How to speak in Vietnam – Why it's easier than you think!

Vietnamese has a bit of a reputation for being a difficult language to master, even the locals will tell you that! But these reasons are sure to change your mind and will make you want to learn Vietnamese fast!

Image via Anantara Hoi An Resort

No genders

If you have ever tried learning Spanish, French or German or any of the Romance Languages, you will be relieved to hear that in Vietnamese that concept doesn’t exist. There are no gender-specific words or neutrals to worry about. This means less memorization as well. 

There are no articles 

Even in the English language, the precise use of articles can be confusing. The formula of where to use the ‘a’ and ‘the’ can be confusing at times. Most people will just rely on the word flow to decide on the appropriateness of the article. For that, you must have a certain skill with the language. However, for the clarity of many, Vietnamese does away with such articles, and simply uses nguoi, this is used to denote for example ‘a’ thing or ‘the’ thing.

No plurals 

In Vietnamese, there are no plurals for nouns. For example, ‘cho’ is used for both dog and dogs, ‘ban’ which means tables is also used for the singular table. To distinguish between plural and singular one can place an extra word such as ‘mot cho’, which means one dog, or ‘nhung cho’ – some dogs or cac cho – all the dogs. 

Numbers can be used to denote the quantity as well. 

No confusing verb endings 

For Romance languages such as Italian or French, you have to learn at least six different verb endings usually dependent on the person and tense. Also known as inflexions they come into play for verbs and adjectives as well. Luckily for those who found French miserable, Vietnamese is a non-inflective language. The words do not change according to tense or person. For example, speak which is noi will be the same regardless of the person. It will just be the ‘noi’. she ‘noi’. they noi etc. 

 No new alphabet 

Due to the French colonial influence up until recent times, the Vietnamese language system was based on a pictorial system named Chur Nom. It remains somewhat similar to the Chinese text. That has been now overtaken completely by a system similar to the Latin Alphabet, which is the same one used for English. It is called Quoc Ngu. So unlike other Asian languages such as Thai, Korean, Hindi or Japanese, you won’t have to learn a new alphabet from scratch it will be similar to the English alphabet.  

Vietnamese Grammar is easy 

 Vietnamese allows you to omit out tenses if what you mean is apparent according to the circumstance. This is another area that makes Vietnamese grammar amazingly manageable. Most of the time, one can just speak the least number of words to make sense and get your message across. 

It may sound broken in English, but according to Vietnamese, you will still be within their grammatical structure. 

You may often hear Vietnamese applying half-done English sentences such as “where you go?” and “no have”. This is just because they are directly translating Vietnamese to English. Thus, all the complicated grammatical structure of the English language is bypassed. So, for someone fluent in English, Vietnamese will be so much easier to speak than most other languages.

If you are planning on visiting Vietnam, get your basics right. Once there it will surely improve. If you are visiting Vietnam you can try hotels in Hoi An such as the Anantara Hoi An Resort.