Most people (including the locals) will tell you that learning Vietnamese is very difficult. If you were to take a survey of the European and American foreigners living here, it would be difficult to find even a small amount of them who have learned the language. Perhaps one obstacle, the toughest, is the pronunciation of the vowels. While it's important in Spanish to pronounce each letter, and it's important in Turkish to pronounce the vowels correctly, it's absolutely imperative to pronounce the vowels at the correct tone in Vietnamese. Let me show you...
In Vietnamese, there are 12 vowels.
| Vowels | IPA | English sounds |
|---|---|---|
| a | /aː/ | far |
| ă | /a/ | father (shortened a)* |
| â | /ə/ | but * |
| e | /ɛ/ | red |
| ê | /e/ | may * |
| i, y | /i/ | me |
| o | /ɔ/ | law |
| ô | /o/ | spoke * |
| ơ | /ə:/ | sir |
| u | /u/ | boo |
| ư | /ɨ/ | uh-uh * |
There are also 6 tones. Each vowel must always have a tone.
| Tone | Name/Symbol | Tone sound |
|---|---|---|
| Level | no sign | normal tone |
| Sharp | up accent(´) | high sound |
| Hanging | down accent(`) | low sound |
| Asking | hook( ̉ ) | like a question |
| Tumbling | tilde(~) | wavy sound (up and then down) |
| Heavy | dot(.) | heavy sound |
So one word can have up to 6 meanings depending on the tone. To give you an example of how this works...
ma = Ghost
má = Mother
mà = Which
mả = Tomb
mã = Horse
mạ = Rice Seedling
So in summary, there are 12 vowels and 6 different sounds that each vowel can make. That makes 72 vowel sounds. And thus, this is the reason why you shouldn't complain about learning English.
