Introduction

Vietnamese is a very difficult language to learn. The way in which Vietnamese is spoken and written can be hard to wrap your head around, especially if you don’t have much exposure to the language. But there’s also a completely different layer of difficulty to learning Vietnamese; finding good resources on it.

For those wishing to learn Vietnamese, there are 3 options

• Relatives
• Vietnamese schools
• Online resources

Relatives who speak Viet are a good start, but there could be places where their knowledge falls short, times where it's not possible to constantly ask them about how to pronounce words and their meanings, or times where you don’t even know the right questions to ask.

There’s also Vietnamese classes available, but unfortunately, they are mostly done as a volunteer service to teach Vietnamese children. This means that there isn’t much dedicated reading or lesson plans to go off of and most likely, the person teaching the class isn’t well versed in teaching languages.

So then, we move on to online resources and textbooks, and things don’t get much better. Words are grouped by sound which is good for learning to pronounce them, but can make them hard to remember. Along with that, words that are crucial to the language have their definitions omitted because it's assumed that you already know some Vietnamese. But, probably the worst part of it, 95% of the thing trying to teach you Vietnamese, is written completely in Vietnamese which defeats the purpose. Online dictionaries for Vietnamese also tend to be atrocious and don’t give enough context for the words that they’re trying to explain.

That’s why I decided to make my own compilation going over some different parts of Vietnamese to try and address some of these problems and help along people who aren’t as familiar with the language and/or don’t have a good entrypoint in. Here, we will cover the structure and key features of the language that you need to know in order to understand the language and how it operates

Is this going to be comprehensive? Probably not. Will it be organized? If I can get it to be. Will the sections in here be connected or make any sense? Depends on my mood. But I hope it can at least solve some of the problems that we have with learning Vietnamese. Any feedback, changes, and criticism are welcome. I am not a fluent speaker and a simple CompSci major so there’s no way I’m not making any mistakes. Especially with the spelling. But with that out of the way, let's begin.