Free Vietnamese Pronunciation Guide

This is the free half of FluentViet's pronunciation guide: the sounds, laid out from English, no account required. Skim the table below for the whole system in one screen, or jump straight to a chapter.

Not sure the tones are learnable at all? The blog makes the case that you already produce every pitch shape Vietnamese needs — then come back here for the tables. More notes on the FluentViet blog.

The whole system, on one screen

So this is not a course. It is a conversion chart — from the reading you already do fluently, to the reading Vietnamese asks for. Your starting point is not zero. It is a literate adult applying the wrong sound values to a familiar alphabet.

The honest limit of the promise: reading is solved, spelling is not. In Hà Nội, d, gi and r all sound the same, as do s and x, and tr and ch. So you can always go from the page to the sound, but hearing a word will not always tell you how to write it. That is a real gap and it is one native Northerners have too.

Read this table and you have the 80%. The four books are the other 20%, plus the reasons.

What's here, and what isn't

Book 1 — Reading the alphabet: every consonant at the front of a syllable

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.

First, three facts that reframe everything

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.

The main table — every onset spelling

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

The five false friends — where English actively misleads you

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).

The two sounds English genuinely does not have

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).

The spelling rules that look arbitrary and are not

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 has one quirk worth knowing

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.

You may also hear — Southern (and why it matters here)

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 the app's central dialect cheatsheet — 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.

Prove it to yourself

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: Book 2 — Vowels and marks — the twelve vowels and why the marks on them are not tones.

Book 4 — Tones: the six melodies, and the English habit fighting them

You already control pitch with total precision. You do it every sentence of your life: you rise at the end of a question, you fall at the end of a statement, you swoop on "reeeally?", you drop flat on "fine." — and a listener reads all of it correctly without thinking.

The difference is only this: English spends pitch on the sentence. Vietnamese spends it on the syllable. Nothing new to build. Everything to re-aim.

This book is Northern (Hà Nội), which has all six tones. Southern has five — that section is at the end.

The operator's example, because it is the whole book in one word

English "no" and Vietnamese nó (he, she, it) look like the same word. They are three differences deep.

1. The vowel. English "no" is a diphthong — it slides from "o" to "oo" and your lips close. The vowel in nó is a single steady o — the open one from Book 2, the "aw" of "saw". Your lips do not move at all.
2. The pitch. Say "No." as an English answer. Your pitch falls. The sắc tone on nó rises, sharply, from mid to high.
3. The length. English "no" is drawn out. nó is short and clipped.

So an English speaker reading nó aloud produces something with the wrong vowel, moving in the wrong pitch direction. That is why "I said it exactly like it's written" and "nobody understood me" are both true at the same time.

The fix for the pitch is a re-aim, not a new skill: nó is said with the pitch of an English "what?" — a genuine question, going up. Say "what?" and then keep that rise while saying "naw". That is nó.

The six tones

Every Vietnamese syllable carries exactly one tone. No mark on the vowel means the first tone — which is a tone, not the absence of one.

The canonical set, one syllable, six words:

The two that need a bit more than an anchor

ngã — the tone with a hole in it

ngã is not just "high rising". It is a rise interrupted: the voice starts, gets choked off by a catch in the throat, and then restarts higher. That catch is a glottal stop, and it is the same thing you do in the middle of the English "uh-oh" — or, if you have a London accent, in the middle of "bu'er" for "butter".

Say "uh-oh" and then compress it until it is one syllable. That is ngã.

The glottal break is the tell of a real Northern accent. Southern speakers do not make it (see below), so if you are learning Northern this is one of the few places where getting it right marks you as having learned from Hanoians rather than from an app.

hỏi — the one everyone smooths out

hỏi dips and then rises: down, then up. In connected Hanoi speech the rise is often small, and plenty of speakers make it with a bit of creak on the way down. Learners typically flatten it into ngang or drop it into huyền.

The English feeling that works: the way you say "so...?" when someone has stopped mid-story. The pitch falls on the vowel and then lifts as you hand the turn back.

The rule that halves the work

A syllable ending in -p, -t, -c or -ch can carry only two tones: sắc or nặng.

That is not a tendency, it is how the sound system works. Those endings cut the syllable short, and a short syllable has no room for a contour that dips or breaks.

So the moment you see một, học, biết, đẹp, sách, thuốc, you know before you look at the mark that it is one of two possibilities: high-and-short (sắc) or low-and-stopped (nặng). About one syllable in ten across FluentViet's own scene and story text ends this way, and for every one of them the tone problem is a coin flip rather than a six-way choice.

The other four tones — ngang, huyền, hỏi, ngã — only ever appear on syllables that end in a vowel, a glide, or -m -n -ng -nh.

Where the tone mark sits, and why it looks like it moves

Two marks can stack on one letter: the shape mark from Book 2 and the tone mark from this one. ầ is â with a grave. ữ is ư with a tilde. ế is ê with an acute.

The tone mark always lands on the main vowel. When a syllable has two vowel letters in a row, the rule is:

• Nothing after the vowels — the mark goes on the first: mía (sugarcane), của (of), lửa (fire), mùa (season).
• Something after the vowels — the mark goes on the second: muốn (to want), tiếng (language), người (person), nguyễn (the surname).

Once you see that, nguyễn stops looking like a spelling puzzle: it is ng + the sliding uyê + n, with the ngã tilde on the ê because something follows.

Style note: for the w-glide spellings, older typesetting writes hòa, thúy and newer writes hoà, thuý. Both are current in Vietnam, both are correct, and it changes nothing about how the word sounds. If you type with Telex the choice is usually made for you by the software.

Minimal pairs that are actually worth the drill

Not every tone pair matters. These do, because both words are common and the situations overlap.

The phở family — same three letters, three different words:

Order breakfast with the wrong mark here and the misunderstanding is memorable. And note separately that phô (to show off) is not in this set at all — that is ô, a different vowel from Book 2, not a different tone.

Daily-life pairs that cost you something when they go wrong:

More sets, laid out for drilling, are in the app's tones minimal pairs cheatsheet. This book is about how the six tones work; that sheet is the practice material.

The English habit that fights you hardest

Do not let questions rise.

In English, pitch at the end of a sentence carries the question. In Vietnamese, the question is carried by a word — không, à, chưa, hả — and the pitch of every syllable stays exactly where its own tone puts it.

Anh ăn cơm chưa? (have you eaten?) ends on chưa, which is ngang: flat. If you lift it into an English question rise, you have not asked more clearly, you have said a syllable that does not exist.

The same goes the other way: English statements fall at the end. A one-word Vietnamese answer like Rồi. (yes, already) is huyền — already low — and a final English fall pushes it down into something unrecognisable. Có. (yes, there is) is sắc and must rise, even though your English instinct for a one-word answer is to drop.

This is the interference the operator's nó example names, generalised: your accent is not the problem, your sentence melody is.

How to practise this so it actually transfers

Isolated syllable drills build the wrong thing. You can nail ma mà má mả mã mạ in a mirror and still lose all six tones the moment you form a sentence, because real speech puts tones next to each other and each one starts from wherever the last one left off.

The sequence that works:

1. Hum before you speak. Say the pitch shape with no consonants and no vowels — just a hum. Get the shape right with nothing else to think about, then add the word.
2. Shadow phrases, not syllables. Play three to five words of native Hanoi audio, speak along with it in near-real time, do not translate. Chunks first, then sentences.
3. Slow the audio to 0.7x for the first pass, then take it back to full speed. Do not stay slow — the point is to arrive at native speed.
4. Record and compare. You cannot hear your own tone errors reliably from the inside. In the app, this is what the Nói exercises do: when a transcript comes back as a different word, the tones are what changed it.
5. Point-and-say with a native. They shuffle a minimal-pair set and say one; you point. This trains the ear, which is what the mouth is copying from.

Steps 1 to 3 are five minutes a day. That is enough.

You may also hear — Southern and Central

Southern has five tones, not six. ngã and hỏi merge — both come out as one mid dipping tone. So mã and mả are the same word in Sài Gòn, and Southern speakers writing quickly sometimes have to stop and think about which mark a word takes. Southern sắc and nặng also lack the sharp glottal cut that Northern gives them, so the whole system sounds smoother and less clipped.

Central is different again. The accent the Central journey teaches you to speak is South-Central — Đà Nẵng and Quảng Nam — which merges hỏi and ngã the way the South does. Huế, an hour north, moves the tone shapes themselves and not just the count, and ngã and nặng behave there in ways that surprise Northern and Southern speakers alike; FluentViet teaches Huế as a listening skill inside the Central ride rather than as a target accent. See the app's central dialect cheatsheet.

The pattern one more time: the North keeps all six tones and merges consonants; the South merges tones and keeps consonants apart.

Prove it to yourself

Say each pair. If they sound the same, you are producing one tone, not two.

Back to the start: the conversion chart above.