Compound Words (Từ Phức)

In Vietnamese, each syllable is represented by one block of letters. However, that doesn’t mean that every word is made up of one syllable. That’s where Từ Phức, or “Compound Words” come into play. These words are formed using two letter blocks in order to make a single word. They come in many different varieties including, words where individual blocks are words by themselves, words where some blocks have meaning in older Vietnamese, but aren’t really used on their own today, words where the same word is repeated twice for emphasis, a mixture of the first two ideas, and so on and so forth. Examples of these include words like “cửa sổ” (window), “im lặng” (to be silent), and “thường thường” (often). But what does this mean for you? Mostly, this just results in making things harder for you to search up words because it can be hard to tell if a block is its own word or if it's part of a compound word. But with a little bit of trial and error and some reading practice, eventually, you should be able to figure out when you’re looking at a compound or not.