Đọc bảng chữ cái — reading the alphabet

You already read this alphabet. Vietnamese uses the Latin letters you have used your whole life, plus seven shaped ones (ă â đ ê ô ơ ư) and five tone marks. There is no new script to learn, which means your starting point is not zero — it is "fluent reader who is applying the wrong sound table."

This book fixes the sound table for the start of a syllable. Book 2 does the vowels, Book 3 does the endings, Book 4 does the tones.

All primary pronunciations here are Northern (Hà Nội). Southern differences live in one clearly-marked section at the end, never mixed into the main entries — if you are on the Northern journey you can read this book and ignore that section entirely.

1. The alphabet has 29 letters and is missing four of yours: f, j, w, z. Nothing is broken. Vietnamese has the /f/ sound (it spells it ph) and the /z/ sound (it spells it d, gi, and r). Hà Nội is full of z-sounds and has no letter z. When you see f, j, w, z in Vietnamese text you are looking at a borrowed word, a brand, or texting slang.

2. One spelling, one sound. Always. English has ough in "though, through, cough, rough". Vietnamese has nothing like that. Once you know ph is /f/, it is /f/ in every word, forever, with no exceptions to memorise. This is the whole promise of the guide: the rules are finite and they hold.

3. Hà Nội merges three sets of consonants. This is the single biggest reason Northern pronunciation is easier to produce than to spell:

So reading is solved and spelling is not: hearing a Hanoian say /za/ does not tell you whether to write da, gia or ra. Do not let that bother you now. It bothers native Northerners too, which is why Vietnamese school kids do spelling drills on exactly these three sets.

Anchor is a General American word unless marked. Where British English differs it says so.

These are not "hard sounds". They are sounds you already own, filed under the wrong letter. Each one costs you a real word if you get it wrong.

đ is d, and d is z

The bar through the D is not decoration. đ is the English d of "do". Plain d is /z/.

• đi = "dee" (to go) but dì = "zee" (aunt).
• đá = "dah" (ice, or to kick) but dạ = "zah" (yes/politeness word).

The fix is one habit: read the bar first. Your eye already learned to distinguish l from t by a crossbar; this is the same trick on a letter you thought you knew.

th is not the "th" of "think" — and t is not the "t" of "top"

English has one t and puts a puff of air on it at the start of a word. Hold your palm in front of your mouth and say "top": you feel the puff. Now say "stop": no puff. That difference — the puff — is a whole letter in Vietnamese.

• t = the unpuffed t of "stop". tôi = I, me. The word you say a hundred times a day.
• th = the puffed t of "top". thôi = enough, stop it, that's all.

Say "tôi" the English way and you have said thôi. This is the highest-frequency consonant error an English speaker makes in Vietnamese, and it is a transfer that works perfectly once someone points at the right English sound. Neither t nor th has anything to do with the "th" of "think" or "this" — Vietnamese does not have those sounds at all.

The same puff rule applies to c/k/qu (unpuffed, like "skin") and p (unpuffed, like "spin"). English kh is the puffed one's rasping cousin, below.

x is s — it is not "ks" and not "z"

English x is /ks/ ("box") or /z/ ("xylophone"). Vietnamese x is a plain /s/. xin chào starts "sin". xe (vehicle) is "seh".

ph is f, and this one is a gift

Your English brain already reads ph as /f/ in "phone, photo, graph". Vietnamese does exactly the same thing. phở is "fuh". Zero to learn. Note it, enjoy it, move on.

ng at the start of a word

You can make this sound — it is the ng of "singer" — but English never puts it first, so your mouth will try to insert a vowel and produce "un-gon" for ngon.

The trick that works: say "sing" and hold the final ng for two seconds. Still holding it, add "-on" and then chop the "si" off the front. What is left is ngon (delicious). Same mechanic, same three steps, for người (person), nghe (to listen), ngủ (to sleep) and ngã (to fall over).

Everything above was a re-file. These two are new motor skills. They are worth ten minutes.

kh — the rasping k

The sound at the end of Scottish "loch" or German "Bach". Put your tongue where it goes for k, then instead of stopping the air, let it scrape through continuously.

If you cannot get it: a strongly puffed English "k" is an acceptable temporary stand-in and Northerners will understand you. It is the one place a fallback is honestly fine. không (no / not) is the most common word in the language, so you will get practice.

g and gh — the buzzing g

The voiced twin of kh. Same tongue position, same continuous scrape, but with your voice switched on. Spanish speakers already have it (the g of "agua"). English speakers usually get there by starting from kh and humming.

A hard English g (as in "go") is understandable but sounds noticeably foreign — natives hear it as over-articulated. gà (chicken), gạo (uncooked rice), ghế (chair).

Three sounds are written two ways each, and the choice depends entirely on the vowel that follows. You never have to decide when reading — but knowing the rule makes the words look regular instead of random.

And qu is the third spelling of k, used whenever a w-sound follows: quá, quen, quốc. That is the entire story of c/k/q/gh/ngh. It is a spelling convention, not three extra sounds.

gi is the digraph /z/, and normally a vowel follows it: gia = "za", giường = "zuong". But when nothing follows, the i does double duty as both half of the digraph and the vowel: gì (what) is simply "zee". Same for giữ (to keep) and gìn.

You will meet gì in your first hour — Ăn gì? (eat what?), Cái gì? (what thing?) — so it is worth having the rule rather than the confusion.

FluentViet teaches one production dialect per journey. If you are on the Northern journey, produce the Northern sounds above. But you will hear Southern speech constantly in music, film, and from anyone who moved north, so recognise it:

The pattern behind the table: the North merges consonants; the South keeps them apart (and merges tones instead — see Book 4). Neither is more correct. If you are on the Southern journey, the app's Southern content is the authority; this book's main table is not.

For Central see [[../cheatsheets/central-dialect]] — the Central journey teaches you to speak Đà Nẵng and Quảng Nam, and to understand Huế as a comprehension skill rather than a target accent.

Cover the right column. Say each one out loud, then check.

Say them, do not just read them. Reading them silently is re-reading; saying them is retrieval, and retrieval is what makes this stick.

Next: [[vowels-and-marks]] — the twelve vowels and why the marks on them are not tones.