Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai… are languages that have multi-tone which cause many problems to their learners. But looking back on your own mother tongue, can you understand if one speaks like a robot? You also need to stress on a specific syllable of a word, raising or lowering your voice in some particular situations. It is because you do it unconsciously that you can hardly realize it. If you stick with our VinaPronuncia lessons, you will gradually be able to speak without having to think what accent it is.

Ok, I won’t play with your impatience anymore, so let’s get started now.

Lesson 2: VIETNAMESE ACCENTS

(pt1)

There are 5 kinds of accents in Vietnamese. Here are their names:

Sắc (’ ) huyền (`) hỏi (?) ngã (~) nặng (.)

Didn’t you notice that each name above bears the respective accent on it? (i.e. there is “.” in “Nặng” and “~” in “ngã”). All though the Southerners of Vietnam make no distinction between “ngã”(~) and “hỏi” (?), “ngã”(~) is pronounced lower and a bit longer than “hỏi” (?).

Do you remember what we learned last time? Today, let’s see how accents work with vowels that have 3 variations, which are:

1/A Ă Â

Firstly, let’s see how accents work on A:

A Á À Ả Ã Ạ

How about Ă and Â? The thing is, Ă and  cannot go with accents when standing alone. How can you remember this complicated thing? Just need to imagine the family of 3 brothers: A, Ă and Â. A is the youngest brother who is strong enough to deal with accents himself. His two elder brothers, Ă (with his beard) and  (with his moustache) are too old that they require a supporter to stand in their back to help them deal with accent. The supporters should be some specific consonants that you will learn in further lessons.

2/O Ô Ơ

Different from A Ă Â’ s family, this family consists of 3 sisters: O, Ô, Ơ who are “big” and bold enough to go with accents by themselves.

Let’s check out the pronunciation:

O Ó Ò Ỏ Õ Ọ

Ô Ố Ồ Ổ Ỗ Ộ

Ơ Ớ Ờ Ở Ỡ Ợ

Didn’t you realize that “” and “Ớ”, “Ă” and “Á” are homophonic? Magical, isn’t it?

On the 3^rd lesson next week, we’ll see how accents work with vowels consisting of 2 variations.

Keep practicing means you have made another step in your process of training Vietnamese pronunciation.

See you then!