October 26, 2026
The Karan Mark
I checked the Week 3 words closely, and the part that changes things is that crossing a letter out with ์ can change the tone of the whole word. Once that letter is gone, a different consonant can become the ending, so the live or dead call you already know has to be made again on what is left.
Take สัตว์, animal. The ์ sits over ว, so ว is not sounded. What remains ends in ต, sounded as a t, and a syllable ending that way is dead. With high class ส and no tone mark, that gives you a low tone, sat. If you had kept ว as the ending in your head, you would have called it live and gotten the tone wrong even though you spotted the mark.
เสาร์, Saturday, goes the other way. Cross out the ร under ์ and nothing is left to close the syllable at all, so it ends on its long vowel sound and stays live. High class ส, live, no tone mark gives you a rising tone, sao. Then there is จันทร์, Monday, where I think the mark is at its trickiest. It sits over ร, but the ท before it goes silent too, leaving น as the final. That ending is live, and mid class จ gives you a mid tone, jan.
That is also why the pack puts พุธ and อังคาร beside these words. They carry no ์, so nothing gets crossed out. Their final letters are real finals and are read as the finals they are.
Four of the seven day names carry this mark, so calendars and shop signs will keep handing you this exact decision. My lean is to trust the three words above as your test set this week. If สัตว์ comes out low and เสาร์ comes out rising, the new step has landed, because those two tones only work if you re-read the ending after the deletion.