones that slipped, the text you read, and two forms to use before next week. Language progress is invisible week to week unless somebody writes it down.
The rate is in writing before you start
The figure, the length of a session and the travel arrangement are all written down before lesson one, and all three stay where they are until you say otherwise.
A different tutor at no charge if the match is wrong
Language teaching is personal, and a mismatch shows up quickly. Say so and you are moved, without an argument and without paying twice for the same starting point.

Meet the Tutors

How a tutor for this subject is screened

A native speaker is a native speaker. Teaching ไตรยางศ์ to an adult who has never seen the script is a separate skill, and the screening call is built to find it.

Thai as a first language, with teaching experience that is specifically adults who did not grow up with it

Able to explain why a word carries the tone it carries, working from consonant class, vowel length and ending, rather than asking the learner to memorise the word whole

In the screening call they teach one word they have not prepared: derive its tone from the spelling and explain it inside three minutes, in the language the lessons will run in

Asked how they would handle a learner whose tones set years ago. A speaker answers "repeat after me"; a teacher names the tone, shows the spelling and offers a contrast word

Comfortable teaching from whatever the learner brings in, including a photograph of a notice, a receipt or a message that arrived that morning

Willing to be recorded during the session so the learner can hear the model again during the week

Where Thai lessons happen

Online Tutoring

Online Worldwide

One tutor, one learner, over video. Thai loses less than people expect in this format: the script is easier to demonstrate on a shared screen than on paper, and a recorded session lets you hear the tutor's tone again in the middle of the week.

Shared screen for spelling, vowel signs and handwriting
Recordings of the model pronunciation, kept for revision
Runs from any province, and keeps running while you travel
The easiest format in which to hold the same hour every week

In-Person Tutoring

Tutors travel across Bangkok and the provinces around it, including Watthana (วัฒนา), Sathon (สาทร), Bang Rak (บางรัก), Bang Kho Laem (บางคอแหลม), Huai Khwang (ห้วยขวาง), Bang Na (บางนา), Saphan Sung (สะพานสูง) and Don Mueang (ดอนเมือง), and into Nonthaburi (นนทบุรี), Samut Prakan (สมุทรปราการ) and Pathum Thani (ปทุมธานี). Pairing follows the rail line a learner lives on rather than the district they live in, since the journey home is what decides whether an evening hour survives contact with a Wednesday.

FAQ

Questions people ask before their first Thai lesson

On the script, on tones, on arriving with years of spoken Thai and no reading at all.

Do I have to learn the Thai script, or can I stay with romanisation?: You can start speaking without it, and most learners who stay with romanisation stop improving at roughly the same place. The systems disagree with each other, and almost none of them write tone in a way you can act on, so each word is stored without the feature that decides its meaning. Thai spelling does the opposite: it predicts the tone. Learners here speak from the first session and begin reading inside the first month.
I have lived here for years and speak some Thai, but I cannot read a word. Where does that start?: With a listening audit rather than a beginner course. The tutor works through the words you already use daily and marks which tones have settled wrong, because those are the ones that will argue with the spelling later. The script then goes on top of vocabulary you already own, which is considerably faster than learning sound and spelling at the same time.
Can I skip tones and rely on context?: Context carries you a long way in a restaurant and abandons you exactly where it costs most: numbers, names, places, prices and directions. มา, ม้า and หมา differ by tone alone, and so do ไกล and ใกล้, which is the pair that sends a driver to the wrong side of the city. Tone belongs to the word itself rather than sitting over it as a mood.
Do you come to me, or is it online?: Both, and in Bangkok the commute usually decides. Pairing you with someone who already rides the same rail line you do is what makes a weekday evening hour possible at all; a tutor coming over from the far side of the river cannot hold it. Online removes the journey entirely and gives you a shared screen, which turns out to suit Thai script better than paper does.
Which Thai do you teach?: Central Thai, the Thai of Bangkok, of school and of broadcasting. If the household around you speaks Isan or Southern Thai, say so at the start. Your tutor will not teach you that dialect, and they can tell you which of the forms you keep hearing at home are regional, which saves months of quiet confusion.
When is a good time to start?: Any week, since adult Thai lessons sit outside the school calendar. The two calendars around you are still worth knowing: Thai national schools open in mid-May and finish in March, while Bangkok international schools run August through June. If your Thai is aimed at a school office or a parents' group chat, beginning a couple of months ahead of the term you care about gives you the vocabulary before you need it.

What does it cost?: No rate is printed anywhere on this page, because none has been set for Thailand yet and an invented figure helps nobody. What we can tell you is what moves it. An hourly rate is what gets advertised here, while a booking is made as a sitting, so the length of that sitting is agreed first. After that the figure moves with travel, with in-person against online, and with how often you meet. You get the number in writing ahead of lesson one, and it only shifts when you shift something yourself: two sittings a week where there was one, or work documents brought into a course that began with the alphabet.
How long before I can read a notice from my child's school?: That depends on your week far more than on your talent, and nobody honest will hand you a date. What a tutor can do at the start is tell you what the first three months will cover, then put the same notice in front of you at the end of them. Short real texts appear early here rather than being saved for an advanced stage.
My tutor and I would not share a first language. Does that work?: It works when the tutor can explain clearly in a language you both handle, which is why the screening call is held in that language. English is the usual choice. Tell us at the start if your lessons need to run in another one, and we will say plainly whether we can match it rather than promising and then improvising.
Can my partner and I learn together?: Two to four people who already know each other can share one tutor. It works well when you are at a similar stage. It goes badly when one of you already converses and the other is on lesson one, because correcting tone needs the tutor's ear on a single voice at a time.
My child attends an international school and has Thai classes there. Is this the right page?: Usually not. Thai inside an international school is a timetabled subject with its own assessment, and the Ministry of Education requires Thai-national students there to study Thai while foreign students spend at least an hour a week on Thai culture. That belongs on the Thai for International School Students page. This one is written for adults coming to the language from outside it.

Complete Guide

A working guide to learning Thai as an adult

Why the script is the shortest road, although it looks like the longest
Almost every adult who starts Thai asks whether the alphabet can wait. It is a reasonable question, since 44 unfamiliar letters plus vowel signs that sit above, below, before and after the consonant look like a month of work before you can order lunch.
Here is what makes it the shortcut. Thai is a tonal language, and tone is the property that distinguishes one word from another. Romanisation has to carry tone with accent marks or numbers, every system does it differently, and the version printed in phrasebooks usually drops it altogether. So a learner working from romanised text is memorising words with the crucial part missing, then guessing the missing part from a teacher's voice they hear once a week.
Thai spelling carries tone by design. It is not perfectly regular, and it is regular enough that a learner who knows the three consonant classes, the difference between a live and a dead syllable and the four tone marks can look at an unfamiliar word and say it correctly. That is the conversion the first month is buying: from guessing tones one word at a time, to reading them off the page for the rest of your life.
How a Thai word tells you its own tone
Take three words that look almost identical: ขาว, ข่าว and ข้าว.
Start with the consonant. ข is a high-class letter, one of the eleven. The vowel is long. The syllable ends in ว, a sonorant, which makes the syllable live rather than dead. A live syllable beginning with a high-class consonant and carrying no tone mark takes the rising tone, so ขาว is khǎao, and it means white.
Now add the first tone mark, ไม้เอก. On a high-class consonant that gives the low tone: ข่าว, khàao, news. Add the second mark, ไม้โท, and you get the falling tone: ข้าว, khâao, rice.
Three words, three tones, three meanings a Thai listener separates instantly, and nothing in that paragraph was memorised. The spelling said it. Learn the chain once, in the order class, vowel length, ending, mark, and you own it for every word you meet afterwards.
03
What a realistic first ninety days contains
Practical Tips
1. Week one: the five tones as sounds, before any theory about how they are spelled. Your ear needs to separate them before your eye is asked to predict them.
2. Week two: the mid-class consonants, the smallest group at nine letters, and the long vowels. Small enough to finish, large enough to read real syllables with.
3. Week three: unspaced text enters, even if it is four words long. The skill of finding where a word stops only grows on text that hides the boundaries.
4. Week four: high-class and low-class letters, and the live and dead ending test. This is the hard fortnight and it is worth protecting from interruptions.
5. Month two: the four tone marks, and the first pass through vocabulary you already use out loud, now attached to spellings.
6. Month two, in parallel: pronouns and kin terms tied to the actual people in your week, using their real ages and roles rather than a dialogue in a book.
7. Month three: reading something that was written for a Thai reader rather than for you. A building notice, a school message, a food delivery receipt.
8. End of month three: read again the first text you ever read. That comparison is the measurement, and it does not need a score attached to it.
Study habits that quietly waste a year
Mistakes & Solutions
Keeping a vocabulary list with no tone recorded on it
Write every new word in Thai script from the day you can read, and mark the tone beside it while the tutor's voice is still in your ear. A list without tone is a list of half-words.
Practising only with people who already understand your Thai
Your partner, your colleagues and the vendor you buy coffee from every morning have all learned to decode you. Once a week, say your sentence to somebody who has never heard you before. It is the only honest test.
Counting the app streak as practice
Recognition tasks train recognition. Keep the app if it keeps you turning up, and put the actual work into producing sentences aloud and reading text nobody simplified for you.
Never hearing your own voice
Record thirty seconds at the start of a session and listen to it beside the tutor's version. Most learners discover they are producing three tones consistently and two by accident, which is a far more useful thing to know than a general sense of getting better.
Saving it all for a three-hour push at the weekend
Tone and script both respond to frequency rather than to duration. Fifteen minutes on six days does more than ninety minutes on one, and it fits into a Bangkok week considerably more easily.
05
Questions worth asking a Thai tutor before you book
Practical Tips
1. Ask them to explain the tone of a word you choose on the spot. A tutor who teaches adults will walk you through class, vowel length, ending and mark. A tutor who has only ever taught children will tell you to repeat it.
2. Ask what they would do with a learner whose tones have been wrong for five years. The answer separates a teacher from a fluent speaker very quickly.
3. Ask which language the explanations will be in, and confirm it is one you can follow while tired at seven in the evening.
4. Ask whether you may bring your own texts. A tutor who welcomes the notice from your building is teaching you the Thai you actually need this month.
5. Ask whether you can record the session. The reason to say yes is that you get the model pronunciation back on a Wednesday, which is when you need it.
6. Ask what a session note looks like. If they have never written one, you will be reconstructing every lesson from memory.

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One-to-one Thai tutoring for children at Bangkok international schools: first language or additional language, IGCSE Thai 0518, IB Thai A and Thai B, and the weekly Thai culture hour.

View Details

Mandarin

One-to-one Mandarin lessons in Bangkok and online, matched to the exam you actually sit: TCAS A-Level 87 for Thai candidates, Language B for international schools, or working Mandarin for adults.

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Start with a listening call, in whatever Thai you already have

Tell us where you live, what you need Thai for this year, and how much of it you can already hear. That first conversation exists to place you correctly, so the first paid session starts in the right month of the course rather than at page one.

A listening audit before any course is proposedThe rate written down ahead of lesson oneA different tutor at no charge if the match is wrong

Request a Thai tutor Ask a question first

Thai for Foreigners

What is Thai for Foreigners?

Three ways a Thai lesson can be arranged

Four ways people arrive at Thai, and four different first months

Starting from zero

Speaks, cannot read

Reads slowly, stalls in conversation

Reading documents and news

What a Thai course actually contains

The five tones, by ear first

Who is usually sitting on the other side of the table

Adults who arrived recently

Long-stay residents who never learned to read

Foreign parents whose school communicates in Thai

Partners and family members

What lands in your inbox after each Thai session

Report Features

The session note, in Thai script

The tone corrections you actually needed

A reading log

Two things to use before next week

A quarterly re-read

Five things that quietly stall a foreign learner of Thai

"I will learn to speak first and pick up the script later."

"I learned ก ไก่, ข ไข่, so I know the alphabet."

"Tone is basically intonation. Thai people will work it out from context."

"I can read my textbook, but real Thai looks like one long word."

"I say ครับ or ค่ะ, so I am being polite."

What this arrangement gives someone learning Thai

One tutor, one learner

Corrections happen inside the session

The script starts in the first month

A written note after every session

The rate is in writing before you start

A different tutor at no charge if the match is wrong

How a tutor for this subject is screened

Where Thai lessons happen

Online Tutoring

In-Person Tutoring

Questions people ask before their first Thai lesson

A working guide to learning Thai as an adult

Why the script is the shortest road, although it looks like the longest

How a Thai word tells you its own tone

What a realistic first ninety days contains

Study habits that quietly waste a year

Questions worth asking a Thai tutor before you book

Related Programs

Thai for International School Students

Mandarin

Start with a listening call, in whatever Thai you already have