Word order
Vietnamese is subject – verb – object, like English, and almost nothing about a sentence's grammar is carried by endings. So order carries more than it does in English, and two of its habits run the opposite way.
The head comes first
Every modifier follows what it modifies. The noun comes first; then the adjective, then the possessor, then the demonstrative:
| Vietnamese | word by word | English |
|---|---|---|
| nhà to | house big | a big house |
| xe của tôi | vehicle of me | my bike |
| cuốn sách hay này | book good this | this good book |
| người Việt Nam | person Vietnam | a Vietnamese person |
| tiếng Việt | language Viet | Vietnamese (the language) |
| máy bay | machine fly | aeroplane |
The same rule builds compound nouns — máy bay is a machine that flies. Learners who put the adjective first are understood, and marked out, every time.
Topic first, then comment
Vietnamese, like Chinese, likes to put what the sentence is about at the front, whatever its grammatical role, and then say something about it:
Tôi tên là Lan. — "(As for) me, name is Lan." = "My name is Lan." Cà phê này tôi không thích. — "This coffee, I don't like." Hôm nay trời đẹp. — "Today, sky is beautiful."
The particle thì can mark the topic explicitly: Tôi thì không sao. "As for me, it's fine."
Time first, place last
Time expressions go at the beginning (or right after the subject); place goes at the end:
Ngày mai tôi đi Hà Nội. — "Tomorrow I'm going to Hanoi." Tôi ngày mai đi Hà Nội. — the same, subject first. Tôi ăn sáng ở nhà. — "I eat breakfast at home."
Questions do not move anything
Anh đi đâu? "You go where?" — the question word sits where the answer will. See Questions.
Particles close the sentence
The sentence-final particles carry the tone of voice — softening, insisting, deferring — and they come last, after everything:
| particle | job |
|---|---|
| ạ | deference (to anyone above you) |
| nhé | "ok?", a friendly softener on requests and announcements |
| đi | turns a verb into a friendly command: ăn đi "eat up" |
| thôi | "just", "that's all", "let's just…": đi thôi "let's go" |
| à / hả / nhỉ | question tags (see Questions) |
| đấy / đó | "you know", pointing at what was just said |
| mà | insistence, "but I told you" |
| với | a plea: giúp tôi với! "help me!" |
| cơ / kia | "not that, THIS": tôi muốn cái này cơ (north) |
A learner who never uses them sounds like a phrasebook. A learner who uses ạ sounds polite before they have said anything else.
Verbs in sequence
Verbs chain in the order the actions happen, with no "to" and no "and": đi mua "go buy", về ăn "go home (and) eat", ngồi xuống "sit down". Direction verbs (ra out, vào in, lên up, xuống down, về back) follow the main verb and become its preposition — see Prepositions.
Dropping what is obvious
Subjects and objects that context supplies are left out, especially in speech. Ăn chưa? "Eaten yet?" has no subject; Rồi. "Already" has nothing but the particle. The sentence you need is often shorter than the one you would build.
If you speak Korean
Two things flip and one stays. Vietnamese is SVO, so the verb comes before the object, the reverse of Korean; and every modifier follows its noun — nhà to "big house" where Korean has 큰 집, sách của tôi where Korean has 내 책. What stays is topic-comment: Vietnamese fronts the topic and can mark it with thì, which is 은/는 as a separate word. And the sentence-final particles — ạ, nhé, nhỉ, đi — do what Korean's sentence-final endings do (-요, -네, -지, -자), which is why they come last: they are the Vietnamese equivalent of the ending, detached from the verb.
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