Just like English, Vietnamese also has its alphabet (or bảng chữ cái). All Vietnamese words consists of letters from bảng chữ cái and sometimes with accent marks (known simply as dấu = mark).
It’s not hard to memorize bảng chữ cái if you’ve already known English alphabet. Now take a look at Vietnamese alphabet.
Most letters are similar to English letters except the seven colored letters: ă, â, đ, ê, ô, ơ, ư. But they aren’t totally unrelated to the rest. Ă, Â are derivatives of A; Đ is derivative of D; Ô, Ơ are derivatives of O and Ư is derivative of U.
Pronunciation:
ă as in hat
â as in cutb as in boy
c as in can but without blowing air out of your mouth. Hold a paper in front of your mouth as you speak. The paper should stand still as you pronounce the c (/k/) sound.
d as in you
đ as in the
e as in pen
ê as in hey
g as in get (“gh” is pronounced the same way as “g” but when you use “g” or “gh” followed by vowels, “gh” is used in front of “e”, “ê” and “i”, while “g” is used in front of other vowels)
h as in home
i as in tea
k is pronounced similar to c. However, combinations such as ch and kh are pronounced differently. It will be discussed below.
l as in lend
m as in mother
n as in no
o as in saw
ô as in coat
ơ as in fur
p as in map
q as in queen. However, q never stands alone. It always stands with u to form qu combination, which is pronounced similar to win.
r as in rain
s as in sheep
t as in tea without blowing air out of your mouth. Once again, hold a paper in front of your mouth as you speak. The paper should stay still.
u as in who
ư as in loom
v as in van
x as in sun
y is pronounced similar to i. To differentiate, i is called the “short i” (“i ngắn“) and y is called the “long i” (“i dài“).
Some common combined consonant forms are:
gi, qu, gh, th, ph, ch, kh, ng, ngh, nh, tr
gi is pronounced like “z” in English.
qu, gh are discussed above.
th as in think without blowing air out of your mouth. Once again, hold a paper in front of your mouth as you speak. The paper should stay still.
ph as in fun
ch as in chain without blowing air out of your mouth. Once again, hold a paper in front of your mouth as you speak. The paper should stay still.
kh
ng (“ngh” is pronounced the same way as “ng”. The only difference is that when you use “ng” or “ngh” followed by vowels, you use “ngh” in front of “e”, “ê” and “i” vowels and use “ng” in front of other vowels. For example: It’s “nghe” and not “nge”, and it’s “ngà” and not “nghà”)
nh
tr
When pronounce the letter by itself, if it’s a consonant, you add “ờ” after the letter to pronounce the letter, except for k you pronounce as “ca“‘ to distinguish with “cờ” (c). For example: b, c, d are pronounced as bờ, cờ, dờ.
Now let’s hear how they sound:
Alphabet only
Combined consonants (in the above order from th to tr)
Vietnamese Keyboard – How to type Vietnamese
You will need Vietnamese keyboard. I’ve been using Unikey and it still works just fine. You can download it for free at https://www.unikey.org/download.html. After you install and run it, you will see this
VNI
You will want to change the options if they are not already Unicode and VNI. After that, click on Đóng (Close) to close the window.
Now that you have the keyboard, how do you type? Simply follow these rules:
Telex
Another popular typing style is Telex. To use Telex, from the above window, at Kiểu gõ, instead of VNI, choose Telex. Here are the rules for Telex:
