Most Common Flat-tone Words, Part 1 (1500 Words)

This is a different approach to learning Thai. For those like me who are not natural to hearing or pronouncing the five Thai tones, this set of five lessons is one way to tackle that. The first lesson uses flat-tone (some call it 'neutral-tone'). All the vocabulary here is flat-toned (which isn't necessarily the same as you already do in English, because you might add what Thais would consider rising or falling tones to your words just because you give some emphasis etc).

Two purposes are obvious here. One, you learn a set of words you can say to Thais without having to worry about adding tone to them. Two, after spending several days listening to just flat-tone words, once you go to the lesson using all rising-tone words, you might start to hear what the difference is.

A pink word in an example is not flat-tone.

Word list from Jørgen Nilsen, Thai Frequency Dictionary, 2nd edition, shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The ranking is based on the Chulalongkorn University Thai National Corpus. Other common flat-tone words come from the Thai National Corpus, the Thai Textbook Corpus, and the Phupha common-word list.

1–50 51–100 101–150 151–200 201–250 251–300 301–350 351–400 401–450 451–500

1–50

51–100

101–150

151–200

201–250

251–300

301–350

351–400

401–450

451–500