I am sure there are more
complicated things in life, say, brain surgery, that kind of thing —
but I haven't experienced any of
them. Written Thai has 44 consonants. Twenty-nine have sounds
(21 "initials", the rest "finals"), the rest
are silent. The 42 are grouped into "high consonants", "middle
consonants", and "low consonants", the latter subdivided
into "single" and "twin" consonants. How quaint.
Vowels? You'll be happy to know there are only 32: 18 single vowels (looking for compatible single consonants, no doubt), 6 compound vowels — and you read it here first: 8 "consonant like" vowels. I don't know if these resemble consonants, or are fond of them. Could go either way. [Another book says there are only thirty. That would seem enough]
You may know about tonal languages like Chinese, where the tone of a syllable changes the meaning. "Ma" means one thing, but when pronounced like English handles questions ("Ma?") the meaning is completely different. That's fine, I can deal with that. But in Thai, elaborate rules determine which tone corresponds to a particular set of written characters. Here's Rule #4 (I've gotten up to 6 so far):
If a Low Class consonant is coupled with a short vowel (there are short and long vowels — and consonants), and the final consonant is "live", then the tone is "middle" (the tones are low, middle, high, rising, and falling. Middle, you might expect, is constant pitch at the middle of the Speaker's range — and you'd be close: it starts out at the middle, rises slightly in the middle of the town, then returns to middle. Most books glass over this fact).
One last trivial bit: "beautiful" and "bad luck" are the same "sound" in Thai, except one is uninflected (bad luck), and this other is question-like, English-wise. My Teacher says she couldn't understand why foreigners were always telling her she was "bad luck".
Sub-trivia: the Japanese word for "pretty", apparently means "ugly" in Thai. Or worse. Must make for interesting moments in dating relationships.