Learning the Lao Alphabet with Low-tech Flash Cards

By Kent Roper on 24 June 2014

Update: I added printable Lao Alphabet Flash Cards you can download and print here.

In learning Lao I had to make a decision: learn the Lao script, or don't learn the Lao script.

My goal in Lao is to be able to have conversations in Lao, so I didn't know for sure if I wanted to go through the effort of learning the Lao alphabet. 26 consonants and 28 vowels sounds a little complicated.

So how did I decide that learning to read Lao was a good idea, too?

(Don't forget to read all the way to the bottom to see my first video speaking Lao.)

One, I like the challenge. I don't think it's going to be easy to learn to read Lao. Not only are there over twice as many letters as the English alphabet, written Lao does not put spaces between words, only spaces between sentences.

But the main reason is for learning new vocabulary, and pronouncing that vocabulary correctly. There isn't a standard way of Romanizing (using the English alphabet for) Lao. I've seen the same Lao phrase written phonetically 4 ways on 4 different websites.

And Lao is a tonal language. Vowels have a low tone, a mid tone, or a high tone, that can be constant, rising, or falling. Hard to know what tone a word should have from using English letters.

So why am I using paper flash cards to learn the Lao alphabet? It's all about control. I found alphabet flash cards on Anki. And I found a cool phone app that lets you scroll through the alphabet and hear the letters pronounced by a native speaker. But I found I wasn't really remembering the letters with these tools.

Making my own flash cards helped because had to write the letters myself, and because I can go over as few cards as I want to, as many times as I want to. I fell in love with Anki flash cards when I was learning Esperanto, but in this case, I want more control over what learning.

(I'm still using Anki right now to learn vocabulary, though.)

It's going slow. I learned 8 letters yesterday. But I've got those 8 letters pretty well internalized. I'll learn a few more today.

Oh, here's a video of me speaking Lao.

Coincidentally, Benny from fluentin3months.com is doing a week-long challenge to get people comfortable speaking to a native in their first week of learning a language. To be fair, I've been working on Lao more than a week, but this is my first time taking a video of myself. As I mentioned in my learning Esperanto re-cap, I wish I had done more videos, so I'm happy for the motivation from Benny.