Unlike many other Southeast Asian languages, the Vietnamese language uses the Roman alphabet, which makes it more convenient to learn for many English speakers.
The Vietnamese alphabet follows pretty much the same alphabetical order as the English alphabet. It consists of 29 letters, with 12 vowels and 17 consonants.
a, ă, â, b, c, d, đ, e, ê, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, ô, ơ, p, q, r, s, t, u, ư, v, x, y.
29 = 26 (number of letter in English alphabet) – 4 + 1 + 6
- 4 (f, j, w, z)
- 1 (đ)
- 6 (ă – â – ê – ô – ơ – ư)
Please note that the marks which appear on the vowels are not tone marks. You can simply call them \”vowel marks\”, and there are only 3 of them:
- a smile (ă)
- a hat (â, ô)
- a hook (ơ, ư)
The complex vowel system and a large number of letters with diacritics, which can even stack twice on the same letter (e.g. nhất meaning \”first\”), make it easy to distinguish the Vietnamese alphabet from other Latin scripts.
The Vietnamese system produces words that have no silent letters, with letters and words consistent in how they are read and spoken, with rare exceptions. The elaborate use of diacritics produces a highly accurate sound transcription for tonal languages.
Please watch the below videos to understand this lesson more:
You can also use this video to practice the Vietnamese alphabet pronunciation. I recommend you to practice every day for at least one week when you start to learn Vietnamese:
QUIZ
Can you guess the pronunciation of the following words? Use Google Translate to check.
- Tôi
- Bạn
- Mẹ
- Bố
- Anh
- Chị
- Em
- Bé
- Mỏi
- Mệt