For any Vietnamese learner, pronunciation must be a challenging part that never seems to be tamed. There are some foreigners who can write very good pieces of Vietnamese; however, when it comes to conversation, they find it hard to to speak eloquently. Language is a tool of communication: people don’t only use with pen and paper but we also speak to convey our ideas. On the opening of Pronunciation corner, we hope that you can improve your speaking skills, starting from pronunciations despite the difficulties and complexities of Vietnamese phonetics.

At VinaTown, we are not gonna teach you theory but practical skills. So let us skip the long history of Vietnamese language to focus on the main topic: Vietnamese pronunciation.

When you learn, you begin with abc… and in Vietnamese, we have an alphabet too. Let’s see how it’s like?

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

I imagine you scratching your head with some perplexity and I can almost hear you asking yourself: is VinaTown so air-headed that they wrote an incomplete alphabet? Where are the F, J, W and Z? The answer is clear: these four letters are not officially in our alphabet. However, under some influences of foreign languages like French or English, they are brought into written language which familiar to many Vietnamese chatters (“phải” –must- that becomes “fải” or “quá” –too much- becoming “wá”...)

As you can see, some letters are looking very similar, but their pronunciation is rather different: A and Ă are different from each other, and both different from Â, though some common points can confuse you at first. Relax! With VinaTown’s Pronunciation Lessons and a little training, it will soon look like a piece of cake for you. More than this, it will quickly transform the laborious effort of speaking into a never ending fun. A new world will open its doors to you, once you have been able to speak Vietnamese fluently.

On this first lesson, let’s start with something easy:

Lesson 1: VIETNAMESE VOWELS

In my time, I was taught “O” as the first letter. The lesson was illustrated by a rooster saying “Ò ó o” as the crow of a cock. From 2002 or so, I heard that 1^st graders have started learning the alphabet with E. However, for your understanding, we sort out vowels with 3 variations and 2 variations and will start with A.

1. Vowels with 3 variations:

A Ă Â

Now I still can recall the poem that we were taught from childhood in order to remember O and A.

“O tròn như quả trứng gà,
Ô thì đội mũ, Ơ già thêm râu
O, a hai chữ khác nhau
Vì a có cái móc câu bên mình”

Simply translated in English:

“O is as round as an egg

Ô wears a cap, old Ơ has a beard

O, a – two different letters,

Since a has a hook with itself”.