How to learn Vietnamese by reading

Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, and that gives English speakers a head start: you can learn to sound out a page in days. The modern script, chữ Quốc ngữ, grew out of the work of seventeenth-century European missionaries and became the standard in the early twentieth century, replacing writing based on Chinese characters. Its literature runs from Nguyễn Du’s verse novel The Tale of Kiều to Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War.

The grammar is kind to learners. Verbs don’t conjugate and nouns don’t change for plural or gender: tôi đi, anh đi, họ đi, “I go, you go, they go.” The challenge is in the marks above and below the letters, and in the sounds they stand for.

What makes Vietnamese hard to read

• Tones. The northern standard has six tones, and the spelling always shows which one a syllable has: five with a mark, the level tone with none. The syllable ma gives ma (ghost), má (mother in the south; cheek), mà (but), mả (grave), mã (code; also “horse” in Sino-Vietnamese compounds such as mã lực, “horsepower”) and mạ (rice seedling). Southern speech merges two of them, hỏi and ngã.
• Stacked marks. Vowel marks (ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư) combine with tone marks, so one vowel can carry two: người (person), được (to be able), Việt. The marks are precise, and you learn to read them as quickly as plain letters.
• Spaces between syllables, not words. Vietnamese writes every syllable separately, so a two-syllable word looks like two words: học sinh (student), thủy thủ (sailor), bệnh viện (hospital). Reading means grouping syllables into words as you go.
• Pronouns from family. Vietnamese uses kinship terms as pronouns, chosen by age and relationship: anh (older brother), chị (older sister), em (younger sibling), ông (grandfather), bà (grandmother), cô and chú (aunt and uncle). In a novel, the choice tells you how characters see each other.
• Classifiers. Nouns take a classifier when counted or specified: con mèo (a cat), cái bàn (a table), quyển sách (a book).
• Time words instead of tenses. Đã marks the past, đang an action in progress, sẽ the future, and vừa something that just happened. Often there’s no marker at all, and context does the work.
• North and south. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City pronounce some letters differently: in the north, d, gi and r all sound like z, while the south says d and gi like y. Some everyday words differ too, such as thìa and muỗng for “spoon” and bát and chén for “bowl.” Books use a shared written standard.
• Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary. Many formal and abstract words come from Chinese roots: quốc gia (nation), hạnh phúc (happiness), giáo dục (education). They’re common in books.

Vietnamese reading at each level

Here is roughly what each CEFR level looks like in Vietnamese:

• A2, elementary. Short sentences with everyday words, the basic time markers, common classifiers and simple pronouns.
• B1, intermediate. Longer sentences joined with vì, nên, khi and nhưng, the passive with bị and được, and a wider range of pronouns in dialogue.
• B2, upper intermediate. More Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, idioms, and long sentences with clauses that describe nouns.
• C1, advanced. Lightly condensed, and otherwise close to the original. C2 is the complete novel.

See CEFR levels explained for the scale itself.

Les Misérables at A2 and at B2

Here is the turning point of Victor Hugo’s novel, written for this page at two levels:

A2

Jean Valjean vừa ra tù. Ông đói và mệt, nhưng không ai cho ông vào nhà. Chỉ có một vị giám mục già mời ông ăn tối.

Jean Valjean has just come out of prison. He is hungry and tired, but no one will let him in. Only an old bishop invites him to supper.

B2

Đêm đó, Jean Valjean lấy trộm bộ đồ ăn bằng bạc rồi bỏ trốn. Khi cảnh sát giải Valjean trở lại, vị giám mục lại nói rằng chính ông đã tặng số bạc ấy, và còn đưa thêm cho Valjean đôi chân nến.

That night, Jean Valjean stole the silverware and ran away. When the police brought Valjean back, the bishop said instead that he himself had given away the silver, and he even gave Valjean the pair of candlesticks as well.

The A2 text uses vừa, “just,” with no other tense marking, calls Valjean ông, the pronoun for an older man, and introduces the bishop with vị, a respectful classifier. The B2 text adds rồi (“and then”), giải… trở lại (“escort back”), and three small words that carry the story’s surprise: lại, which signals the opposite of what you’d expect, chính, which stresses “he himself,” and còn… thêm, “even, in addition.”

A daily Vietnamese reading routine

1. Pair your eyes and ears. Play a few pages with the read-along on, so each word lights up as you hear it. Every tone mark gets a sound, and after a few weeks you’ll hear the mark before you see it.
2. Repeat a few sentences. Say two or three lines after the narrator. Tones settle in the mouth faster than in the eye.
3. Group the syllables. When you reread, notice which syllables belong together as words. When you can’t tell, tap and read the meaning in context; it usually settles the question.
4. Reread yesterday’s pages. The same pronouns, classifiers and time words come back constantly, and rereading makes them automatic.

The research on reading while listening is encouraging. In a study by Webb and Chang (2015, “Second language vocabulary learning through extensive reading with audio support”), learners who read and listened to graded readers picked up a substantial share of the words they hadn’t known, and kept much of it months later. For a tonal language, the audio is more than a support: it’s how the written marks become real sounds. For the research and the method, see reading while listening and extensive reading.

Classics to start with

• Les Misérables is long in the original, but at B1 or B2 its central story, a convict, a bishop and a relentless policeman, is gripping and clear.
• The Count of Monte Cristo is a revenge story that keeps you reading at B2.
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea fills your vocabulary with the ocean, at B1 or B2.
• Treasure Island is an ideal first novel at A2 or B1, full of dialogue.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes offers short, satisfying mysteries at B1 and B2, each with its solution in the last pages.

Reading Vietnamese with Lexo

Tones are the hard part of Vietnamese, so Lexo’s audio is the place to start. Every word can be played on its own, so you can hear any tone the moment you’re unsure of it, and the whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted as it’s read.

Tap any word and a card shows what it means in that sentence and its part of speech, and if it belongs to a phrase or idiom, the card explains that too. The whole sentence is translated into English, words worth keeping go into your Words list, and sentence-by-sentence mode shows one sentence at a time with its audio and translation.

Every book comes at five levels, from A2 to C2. When you’re the first reader of an edition, you watch it being written: chapter 1’s opening lines appear within minutes, the rest follows as you read, and the edition carries your dated “First edition” mark. Everything downloads for offline reading, with no account.

Vietnamese shares a great deal of vocabulary with Chinese and Cantonese, and like Thai, it’s a tonal language.

Lexo is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Get notified at launch.