Linking Sentences Together Part 2: Prepositions

A preposition is a word that shows the relationship between a noun and some other thing. The preposition is always placed in front of the noun and is said to “modify it”. For instance, if we take the prepositional phrases “The dog is with his owner” and “I’m learning about it” , we can see that the words with and about are being used to describe how the nouns, “his owner” and “it”, are related to the dog and the person learning. Once again, they function in Vietnamese the same way as they do in English.

Example Sentences:

Vietnamese: Con chó đang chơi với con chim.

English: The dog is playing with the bird.

Vietnamese: Con coi ti vi ở trong phòng

English: I watch tv (at) inside (the) room.

Sidenote* The above sentence has a more in-depth explanation in the vocabulary section: Positioning Yourself

Here is a list of some of the common prepositions. Some of them are going to get a deeper explanation underneath the table.

Prepositions
Word (Từ)	Definition (Nghĩa)	Usage Notes
với	With
ở / tại	In / At	More details found in the vocabulary sections: Positioning Yourself
về	About
của	Of / Indicates Possession	More details below
bằng	By Using / Via
để	To / In Order To

Now you may notice that the last 3 words don’t exactly have the cleanest definitions. That’s because we really don’t have a good English equivalent to either of them. So naturally, we need to go a bit deeper to explain why exactly these words work the way that they do.

Possession (của)

To begin with, we have the word của. Normally, in English, if we need to say that something belongs to another thing, we can just add “‘s” to the end or use a different word that indicates that. We can see this in simple phrases like “Sally’s sandwiches” or “My phone”. Vietnamese on the other hand does not work like that. In order to say that one word belongs to another, we need to use của. Earlier, we learned that we need to put a preposition in front of the noun it is “modifying”, but which one is that? Well luckily, we can see that the “‘s” and the “My” are the things being modified from are examples. So instead of having “Sally” and “I” come first when using của, we instead flip things around from normal. So “Sally’s sandwiches” becomes “bành mi của Sally” and “My phone” becomes “Điện thoại của tôi”. It also might be helpful if you remember the direct translation “of” like “Sandwiches of Sally” or “Phone of I”.

Example Sentence:

Vietnamese: Tôi đang ở nhà của Ông bà

English: I am at my grandparent’s house

Vietnamese: Đồ ăn của chị

English: Her food

By Means Of / By Using / Via (bằng)

Now moving on to the word bằng, this word doesn’t really have a good translation into English. If you know any Japanese, this word acts exactly like the particle で except in front of the thing being modified. I just saved you a few minutes to a couple of hours. If you don’t though, here is an easy way of learning how it works. The word is used any time bằng you are using one thing to do another thing. For instance, “I went to the park using (a) bicycle” would translate to “Tôi đi công viên bằng xe đạp”. In this case, the word a bicycle or “xe đạp” is being used to go to the park, so you would use bằng.

You could also translate this as “I went to the park via bicycle”, but while it works in this situation, it doesn’t capture the full context of using bằng so I would personally avoid thinking of it as “via”. To show you what I’m talking about, I could say the phrase “Anh ấy đang nói bằng tiếng Pháp”, to say that someone is talking in French. But, you wouldn’t say in English that “He is talking via French”, you would say something more like “He is talking in French” or more specifically, “He is talking using French”. The word bằng is also much more common in Vietnamese than it is in English. You will see many instances of bằng being used in Vietnamese casually where the word “using” or “via” would be seen as formal or stiff in English. So in summary, you have something’s doing one thing using another thing, then use bằng.

Example Sentences:

Vietnamese: Má muốn đi bên Ca Li bằng máy bay

English: Mom wants to go over to California using a plane

Vietnamese: Cậu đang ăn cơm bằng đũa

English: He is eating rice using chopsticks

To / In Order To (để)

Continuing with concepts that don’t translate well into English, we have the word để. Unfortunately for my Japanese speakers, you don’t have an easy out this time. This word is used to describe that you are doing one thing in order to do another thing. For example, the sentence “I use a car to go to work”, can be translated as something like “Anh sài xe để đi làm” where the person uses a car to go to work. In English, this concept is mostly covered by the word “to”, but I’m making the distinction because the word “to” covers way more cases than the word để. For instance, you wouldn’t use để if you were going to somewhere. This word is also a fairly common word similar, to how bằng is pretty common. Now, we can move on to some examples.

Example Sentences:

Vietnamese: Ông phải đeo kính để đọc sách.

English: Grandpa has to wear glasses (in order) to read.

Vietnamese: Ba nấu thịt nướng để ăn.

English: Dad cooked grilled pork (in order) to eat.