5 Reasons why the Vietnamese language is easier than you think

Have you ever set out to learn a new language and found it extremely hard to do so?

Well, you are not alone. Few languages in the world are difficult to learn. The Vietnamese language is one such language. Spoken in Vietnam, the Vietnamese language is considered a difficult language even by its inhabitants. Although about 90 million people worldwide speak this language, they are not afraid to tell you that Vietnamese is hard!

So, if you are among those enthusiasts willing to take on the challenge to learn the Vietnamese language, this post is for you. With so many people speaking this language, chances are you will do fairly well in learning it too, provided you have the right Vietnamese translation services to give you the leg up.

The Vietnamese language is easier than you think. Here is all you need to know about the Vietnamese language.

Looking into the Vietnamese Language:

Vietnamese takes its roots from other languages

The Vietnamese language is the official language of the country of Vietnam. It ranks among the 20 most spoken languages of the world and is a part of the Austro-Asiatic family of languages. In addition, the language contains words from Chinese and French too.

Being a tonal language, Vietnamese links to Thai, from Thailand and Khmer, which is the official language of Cambodia. According to some statistics, around 50-70% of the Vietnamese vocabulary belongs to the Chinese language. Nevertheless, it also contains words from Khmer and French languages. This means that if you know Chinese, you will find it easier to learn the Vietnamese language.

Vietnamese has no gender

Unlike some European languages such as Spanish, German and French, the Vietnamese language has no gender. This means that it has no concept of “feminine” and “masculine” words. The words are short and easy to learn, with stable tones. Unlike Chinese, which has tones, the tones of the Vietnamese language do not change. This implies that the tone of any syllable is always the same.

Unlike other languages where you have to learn different words to describe feminine and masculine forms, the Vietnamese language does not contain any masculine or feminine words. All the more reason to learn Vietnamese! The fact that the language doesn’t have any gender creates confusion for novice translators. Therefore,  it’s always better to go for a professional translation agency for Vietnamese translation.

Vietnamese has no plurals

Unlike English, the Vietnamese language has no plural forms, either for nouns, adjectives, or adverbs. When we want to mention more than one number of a thing, we usually stick an ‘s ‘ to a word, for example ‘house’ becomes ‘houses’, and ‘person’ becomes ‘people’. However, some words such as ‘fish’ remain the same in plural form as well.

In the Vietnamese language, there is no‘s’ at the end of words. The word ‘nguoi’ describes both ‘people’ and ‘person’. Likewise, ‘cho’ describes both ‘dog’ and ‘dogs’. No wonder people take help from Vietnamese translation services and professional translation agencies for learning this language. Other than this, the Vietnamese language has no articles. Unlike French and Portuguese, the articles make it quite difficult to speak the languages, as these articles depend on gender, number, and case.

Vietnamese has no verb-endings

Some languages such as Spanish have a lot of verb endings that are quite a hassle for its speakers. This is because a Spanish verb has over 50 different forms that a learner needs to memorize. Take, for example, the word ‘speak’ (hablar in Spanish). This word has five or six different verb-endings which a speaker needs to memorize—I hablo, he habla, we hablamos, and so on.

The good news here is that the Vietnamese language is a ‘non-inflective’ language. This means that no word ever changes its form in any context. For example, by learning the word ‘noi’, you will know how to say ‘speak’ in all contexts and tenses. In addition, the Vietnamese tenses are easy, as they are formed by a small number of particles placed before the verb, like da’ for past and ‘se’ for the future.

Vietnamese does not have a new alphabet

A hundred years ago, the Vietnamese language was written by the literate few in the form of a pictorial system. Although complicated, this pictorial system, the Chu Nom, is similar to the Chinese of today. In the present times, it has been replaced by a version of the Latin alphabet called Quoc Ngu. This is the reason why there is no need to learn a new alphabet in the Vietnamese language, unlike Mandarin, French, English, and Spanish. All you need to do is to learn some accent marks which denote tone, and you will be writing the Vietnamese language in no time.

In addition, the Vietnamese language is easy to read. It is written in the Latin alphabet and is modified by accent marks (or diacritics). Other than this, unlike English and the French language, the Vietnamese orthography is fairly regular, which makes it even easier to write than these two languages.

The Last Word

There are quite a few languages in the world which pose a challenge for its speakers and enthusiasts. The Vietnamese language might be one of these tough languages, but with the right tools at your disposal, learning any language is easy and quick. The Vietnamese language poses a difficult challenge for many, but it is easier to learn it than you think. All you need is a professional agency that provides translation and transcription services, and you are good to go.