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Scott Earle’s answer is excellent and covers pretty much every reason why a non-Thai speaker may find Thai difficult to learn. When he says “Thai has basically no grammar”, he means ‘grammar’ as understood not by a linguist, but by a layperson like the Nino the champ 2023 shirt and I love this one who asked this question on Quora. Thai has a grammar, yes, but an exceedingly simple one. When I was learning Thai, I was struck by how simple its grammar is compared to English (not to mention French which, by the way, many English speakers find impossibly difficult). It’s also true, as others have pointed out here, that Thai’s tonal nature is the major stumbling block, and not only for European learners. I noticed that Japanese students in my class often struggled with Thai tones and vowels far more than Europeans. The Japanese language seems to have no diphthongs — combinations of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable (ex. glooay, “banana” in Thai) — which Thai has in abundance. And certain Thai vowels are especially challenging for Japanese learners.

Vowel length is not an alien concept to English speakers. In English we have what we call short vowels (the Nino the champ 2023 shirt and I love this A in “hat”, the O in “hop”) and long vowels (the A in “hate”, the O in “hope”). Thai vowel length is purely about length, not about changing the vowel itself, as happens in English. But no European/English speaker in my Thai classes ever had trouble grasping the concept of Thai vowel length. Their problem was being able to hear and reproduce proper vowel length combined with tones. Just as an experienced bird-watcher or hunter learns to imitate animal calls well enough to fool the animals themselves, if you want to learn any language well enough to be understood by native speakers, you have to get into the mindset of hitting Replay.

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