How to text in Vietnamese

In this post, I will show you how to text in Vietnamese.

Table of Contents

• How to get Vietnamese keyboard on Android phones
• How to get Vietnamese keyboard on iPhones
  • How to activate Vietnamese keyboard on iPhones
  • The options
  • Which option should you choose?
• How to text in Vietnamese
• Texting in Vietnamese without accent marks (tones) and special letters
• How to use “Google voice typing” to text Vietnamese
• Which typing method do I use to type on mobile phone?
• Vietnamese typing test

How to get Vietnamese keyboard on Android phones

In order to type Vietnamese, you need to get a Vietnamese keyboard on your phone. Since there are many types of Android phones from from different companies, I can’t guarantee that it’s the same for every Android phone and I can’t cover all of them in this post. However, the options should be similar.

The following instructions are for Samsung phones:

1. Go to Settings.
2. Then go to General management.
3. Go to Language and input.
4. Under Keyboards section, select On-screen keyboard.
5. Select Samsung Keyboard.
6. Select Languages and types.
7. If you do not see Tiếng Việt listed, select Manage input languages, search and download Tiếng Việt in the available languages section. Once you have downloaded, activate Vietnamese by turning the switch next to Tiếng Việt on.

Now that you have added the Vietnamese keyboard to your phone, in order to type Vietnamese, you need to switch the keyboard if you have multiple keyboards activated.

To switch the keyboard, press and hold the space bar on the keyboard and slide it to the language that you want to select and let go. In this case, it’s Tiếng Việt.

How to get Vietnamese keyboard on iPhones

In order to type in Vietnamese on iPhones, you need to activate Vietnamese keyboard. Here is how to activate it.

How to activate Vietnamese keyboard on iPhones

1. Go to Settings.
2. Select Keyboard.
3. Select Keyboards.
4. If you do not see Vietnamese listed, type “Vietnamese” in the search box and select “Vietnamese.”
5. Once you have selected Vietnamese, you will see the following options. Select the typing style that you want to use and press Done.

What are these typing options? Which one should you choose?

The options

There are five options but there are actually just three typing methods called Telex, VNI and VIQR. Telex and VNI are popular typing methods and were previously discussed in Vietnamese Alphabet post. VIQR is a less popular typing method.

VIQR uses 7-bit ASCII encoding. When the world switched to Unicode encoding, VIQR became outdated. VIQR can be difficult to read without transcoder.

You can find the cheat sheet for VIQR in the next section below.

Now for Telex, you will see that there are 3 options for Telex typing method. They are QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ. The typing method is the same for these three options. The only difference is the location of certain keys.

QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ are three different types of keyboards. To know which one you have, simply look at the letters next to Tab key.

• QWERTY

Tab

Q

W

E

R

T

Y

• AZERTY

Tab

A

Z

E

R

T

Y

• QWERTZ

Tab

Q

W

E

R

T

Z

Which option should you choose?

The answer depends on what keyboard you have and what typing method you find easier to use.

Telex is the most popular typing method for texting because it is the fastest typing method to use on the keyboard on your mobile phone. The reason is that the keys to add marks are all around the main letter keys so you don’t have to move your fingers far from the main keys. However, when you need to type Vietnamese and another language, such as English, Telex may add unwanted marks on the letters.

In that case, if you are going to type multiple languages together, it may be easier to use VNI. However, even though I grew up learning and using only VNI to type on computer keyboard, I find Telex easier to type on the mobile phone. When you want to switch to a different language, just simply switch it to another language keyboard, which can be done quickly on the phone. Either that or you can also just press the same key twice to go back to the original letter you want to use.

For example, when you have Telex activated, when you type “of” it will become “ò.” In this case, you just need to type “f” again for it to become “of.” In other word, to type “of” when Telex is activated, just type “off.”

How to text in Vietnamese

Now that you know how to activate Vietnamese keyboard on your phone, here is how to text in Vietnamese.

As previously mentioned in my post Vietnamese alphabet, the two popular Vietnamese typing methods are VNI and Telex.

You can find the details about the two types of typing VNI amd Telex at the end of Vietnamese alphabet post. To make it easier for you, I re-post the cheat sheet for Telex here.

Here is the cheat sheet for VNI typing style.

Just in case you want to use VIQR, here’s how to type using VIQR:

a’	á
a`	à
a?	ả
a~	ã
a.	ạ
a^	â
o+ or o*	ơ
a(	ă
dd	đ

To type Vietnamese, you just need to type the combinations above to use Vietnamese letters and accent marks.

Texting in Vietnamese without accent marks (tones) and special letters

While it is easier to understand if the text has accent marks and special letters such as ô, ư, etc., it is also very common for Vietnamese people to just type or text Vietnamese without accent marks or those special letters to save time.

Sounds crazy right? Imagine reading Japanese, Korean or Chinese with half of the characters gone. It may sound impossible or difficult to understand, but it is doable with Vietnamese in most cases. When it is difficult to differentiate between different words, clarification or marks can be used.

Let’s say you know that “không biết” means “don’t know” and you also know what tôi means. If you receive a text like this, will you understand what it means?

toi khong biet

Even without marks, it is almost unthinkable for a Vietnamese person to associate “khong biet” with anything else other than “không biết” when they first look at it. As a result, when a Vietnamese reader reads the text above, he or she will know that it is “Tôi không biết,” which means I don’t know.

How to use “Google voice typing” to text Vietnamese

Don’t want to manually type it yourself? Google voice typing can type it for you. And it happens to understand Vietnamese too!

You just need to turn on Google Voice typing and speak to it. It will turn speech into text so you don’t have to type it.

If you have a Samsung phone, here’s how to add Google Voice typing option.

1. Go to Settings.
2. Then go to General management.
3. Go to Language and input.
4. Under Keyboards section, select On-screen keyboard.
5. Select + Manage keyboards.
6. Turn on the switch for “Google voice typing.”

When you want to use it, if you use Samsung phone, do not click on the microphone icon on the virtual keyboard. If you click on the microphone icon, it will turn on Samsung voice instead of Google voice typing. Instead, click on the keyboard button at the bottom right of your screen.

Once you click on it you will see that its default keyboard is Samsung keyboard. Change it to Google voice typing.

Once you have changed the keyboard, Google microphone will appear. You just need to tap and speak.

I was very amazed when I found out that Google can actually recognize Vietnamese speech and type it in Vietnamese. It makes typing Vietnamese so much faster and easier. Google, great job!

Which typing method do I use to type on mobile phone?

Since I discovered that Google’s speech-to-text function can understand Vietnamese, I have been using it exclusively to type on my phone. It’s way faster than manually typing. Sometimes, when Google cannot understand or misspells a word, I will use Telex to type it. But it is mostly because Telex is the only available option on my current phone.

Vietnamese typing test

Do you want to see how fast you can type Vietnamese? Check out this Vietnamese typing test.