Thai Grammar

Learning Thai grammar is easier than learning the grammar of almost any other language in existence. In fact, in order to help you fully appreciate how easy mastery of this subject is going to be for you, let’s take a moment to review grammar in general. Since you’re reading this article, you’re most likely a native speaker of English. Therefore, you understand that there are a lot of rules in grammar. To make matters worse, the vast majority of these rules have a number of exceptions, and the only way to learn those exceptions is simply to memorize them. These two factors combined are the reasons so many people get nervous at the thought of a series of grammar lessons.

However, in Thai grammar, as we mentioned a moment ago, you are not going to have very many of those types of issues. As a matter of fact, there are very few fixed rules in Thai grammar at all. Not only that, the few rules that do exist are very easy to understand, thanks in large part to the fact that, like English, Thai is a language which is based on the use of subjects, verbs, and objects to express complete ideas (sentences). That is, it is what is known in linguistics as an “SVO” language. What’s more, those three parts of speech (subjects, verbs, and objects) usually appear in the same order in Thai sentences as they do in English ones.

Another similarity between Thai grammar and that of the English language is that they both make use of personal pronouns. However, it is really the differences between these two languages that make Thai’s rules of grammar so much easier to comprehend than those of English. For example, in Thai, there is no such thing as verb conjugation. That alone is enough to delight most students of grammar. However, the good news doesn’t end there! There are also no articles in Thai, either definite or indefinite. Object pronouns, plurals, gender, and noun declension are also concepts you don’t need to be familiar with in the Thai language.

In the absence of these concepts, Thai grammar expresses tense through both context and the use of additional words when necessary. Plus, since tense is not indicated by changing the form of Thai verbs, making sure that your sentence has good subject-verb agreement is totally unnecessary in Thai. As you can see, learning this language is not going to be very difficult, at least in terms of its grammar.