Nouns & gender

Vietnamese nouns have no gender, no case, no plural ending and no agreement. A noun is one unchanging syllable or pair of syllables, and everything else is done by word order and by the little words around it. What a learner has to learn instead is where the words come from and how they are built.

Two vocabularies in one language

About a thousand years of Chinese rule (111 BC – 938 AD) and another thousand of Chinese schooling left Vietnamese with two layers, roughly as English has Germanic and Latinate:

The Sino-Vietnamese words are the formal, abstract and technical ones, and they are the same words as in Mandarin and Cantonese with a different sound: bác sĩ = 博士 = Cantonese bok3 si6. Roughly a third of the words in this site's Vietnamese column are Sino-Vietnamese; their characters are in the notes so that the three Chinese-script columns can be read together.

Nouns are built from pairs

A Vietnamese syllable is a morpheme, and most nouns are two of them glued together with the meaning worked out from the parts:

The head comes first and the modifier second — máy bay is a machine that flies, bay máy would be nothing. This is the opposite of English and Chinese (飞机, "fly-machine") and the same as French (machine volante).

Classifiers, not genders

Where French sorts nouns into two classes and German into three, Vietnamese sorts them into a few dozen classifiers — by shape and kind rather than arbitrarily: cái for objects, con for animals, người for people, cuốn for books, chiếc for vehicles. The classifier is needed for counting and for pointing (see Articles and Plurals). It is the nearest thing to gender, and unlike gender it is mostly guessable.

Sex, where it matters

When the sex of a person or animal matters, add a word after the noun:

The prefix nhà

nhà "house" in front of a noun makes a profession or a category — the -ist of Vietnamese:

nhà báo journalist (newspaper) · nhà văn writer · nhà thơ poet · nhà khoa học scientist · nhà hàng restaurant

And sĩ / sư / viên are the Sino-Vietnamese suffixes for people by role: bác sĩ doctor, kỹ sư engineer, nhân viên employee, giáo viên teacher.

If you speak Korean

The Sino-Vietnamese layer is the Sino-Korean layer with different sounds, and once you see the correspondences you can often guess a Vietnamese word from the 한자어:

Some regular sound shifts to read across: Korean ㄱ initial is often Vietnamese k/c/gi (건 → kiến, 교 → giao); Korean ㅅ is t/th (사 → sĩ, 태 → thái); Korean final ㄱ is Vietnamese -c (학 → học, 복 → phúc); final ㄴ and ㅇ survive as -n and -ng. The words carry different everyday senses on each side — 시절 sijeol is "an era" where thời tiết is "the weather" — so treat the match as a memory hook, not a translation.

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