Learning Vietnamese - Lesson 5

We started with simple introductions:

• Chúng tôi (we) and Các bạn (you guys).
• Asking “Are you Hoa?” becomes: Chị có phải là Hoa không?
• And to answer: Dạ, không phải. Tôi tên là… (No, my name is…)

We practiced how to ask for someone's name: Đánh vần tên chị thế nào? — "How do you spell your name?" And introduced ourselves with: Tôi tên là…

I found it super helpful to break these down into patterns, which I can now reuse with different names or people.

Pointing Things Out: Đây, Kia, Đó

We dove into demonstratives — words like this, that, there — which work a bit differently in Vietnamese:

• Đây — here / this (close to the speaker)
• Đó — that (closer to the listener)
• Kia — that over there (far from both speaker and listener)

So now I can say:

• Đây là cái ghế — This is a chair.
• Or point across the room and say: Cái ghế đó — That chair (near you).

Talking About Others

We covered how to refer to third persons with ấy, like:

• Chị ấy — she
• Anh ấy — he Also, the word cũng (also) came up — useful in sentences like Anh ấy cũng là...

A Little Tone Practice (Again...)

We revisited the huyền tone (the falling one) with words like bè, bì, mẹ, bà and contrasted it with the flat ngang tone in bê, be. It’s subtle, and yes, I still struggle with it.

We also touched on consonant clusters and how letters like c, k, q can sound the same depending on the following letter (e.g., kỳ, quá, cá). Also, those nasal sounds:

• ng/ngh (tongue in the back)
• nh (tongue near the front)

I feel confident that I can learn all words, sentence structure etc with enough time. It's the pronunciation and listening parts that are the big challenges for me. But I will keep working on it!