How to Read Different Thai Fonts and Handwriting

This article was originally posted on WomenLearnThai.com.

It’s been my observation that when you are advanced in a language, to read you don’t need to recognize each letter. You see words as a coherent whole. And given the context you can guess what the word is quite easy. 

But at the beginning of learning a language such as Thai, even little differences in letter shapes (using different fonts and handwriting) will often make you stumble. At least it was my experience.

 Over time I developed rules on how to distinguish letters in the Thai alphabet which I will share with you now.



There are hundreds of Thai fonts. To make the comparisons, I chose four different ones:



1. Browalia New – classic Thai font

2. JS-Puchong-Normal.ttf – modern font with simplification

3. Prompt-Black.otf – modern font with another type of simplification

4. SOV_wayo.ttf – nice handwriting



All are easy to find online so you can try them yourself. 


Note: There’s also a post on WLT listing free Thai font downloads: FREE Thai Fonts: Comparisons & Downloads

How to Read Different Thai Fonts and Handwriting…

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FREE Downloads…

Here are the three files at full resolution for you to download and print out.

ZIP (572kb): Aleksey Golubtsov: Read Thai Fonts