Vietnamese survival kit

About this kit

Vietnamese is a tonal language with 6 tones, but good news: it uses the Latin alphabet (quoc ngu), which makes reading much easier. Spoken by 95 million people, it is the key to exploring Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and the beaches of Da Nang.

Vietnamese (tieng Viet) is spoken by around 95 million people across Vietnam and the diaspora living in France, the United States, Australia or Canada. It is a tonal language with six tones, and your intonation can radically change the meaning of a syllable. You will quickly realise that pronunciation matters more than grammar, which is fairly straightforward: no conjugation, no gender, no agreement. The good news for travellers and learners is that Vietnamese is written with the Latin alphabet, chu Quoc ngu, designed in the 17th century by Portuguese missionaries and popularised by the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. Diacritics above or below vowels mark tones and specific vowel sounds. The lexicon shows centuries of Chinese influence, especially in formal, administrative or religious vocabulary, alongside French loanwords (ca phe for coffee, ga for railway station, banh mi for bread). Culturally, you will notice the rich pronoun system based on age and family ties: you do not address an elder, a younger person or a shopkeeper with the same word. The family remains the pivot of society, and ancestor respect shapes both language and ritual. At the market, bargaining is done with a smile and patience, never aggression. Tet, the lunar new year, is the most important moment of the calendar: knowing a few greeting formulas will open many doors.