Putting Words Together

With the basic sounds out of the way, we can now begin combining our letters together. For starters, each standalone word in Vietnamese is a single syllable. So if you see a word like _mì gói, _you can safely assume that there are only 2 syllables because both of the pieces have a single syllable.

To go along with this, Vietnamese is also a phonetic language. That means when you see certain combinations of letters in Vietnamese, they will always sound the same. For example, in English we can have a word like “lead” which has two pronunciations of the last three letters “ead”. In Vietnamese, on the other hand, there would only exist one way to pronounce that combination of 3 letters that would be used every time, if this combo of letters was possible in Vietnamese. For example, an actual sound that's possible to make in Vietnamese is the letters ong. Whether it be in the word, or these three letters combined will always make the same sound.

A Vietnamese word is made up of a potential of 3 parts. A vowel or vowel combination in the middle which is required, and an optional initial consonant and/or final consonant sound.

Initial (Optional) + Vowel Sound + Final (Optional)