Vietnamese grammar would make a learner of German weep with envy: no verb endings, no cases, no gender, no plural forms, no articles. Then you open your mouth. Nearly all the difficulty of Vietnamese lives in the sound, and the sooner you accept that, the faster you'll get somewhere.
To learn Vietnamese, you trade grammar for pronunciation: six tones in the northern standard, a dozen vowel letters, final consonants that are barely released, and a pronoun system in which choosing "you" means deciding who's older. It's hard, and it's very learnable if you spend the first weeks on sounds and spelling rather than on phrases. Vietnamese spelling, unlike Chinese characters, tells you exactly how a word sounds once you can read the marks.
Where Vietnamese is spoken
Vietnam has around 100 million people, and Vietnamese is the first language of roughly 85 to 90 million of them; most of the country's ethnic minorities speak it as a second language. Several million more live abroad, with the largest communities in the United States, France, Australia and Canada, and long-established ones in Germany and the Czech Republic.
Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language, distantly related to Khmer. It isn't related to Chinese, but centuries of Chinese influence left a large Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary: đại học (university), học sinh (pupil), quốc gia (nation). French rule added cà phê, bơ (butter), ga (railway station) and xà phòng (soap). Like Thai, Vietnamese is tonal with very light grammar, though the two aren't related either.
Since the early 20th century it has been written in chữ Quốc ngữ, a Latin-based alphabet first developed by European missionaries in the 17th century. It has 29 letters, including ă, â, đ, ê, ô, ơ and ư, and no f, j, w or z. A single vowel can carry two marks: in Việt, the ê wears its own hat and a tone mark underneath.
North or south
Hanoi speech is what most textbooks teach, and it has six tones. In the south, around Ho Chi Minh City, two of them, hỏi and ngã, sound alike, so there are effectively five. Consonants differ too: d and gi sound like "z" in the north and like "y" in the south. Some everyday words change. A bowl is bát in the north and chén in the south, and má is "mother" in the south, while in the north it usually means "cheek". Learn the variety of the people you'll talk to; many overseas communities, especially in the US and Australia, speak southern Vietnamese.
How to learn Vietnamese tones
Every syllable has a tone, and a change of tone makes a different word. The textbook example is ma:
| Tone | Mark | Roughly | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| ngang | none | level, mid voice | ma, ghost |
| huyền | grave accent | low, falling gently | mà, but |
| sắc | acute accent | high, rising | má, cheek or mother |
| hỏi | hook above | dips, then rises | mả, grave (tomb) |
| ngã | tilde | rises with a break in the voice | mã, code |
| nặng | dot below | low, short, cut off | mạ, rice seedling |
Learn every word with its tone from day one. A word without its tone is a different word, or no word at all. Practise in sets like the one above, out loud, and exaggerate at first; your voice will calm down on its own later.
The pronoun problem
Bạn, "friend", works as "you" between people of roughly the same age, and textbooks use it everywhere. Real life asks more. You choose a kinship term based on age and relationship: anh (older brother, for a man a bit older than you), chị (older sister), em (younger sibling, also used between partners), cô and chú (aunt and uncle, for people around your parents' age), ông and bà (grandfather and grandmother, for older people). Then you refer to yourself with the matching term. Tôi is the neutral "I", polite but a little distant.
Xin chào is correct but formal. Day to day, people say chào plus the right term: chào anh, chào chị, chào em. Getting it right is a small courtesy, and people notice it.
Classifiers come with nouns: con for animals (con mèo, a cat; con chó, a dog), cái for many objects (cái bàn, a table), quyển for books (quyển sách).
The grammar that's kind to you
Tense is optional: tôi ăn can mean "I eat" or "I ate". When you need to be precise, small words do it: tôi đã ăn (I ate), tôi đang ăn (I'm eating), tôi sẽ ăn (I'll eat). Questions often end in không: bạn khỏe không? "Are you well?" And a common greeting is a question about food: ăn cơm chưa? "Eaten yet?"
First Vietnamese words
- Xin chào: hello (formal). Chào anh, chào chị: hello, to a man or a woman a bit older than you.
- Bạn khỏe không? Tôi khỏe, cảm ơn: how are you? I'm well, thanks.
- Cảm ơn: thank you.
- Xin lỗi: sorry, excuse me.
- Vâng or dạ: yes, politely. Không: no.
- Tôi không hiểu: I don't understand.
- Bao nhiêu tiền?: how much?
- Ngon quá: delicious.
- Một, hai, ba: one, two, three.
- Tạm biệt: goodbye.
Phrases before sounds, words without marks
Learners are often handed phrases before sounds, so they memorise xin chào with English intonation and the tones never settle. Anh, chị and em usually get translated simply as "you", which leaves learners baffled the first time someone calls them em. And quick phrase lists sometimes drop the diacritics altogether, writing cam on for cảm ơn. Never learn from Vietnamese without its marks. You'd be memorising words that don't exist.
A first month
Week one is sounds and spelling: the alphabet, the vowels with their marks, and the six tones, read aloud daily. Week two adds greetings, pronouns and numbers, and the habit of choosing anh, chị or em before you speak. Week three brings everyday verbs with đã, đang and sẽ, and the classifiers con, cái and quyển. In week four, read short real texts, a menu, a street sign, a simple message, and write a few of your own.
Vietnamese is a long-haul language. The FSI, measuring for English speakers, places it in Category III, about 44 weeks of full-time study to professional level, and our article on how long it takes to learn a language explains what that means for someone with half an hour a day.
Learning Vietnamese with Qlango
Qlango teaches Vietnamese from A1 to B1, the level at which you can handle most everyday situations, talk about your experiences and plans, and give simple reasons for your opinions. Every word appears with its full set of marks, so you learn cảm ơn as cảm ơn from the first lesson. Spaced repetition brings words back right before you'd lose them, which matters in a language where ma and má are strangers, and building sentences yourself trains word order, classifiers and pronouns together. With Premium, an AI teacher answers the questions textbooks skip, like when to call someone anh and when em, and lessons work offline.
You choose the language you learn through when you add the course. The list of languages and levels shows everything Qlango teaches, and Premium adds the AI teacher and offline lessons.
Week one belongs to the tones, and hỏi will take longer than the other five. Read ma, mà, má, mả, mã and mạ aloud once a day alongside Qlango's A1 lessons, and don't worry if the dipping one is the last to settle.
