“Is Vietnamese hard to learn?” When you see the Vietnamese version of this question, which is “Tiếng Việt có khó học không?” you are likely to answer “yes”—or rather “Đúng” which is the word for “yes” in Vietnamese.
But as you can see in this example, Vietnamese uses a version of the Latin alphabet. That’s one of the easier aspects of learning Vietnamese because we also use a version of the Latin alphabet in English.
Vietnamese is one of the few Asian languages that use the Latin alphabet (Filipino and Indonesian are two other examples). But this wasn’t always the case: several hundred years ago, Vietnamese was written using Chinese characters.
Another of the easier aspects of learning Vietnamese is that individual words are separated by spaces. This is something that we take for granted as English speakers, but many Asian languages (Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Japanese, for example) do not separate words with spaces.
The following table shows the same English sentence translated into several different Asian languages. As you can imagine, when words are separated by spaces, it can make it easier for a beginner to parse the sentence.
| Language | Example sentence |
|---|---|
| English | I like to travel. |
| Vietnamese | Tôi thích đi du lịch. |
| Thai | ฉันชอบการท่องเที่ยว. |
| Lao | ຂ້ອຍມັກການເດີນທາງ. |
| Khmer | ខ្ញុំចូលចិត្តធ្វើដំណើរ។ |
| Japanese | 私は旅行が好きです。 |
Vietnamese and English belong to different language families
English is a Germanic language. Examples of other Germanic languages include Dutch, German, and Scandinavian languages like Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish.
Germanic languages are part of the broader Indo-European language family, which also includes Romance languages like Spanish and French, Slavic languages like Czech, Polish, and Russian, Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh, and even many other languages like Persian, Hindi, and Bengali.
Vietnamese is not in the same language family as English. Vietnamese is not an Indo-European language; it is in the Austroasiatic language family, and so is Khmer.
When you learn a foreign language that is in the same language family as your native language, there are often some similar vocabulary words, which make the learning process easier.
Take the word “music” for example. In Spanish, it is “música”. In French, it is “musique”. But in Vietnamese, it is “âm nhạc”. As you can imagine, learning Vietnamese vocabulary words requires more effort than learning them in Spanish or French.
Another difficulty when learning Vietnamese has to do with tones. Vietnamese is a tonal language (Chinese, Thai, and Lao are also tonal languages). In English, changes in intonation, like a rising or falling tone, might convey the speaker’s mood, but in Vietnamese, changes in tones can turn one word into another.
Vietnamese has six different tones. That is why some Vietnamese words have those accents on some letters. Tones are indicated with extra marks on the letters.
The U.S. Foreign Service Institute classifies languages into four groups according to their difficulty (for English speakers who learn them).
According to that language rating system, Vietnamese is in the third hardest group (out of four groups). This means that learning Vietnamese is of the same order of difficulty as learning other languages from that group, like Polish, Russian, and Thai.
Based on their experience teaching languages to diplomats, the Foreign Service Institute estimates that learning Vietnamese to a level of “General Professional Proficiency” takes an average of 44 weeks (with a total of 1100 class hours).
So, with one hour of class per day, it would take about three years (excluding holidays and vacation time) to reach those 1100 total class hours. And at a rate of 1h class per week, it would take decades.
That may sound intimidating. But Vietnamese looks easier when compared to the languages in the fourth (and hardest) group. An average of 2200 class hours is needed to learn a language from group 4. Those “Super-hard languages” include Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Basically, learning Vietnamese takes about twice as long as learning Italian or Dutch (600 class hours versus 1100 class hours), but it takes half as long as learning Chinese or Japanese.
Remember that those class hour estimates are for reaching a “General Professional Proficiency” in those foreign languages. The level of fluency for casual conversations with friends and acquaintances is much lower than for working in a foreign language.