Unless you already have in mind a target region of Vietnam for use, you can simply stick with the northern pronunciation as it’s considered the “standard”. This information is mainly for your reference and is not meant to cause further confusion. In this table, pronunciations of the northern, central and southern regions are also provided where they differ. The table shows that in contrast to the vowels’ sounds, the pronunciations of all consonants and many consonant clusters have close equivalents in English, with the only exceptions of ch, kh and nh, which are annotated with asterisks. Pronunciation of consonants and consonant clusters Consonants You can just ignore the IPA symbols if you want to. If you’re unfamiliar with IPA symbols, it’s simply a conventional mapping from symbols to actual sounds so that once you’ve learned the mapping, you would know the correct pronunciation by just looking at the phonetic symbols, which are available in dictionary entries. The following table list the vowels, their IPA phonetic symbols and the equivalent sounds in English.

The wisdom practice makes perfect rings true here. The key to tackle this difficulty is however still the same as acquiring any difficult knowledge: understanding the basics to get started, then keep listening till you get familiar with the sounds. As such getting the hang of Vietnamese words’ pronunciations is understandably not easy. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” - Martin Luther King Jr.Īs we have learned in the lesson on writing, Vietnamese is a tonal language (i.e., with accent marks/diacritics) with some vowels that don’t appear in the English alphabet (e.g. The ability to speak even just a few simple words and sentences in the target language quite often arouse a very special feeling!

After you have had a good foundation of how to write Vietnamese, it’s time we learn how to speak Vietnamese.

How to you pronounce this name vijapura