Lesson 1:
Greetings and Essential Expressions
- Vocabulary 1
- Go Further: Age and Greetings
- Matching Bubbles: Greetings
- Grammar: Greeting and Addressing Terms
- Go Further: Chữ Quốc Ngữ
- Go Further: Standard Vietnamese
- Matching Bubbles: Kinship terms and Tones
- Vocabulary 2
- Go Further: More on Vocabulary 2
- Go Further: Expressing One's Nationality
- Multiple Choice: Greetings and Polite Expressions
- Grammar: The linking verb là
- Fill In: Contructions with là
- Conversation: Anh khỏe không? (How are you?)
- Culture: Greetings and Politeness
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Chữ Quốc Ngữ
Vietnamese is written with Latin letters with additional diacritics marking the tones and different vowels. This writing system is called chữ Quốc Ngữ (National Script). Chữ Quốc Ngữ was first developed in the 16th century by Catholic missionaries from Portugal, France, Italy and Spain. In the 17th century, it was completely systemized for the first time in Alexandre De Rhodes’s Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary.
As you have noticed, each syllable in Vietnamese sounds somehow melodic. This is because Vietnamese is a tonal language, which means that each syllable has a tone. In the standard variety, there are six tones. In English, we can use tone on phrases and sentences to express surprise, to emphasize or to question (think of how the meaning of the word “really” changes if you say it with a rising tone vs. a falling tone). Differently, in tonal languages like Vietnamese, tones actually change the meanings of words and are an essential part of speaking and understanding the language. The tones are marked in writing with diacritics, above or under the vowels. The only tone that has no marking is the high flat tone. Below is a visual representation of the six tones with their traditional Vietnamese names below them.

Let’s take a look at how the tones work with an example syllable la:
Tone ngang | la | a high flat tone | to shout |
Tone sắc | lá | a rising tone | leaf |
Tone huyền | là | a falling tone, also sometimes spoken as a low flat tone | to be |
Tone nặng | lạ | a short abruptly falling tone ended by glottalization* | strange |
Tone hỏi | lả | a low broken tone with a low falling-rising melody (except in the middle of the phrase, where it is spoken without the rising part) | exhausted |
Tone ngã | lã | a high broken tone that begins a bit higher than tone 2, then is glottalized*, then rises abruptly. | unclean |
* Glottalization refers to a constriction of the throat. In English, there is a glottal stop (that is, not just a constriction but a closing of the throat) in the middle of the two syllables in the phrase “uh-oh.”
You may have noticed that there are several other diacritics than those above. These diacritics indicate qualities of the vowels they go with. For example, the diacritic ^ in ông (an older man, grandfather) sounds like the o in long, while the o in ong (bee) is a more open vowel like o in hot. You will learn further differences between the vowel diacritics in the next lessons.
Now let’s get some practice with listening to the tones. Listen to the following words that share the same syllable, but differ in their tones:
ma ghost
má cheek
mà but
mạ rice plant
mả grave
mã appearance
ba three
bá uncle
bà grandmother
bạ any
bả bait
bã waste