For some personal reasons, I have a recent project to learn Vietnamese, not just basic words and phrases, but to become somewhat fluent. With all the years of studying Chinese, I had never gotten past an intermediate level. That level of fluency would be my goal for Vietnamese. It’s enough to read basic books and know about 70% of the text. And it’s enough to have basic conversations and be able to express myself, even if I need to substitute unknown words on occasion.
Jumping into a language completely cold is a great opportunity to take all that I have learned from Chinese, and see what applies more generally to language learning. What tools and strategies can advance my levels quickly, without getting sidetracked on ineffective methods?
First impressions
I have gone to Saigon twice, once a year ago, and again last month. The only studying I had done up to last month was a few Pimsleur lessons. I had learned to say “How are you” and was excited to use it. When I said it to my friend’s mother, it turns out I had used the wrong pronoun considering our age differences, and it was offensive. I also used standard Vietnamese and not the Saigon dialect, so it was the wrong syntax anyway. The result was just confusion on their part. It was discouraging, but it also woke me up to understand that it’s not going to be an easy language to learn.
Last year when I went, I stayed with my brother who lived in Saigon and spoke English. There was no need to know any Vietnamese, and I left the trip not having picked up anything. Then, a month ago, I went to Vietnam with a friend, and we stayed with her extended family. This was a completely different experience, and my lack of language skills became a clear problem. I needed to quickly pick up some useful phrases to get by. Since my friend was a native speaker, all I needed were a few survival phrases. It turns out this is all I needed:
- bathroom
- man/woman (to distinguish bathroom signs)
- what is your name
- it’s nice to meet you
- thank you
- hello
- good morning/afternoon/evening/night
- see you later
- it’s delicious
- I’m full
- I’m tired
- My stomach is bad (yes, you can have too much noodle soup)
- excuse me/I’m sorry
- pronouns!
Some other terms that I didn’t use but might have been useful for rudimentary conversation include:
- yesterday/today/tomorrow
- my job (IT or “computers”)
- numbers 1-10
- months
- expressing time
- to go/arrive/return
Unlike English and Chinese, it’s critical to use the correct pronoun, considering the person’s gender along with your relative ages. My impression so far is that using the wrong word to address someone is a serious offense that is going to cause some bad feelings. There are neutral pronouns to play it safe, and every formal lesson I have encountered so far — Pimsleur, textbooks, and flashcards — all use these neutral pronouns. If you relied solely on these, you would be missing a lot of important practical usage.
Similar to Chinese, Vietnamese has tones. There are a few more than standard Mandarin, but at least I was prepared for it and knew to include it in my word learning. But Vietnamese has many vowels and vowel combinations, and those also have diacritical marks. I hadn’t learned to read these, and vowel diacritics and tone markers all meant the same for me. But  is a flat tone vowel, à is a tone, and Ẫ is a vowel with a tone.
A lot of Vietnamese is pronounced very different from how it’s spelled. Chinese (pinyin or other English representation) did have that too, like xin and qin and si. Vietnamese has more letters, and more variations. if you have ever ordered phở (beef broth soup), you already know that it is not pronounced like English “foe”. And many sounds are unfamiliar to English speakers, and it is taking some training to move my mouth in different ways. Correct speaking is essential, as it’s easy to be misunderstood with just a slight difference in tone or pronunciation accuracy. I will prove this out someday, but my hunch so far is that there are more one syllable words in Vietnamese than in Chinese. This means that there is a higher ambiguity with an incorrect word since there is less context to compensate for it. Apparently, “I want to buy a house” sounds similar to “I want to sit now” at the poor speaking level I am at so far! As a bonus, I need to focus on Saigon dialect, while most learning material is the Hanoi dialect.
The same goes for spelling, as the correct diacritics and tone marks are necessary for being understand. The built in input method in both Windows and Android is TELEX, which allows adding marks by inputting extra letters after the vowels. It isn’t too hard to pick up. Writing out words has helped me remember words better, since I need to pay attention to the exact spelling, versus casual reading in which it’s easy to gloss over the vowel marks.
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet (plus all the diacritics) instead of characters. But it is similar to Chinese in that words are all separated per syllable. Thus, some mental processing is required to parse out the actual words from these syllables. In my first attempt at reading a full text, I really had no idea what I was looking at. Without being able to pick out key words, reading any text isn’t something I can tackle at this point.
With all that in mind, how should I study?
Proposed strategies
I don’t know an easy hack for learning Chinese, or any language at higher levels. What worked for me was a lot of exposure, and spaced repetition in both reading and writing. I drew from available dictionaries, corpora, and word lists available for download, along with my own Chinese Word Extractor program to create word lists and flashcards from texts. Once I knew enough words, reading texts was possible, and that allowed for even more exposure. But my biggest accomplishment was being able to read Harry Potter in Chinese. In fact, I still haven’t read it in English.
Attempting the same for Vietnamese, I see how spoiled I was with Chinese. As of now, there are 807 Aniki flashcard shared decks for Chinese flashcards. In Vietnamese, there are 123, and many of those are for learning English from Vietnamese, or Chinese from Vietnamese. Chinese has Pleco software which is a great tool for dictionary lookups and etymology. Chinese has official word lists geared for the various levels of the HSK exams.
To get up to speed, I want to set up my pipeline of flashcards to rapidly achieve a base knowledge of core words. Flashcard lists with Vietnamese audio would be especially useful.
The Anikweb flashcards I started with are these:
- Xefjord’s Complete Vietnamese (Southern): 201 words and phrases with audio. I went into Vietnamese completely cold, so having audio cards was helpful to start with. Skip the “Core Vietnamese Vocabulary” which is just 16 phrases with some weird ones like “Hello America.”
- Vietnamese to English vocab and practice: 500 sentences and 1069 words. No audio, but the example sentences are pretty reasonable for a beginner level, helping with both common words and grammar
I created a fork of my Chinese Word Extractor program that works with Vietnamese. It is still in progress, but modifying the logic to handle Vietnamese instead of Chinese was only a few hours of effort. The greater work was updating the program for Python 3, and switching the GUI framework from WX to tkinter. For a free Vietnamese to English dictionary, I used VNEDICT from Paul Denisowski, who was actually the original creator of CEDICT.
Armed with a vocabulary extractor, I can now create my own word lists. So far, I have taken a list of parsed words from OpenSubtitles, combined it with VNEDICT English definitions, and made a flashcard set from the top 1000 most frequent words.
Eventually, I will make a Vietnamese version of my Word Test online program to track my word knowledge.
I will spend about an hour every day studying. Keeping in mind my rough starting date of March 3, 2025, I want to keep more notes on the timeline for major milestones. While the results are entirely personal, it will give me a rough idea of how long it would take to learn any language with little to no prior knowledge.