9 Reasons Vietnamese is Easier Than You Think

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Just how difficult is the Vietnamese language?

Pretty much impossible, if you ask the Vietnamese themselves. The supposed difficulty of Vietnam's official language is a point of national pride among its roughly 101 million people, and locals are happy to tell you “tiếng Việt khó!” (Vietnamese is hard) at every possible opportunity.

So if you’re learning Vietnamese, or thinking about learning, it’s likely that all you’ve been getting so far is discouragement! In this article, I want to give you an alternate perspective, and offer you some encouragement, because chances are that Vietnamese is easier than you think.

It's true that, with six tones and a plethora of strange vowel sounds that we don’t have in English, pronouncing Vietnamese can be tricky. But most expats in Vietnam (of which I was one for a year) fail to realise that the pronunciation is just about the only difficult thing about Vietnamese. Every other aspect of the language is extremely easy – far easier than what you might expect, especially compared to most European languages.

Don't believe me? Here are nine reasons why Vietnamese is easier than you think:

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

1. Vietnamese Has No Genders

If you've ever learned French, Spanish, German, or just about any European language except English, you just breathed a huge sigh of relief. Vietnamese has no concept of “masculine” or “feminine” words. You can just learn the word as it is, without any need for extra memorisation.

2. Vietnamese Dispenses with “a” and “the”

If someone who was studying English asked you when to use “a” before a word, and when to use “the”, would you be able to explain? It’s a surprisingly complicated topic. The Wikipedia page on “articles”, as they’re called, is over 2500 words long!

But is it really that important whether you’re talking about “a” something or “the” something? It’s usually obvious from the context which one you mean. Far easier to just do away with them completely, which is what Vietnamese does. Người can mean both a person or “the person”, and you never need to worry about the distinction.

3. Vietnamese Doesn’t Have Plurals

In English, when we want to make something plural we usually stick an “s” on the end of it. “Dog” becomes “dogs”, “table” becomes “tables” and “house” becomes “houses”. However, there are many exceptions. “Person” becomes “people”, “mouse” becomes “mice”, “man” becomes “men”, and some words like “sheep” or “fish” don’t change at all.

In Vietnamese, everything is like a sheep. The word người, which I’ve already mentioned, can be used for both “people” or “person”; “chó” is “dog” or “dogs”, “bàn” is “table” or “tables”, and so on. If you think this would get confusing, ask yourself: can you remember a single time in your life when you heard someone talking about “the sheep” or “the fish” and you got confused because you didn’t know how many animals they were talking about?

If you really need to be specific, just put an extra word in front of the noun: một người is “one person”, những người is “people”, and một số người is “some people”. Easy. One worth sidestepping for now is các người: các is a perfectly normal plural marker in something like các bạn (“you all”), but các người aimed at a group of humans lands somewhere close to “you lot”, so it is not one to practise on strangers.

And it’s not just nouns that are simple…

4. Vietnamese Has No Confusing Verb Endings

Pity the poor learner of Spanish. Just to say “speak” (hablar), you have to learn five or six different endings for the present tense alone, depending on the dialect: I hablo, you hablas, he habla, we hablamos, and on it goes. Factor in the other tenses and the grammatical moods, and a single Spanish verb runs to over fifty forms.

The technical term is that Spanish verbs (and nouns, and adjectives) inflect, meaning the same word can take different forms depending on the context. English isn’t nearly as inflective as Spanish, but we still do it to some extent – for example the word “speak” can inflect to “speaks”, “speaking”, “spoken”, or “spoke”.

Here's the good news: Vietnamese is a completely non-inflective language – no word ever changes its form in any context. Learn the word nói, and you know how to say “speak” in all contexts and tenses for all speakers. I nói, you nói, he or she nói, we nói, you all nói, and they nói. That’s dozens, if not hundreds of hours of work saved compared to learning almost any European language.

A corollary to this is something that will give anyone who’s studied a European language a sigh of relief:

5. Vietnamese Tenses Can Be Learned In Two Minutes

Vietnamese tenses are so easy it’s practically cheating. Just take the original verb, e.g. “ăn” (to eat), and stick one of the following 5 words in front of it:

• đã = in the past
• mới = in the recent past, more recently than đã
• đang = right now, at this very moment
• sắp = soon, in the near future
• sẽ = in the future

(There are a few others, but with these 5 you’ll be fine in 99% of situations.)

To give you some concrete examples (“tôi” means “I”):

• Tôi ăn cơm = I eat rice
• Tôi đã ăn cơm = I ate rice
• Tôi mới ăn cơm = I just ate rice, I recently ate rice
• Tôi đang ăn cơm = I am eating rice (right now)
• Tôi sắp ăn cơm = I am going to eat rice, I am about to eat rice
• Tôi sẽ ăn cơm = I will eat rice.

Better yet, you can often skip these words entirely if it’s obvious from the context – for example “tôi ăn cơm hôm qua” – “I eat rice yesterday” – is perfectly valid Vietnamese.

Congratulations! You can now express yourself in Vietnamese in any tense! Wasn’t that simple?

6. You Don’t Have To Learn a New Alphabet

You can thank the French for this one. Until the early twentieth century, Vietnamese was written by the small literate minority in Chữ Nôm, a logographic system built out of Chinese characters and Chinese-derived parts rather than pictures. That has since been completely replaced by a version of the Latin alphabet, the same one English uses, called Quốc Ngữ. So unlike Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Thai, Khmer, Korean, Hindi and dozens of other Asian languages, there is no new alphabet to learn before you can read Vietnamese. You just learn a set of accent marks, technically called diacritics, which mostly mark tone, and you are away.

In fact, learning to read Vietnamese is actually easier than learning to read English, because…

7. Vietnamese Spelling is Highly Consistent and Unambiguous

Quick question: how do you pronounce the English words “read”, “object”, “close”, and “present”? Well, was it close, or did you close? Did you present the present, read what I’ve read, or object to the object?

English spelling is extremely inconsistent, more than any other language I’m aware of, and the “same” word can often have different pronunciations depending on the context. Even the same letter can be pronounced a ton of different ways – like the letter “a” in “catch”, “male”, “farmer”, “bread”, “read” and “meta”. Combine that with a mountain of inconsistencies, imported foreign spellings and things that make no sense whatsoever, such as the -ough ending, and learners of English have a genuinely miserable time working out how a word should be written or said.

Vietnamese, on the other hand, has none of this nonsense. The same letter is always pronounced the same way no matter what the word or context (disclaimer: this holds true more for Hanoi Vietnamese than Saigon Vietnamese, which has a very small number of inconsistencies), and you can always tell from reading a single Vietnamese word exactly how it’s supposed to be pronounced. Once you can read the Vietnamese alphabet’s 29 letters (which, remember, are almost exactly the same as English’s 26), and understand its five tone marks, you can read any Vietnamese word. Job done!

8. Vietnamese Grammar is Virtually Non-Existent

I already mentioned how Vietnamese lets you leave out the tense word (like saying “I eat rice yesterday”) if what you mean is obvious from the context. This is actually just one example of a wider point: Vietnamese grammar is incredibly simple. Most of the time, you can just say the minimum amount of words needed to get your point across and the result is grammatically correct Vietnamese, no matter how “broken” it would sound in English.

This is why you'll often hear Vietnamese people using incomplete English sentences like “no have” or “where you go?”. They’re just translating directly from how they’d say it in Vietnamese, forgetting to apply the much more complicated rules that English insists on. It's a big disadvantage for Vietnamese people wanting to learn English, but it makes your life much easier as a learner of Vietnamese.

9. Vietnamese Vocabulary is Highly Logical

Most foreigners in Vietnam, even if they don't speak Vietnamese, will know the amusing fact that xe ôm – the local name for Vietnam’s ubiquitous motorbike taxis – translates literally as “hug vehicle.” But it doesn’t stop there – a huge percentage of Vietnamese vocabulary is formed by just combining two words in a logical manner, whereas in English you'd have to learn an entirely new third word that sounds completely different.

For instance, if I told you that máy means “machine” and bay means “flying”, could you guess what máy bay means? It is an aeroplane, of course.

There are more examples than I can begin to list, but to give you an idea: a bench is a “long chair”, a refrigerator is a “cold cupboard”, a bra is a “breast shirt” and a bicycle is a “pedal vehicle”. To ski is “to slide snow”, a tractor is a “pulling machine”, a turkey is a “western chicken”, a zebra is a “striped horse”, and the list goes on and on and on. This massively speeds up the process of picking up new words, because once you have a foundation of basic ones, they combine into hundreds of new meanings you never had to learn separately.

Vietnamese is Easier than You Think

Have I convinced you yet that Vietnamese just might be easier than you previously thought?

Hopefully I've managed to undo some of the myths and misconceptions you may have held around Vietnamese, and given you an insight into how the language works.

The one genuinely hard part is the bit this article has been dodging, which is pronunciation, so that is where your effort should go. Our guide to the Vietnamese alphabet and its tones covers the diacritics in detail, and saying hello in Vietnamese gets you into an actual conversation.

Tones are the one thing reading cannot teach you, so it is worth hearing them. You can sign up for VietnamesePod101 for that, and our VietnamesePod101 review covers what you get if you would rather know first.

And when you want to put all that easy grammar to work, join the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp, where you get 90 days to reach a 15-minute conversation with a native speaker. With no genders, no articles, no plurals and no verb endings to worry about, Vietnamese gives you a real head start.