How to Say When Things Happen

In English, in order to say when an action is happening, we do this by changing its tense. If I were to go on a run and that run happened in the past, I might say I ran and if I am currently on that run, I would say I am running. Vietnamese works slightly differently from this, for two different reasons.

The first one is that words, specifically verbs, in Vietnamese are not actively changed in spelling or pronunciation to fit the situation you are in. Instead, another word is added in front in order that shows you what situation you are in. If we take the sentence “I will run” and its direct Vietnamese translation “Tôi sẽ chạy”, you can see the concept is very similar. You just put the word sẽ in so that you can describe that this thing is happening in the future. This also applies to all other situations, even ones where you would normally just change up the verb in English.

With that being said, there are a grand total of 3 of these “tenses” in Vietnamese:

Past Tense (đã)

The first of these words, dã, is used for things that occurred in the past. In English, one of the more common ways of doing this is by ending a verb with “-ed”, but there are too many to list here. There is one special thing about dã that is different from your traditional English past tense though. In English, when you use past tense, it just means everything that happened before you started the conversation. But, you use the word dã, only if something happened before whatever you happened to be talking about. How does this work exactly? So lets say I’m talking about what I was doing yesterday and I said that “I cooked food”. In Vietnamese, all we would need to say in that situation is “Tôi nấu đầu ăn” without needing to use the word dã at all. The reason for this is because since we were talking about what was happening yesterday, I was presently cooking food yesterday. I didn’t cook food at a moment before yesterday, so I don’t need to use the word dã in that situation. So you could say that dã is used relatively to the context of a situation. Be aware that this word will often be completely omitted for reasons we will be discussing after we cover the tenses. But it will still appear enough that it's good to know how it's used.

Here are some examples of ways to use dã in a sentence:

Example Sentences:

Vietnamese: Bà đã đi ngủ

English: Grandma went to sleep

Vietnamese: Chỉ Yến đã tập toán

English: (Big Sister) Yến studied math

Future Tense (sẽ)

Luckily, in the case of the word sẽ, there is no big catch to it like there is with the word dã. It is used exactly like the English future tense, which means it has an easy, direct translation to the word “will”. It’s also used for the word “would”, but that usage only appears in writing and you won’t be using it that way for any conversations really. Just like the word dã above, sẽ will also often be omitted for the same reasons that will be discussed in the future. But again, it also will show up a good amount still so best to learn it.

Here are some examples of the word sẽ in a sentence:

Example Sentences:

Vietnamese: Bà đã đi ngủ.

English: Grandma went to sleep.

Vietnamese: Chỉ Yến đã tập toán.

English: (Big Sister) Yến studied math.

Continuous Tense (đang, đương)

Next, we will now move on to a word that can’t just be completely dropped in casual speech. The word đang is used to describe anything that is happening at the time. That covers pretty much any word that ends with an “-ing” and any time you need to describe what is currently happening. There is not really a good way of getting that something is happening just by context, so using đang is pretty much necessary. This word is also used all the time in casual speech and is a handy word to know. The word đương is just a less common synonym to đang that only really sees limited use in books and the southern half of Vietnam. But even they will mostly just use đang so, don’t worry too much about it. If you ever happen to run into it though, now you know.

Example Sentences:

Vietnamese: Ba đang lấy phim.

English: Dad is getting a movie

Vietnamese: Em đang ở chợ.

English: I am (currently) at the store.

Recent Past and Near Future (mới, sắp sửa)

Finally, we are going to be discussing how to say things that just happened and things that will happen soon. The word mới is used for anything that has recently happened. So if you “just bought a car”, then you “mới mua xe”. Now if something is about to happen, you would use the word sắp sửa which is also just shortened to sắp. So if you are “about to go on a walk”, you would either “sắp sửa đi bộ” or “sắp đi bộ” depending on how much you feel like talking that day. Even though these 2 words have much more limited usage in comparison to the more broad dã and sẽ, these words are used far more commonly in spoken Vietnamese. Just because, while you can get the context of something happening in the past or future just by using time, it's not as easy to get the context on how recent something is or how soon it will be before something happens.

Example Sentences:

Vietnamese: Con mới coi ti vi.

English: I just watched tv.

Vietnamese: Thủy sắp (sửa) đi về nhà

English: Thủy is about to return home.

Using Adverbs of Time

Now that we have gotten past the tenses section we can now move on to the second reason Vietnamese and English use tenses differently. It's time to get to the most common way people can tell when things are happening in Vietnamese. And the way they do that is just by saying the time when they happened. These almost completely gets rid of the need to use dã and sẽ in most forms of speech. Let’s take the sentence, “I bought food yesterday” as a good example. Notice how we still need to change the word “buy” to “bought” in order for the tense to match the situation. Vietnamese just cuts out the middle man entirely. Why would you need to specifically state that something happened in the past if you already know it happened yesterday? So, in Vietnamese, it would be more common to just say “Tôi mua đầu ăn hôm qua” or directly in English “I buy food yesterday”. You now also understand why a lot of older Vietnamese people don’t care about conjugation in English. It’s because it was never something they had to worry about in Vietnamese.

When it comes to placing these words, you will typically hear them at the end of a clause or at the beginning of the sentence. For the most part, they act almost exactly the same as their English counterparts.

Example Sentences:

Vietnamese: Chú Khôi la nó rồi.

English: Uncle Khôi scolded them already.

Vietnamese: Con muốn đi công viên ngày mai, nhưng mà phải đi học.

English: I want to go to the park tomorrow, but I have to go to school.

Vietnamese Adverbs

Before we get into how Vietnamese adverbs work, I think it would be a good idea to remind you what an English adverb is. An adverb is a word that modifies practically anything that isn’t a noun. Normally, these are the words that end with “-ly” like “quickly”, “lazily”, “exactly”, and so on and so forth. Even the word, “normally” that I just used at the beginning of this sentence is considered an adverb. They also cover things like words that describe time, words that describe how things are done, words that describe where things are done, et cetera. As long as it’s used to describe when, where, or how something is done, then it’s safe to say it's probably an adverb.

Now what are the rules about using adverbs in Vietnamese? Beats me. The reality is that, just like with English, the rules for these words are very case by case. For the most part, you can treat them one to one with their English counterparts for most scenarios with a few edge cases like rồi mentioned above. The only major difference from English adverbs and Vietnamese adverbs is that they generally will come after a verb instead of before it. Just like how adjectives will always follow a noun in Vietnamese.

For example:

English: the boy quickly ran

Incorrect: con trai nhanh chạy.

Correct: con trai chạy nhanh.

con trai - (the) boy / man

chạy - to run

nhanh - fast

The last general topic we will discuss about Vietnamese adverbs is that you don’t have to change a word to make it into an adverb like in English with its “-ly” ending for adjectives. Just like with all other parts of Vietnamese, there is no conjugation involved for any of the words. This means that pretty much any adjective can be used as an adverb without any changes, assuming it makes sense to use it as one.