Why do you need to learn Vietnamese?

As the national language, Vietnamese is spoken throughout Vietnam by ethnic Vietnamese and by Vietnam's many minorities (~90 million people). If your partner, in-laws, relatives or friends speak Vietnamese or you live near a Vietnamese community, learning it will help you to communicate with them. It can also give you a better understanding of their culture and way of thinking

Vietnamese language belongs to the category of phonetic script, which means that a letter is uttered by one sound, or I can say that a word in Vietnamese only contains one syllable. So maybe if your native language is a western language, memorizing Vietnamese vocabulary will be a less challenging task (the longest word in Vietnamese has only 7 characters!!!).

Vietnamese alphabet looks similar to the ones of English, French or other Western countries. Obviously, this is one of the advantages of Vietnamese because most foreigners will find it easy to learn Vietnamese alphabet on the first day of the beginner’s class. There are 29 letters in Vietnamese alphabet, which is based on Latin alphabet. As long as you learn by heart these letters, you will make progress on learning new vocabulary later. Here are 29 letters in the alphabet:

A? Â B C D? E Ê G H I K L M N O Ô? P Q R S T U? V X YVietnamese grammar is said to be easy.• No articles – English articles are among the deciding factors that give non-natives a big headache, you can feel totally relieved when in Vietnamese, they do not exist at all.• Flexible parts of speech – For non-natives, a difficult part in English might be to figure out how to make a noun out of a verb or an adjective out of a verb. In Vietnamese, it’s not obvious what’s an adjective, a verb or a noun, they merge and float into each other, which generally means it’s a lot easier to understand and also easier to guess how to use: For example: thành công can mean success, successful or succeed depending on the context.• Particles instead of inflections – Vietnamese is totally free from inflections, particles are used to represent such things. A particle might indicate that an action is completed or that there are many of something, but these particles are always the same and not dependent on the word preceding it!• No gender - Most people who learn languages whose gender is important complain about it. German has three genders you have to learn, Italian, French and Spanish have two, and there will always be some exceptional cases! In Vietnamese, you don’t need to bother, because there is no such thing as grammatical gender.• Limited use of tenses – Vietnamese does not pay a lot of attention to tenses at all. Most of the time, it’s simply indicated by a word describing when something happens, rather than changing the structure of the sentence. However, tense can often be entirely left out if it’s obvious given the context.Vietnamese is a tonal language, and tone is an indispensable part in the syllable structure. But I’m sure you can overcome such obstacles by convincing yourself that Vietnamese pronunciation is a rich world of sound you didn’t know existed before ;) These tones are marked as follows:

Let me tell you a real funny story about these tones that I collected from the internet as the end of this post. Once, a Korean girl student said to her Vietnamese friend. Korean girl: "Hôm qua, em b? ôm. (Yesterday, I was hugged.). Her Vietnamese friend anxiously asked, "Em b? ôm??âu?" (Where were you hugged?). She replied, "D?? ký túc xá." (In the dorm). He continued, "Em?ã báo b?o v? ch?a?" (Have you reported to the security guard?). And she answered, "Em?ã??n bác s? r?i." (I went to see the doctor already.)(Comment: It turns out that instead of saying "b??m" (be sick), the Korean student pronounced "b? ôm" (be hugged). She only forgot to pronounce the tone "s?c", but the whole story went wrong)

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