40 Basic Vietnamese Phrases Every Beginner Should Know

You do not need a thousand words to function in Vietnam. You need about forty phrases, said with roughly the right tones, at roughly the right moments. This list covers the situations you will actually hit: greeting people without offending anyone, ordering phở, surviving a Grab ride, bargaining at the market, and getting help fast when something goes wrong.

Two things to know before the tables.

Tones change meaning. Vietnamese has six tones, and they are not decoration. Ma (flat) means ghost, má (rising) means mother. The pronunciation column below is a rough map, not the territory. You have to hear each phrase spoken by a native and copy the pitch, or you will say a different word than the one you intended. Reading alone cannot teach you this part.

There is no single word for "you." Vietnamese uses kinship terms based on age. The three you need: anh (man slightly older than you), chị (woman slightly older than you), em (anyone younger). When in doubt, guess older; it is flattering. In the tables below, swap anh/chị/em to fit whoever you are talking to.

Greetings and Politeness

Add ạ at the end of almost anything (cảm ơn ạ) to make it more respectful. Cheap upgrade, big effect with elders.

At the Restaurant (Phở Included)

Cho tôi ("give me") plus anything is your master key for ordering. It sounds blunt in English but is perfectly polite in Vietnamese. And "tính tiền" said toward the staff, or a small writing-in-the-air gesture, gets you the bill anywhere.

Getting Around (Grab and Beyond)

Grab, the ride-hailing app, handles the negotiation for you, but drivers rarely speak English. These phrases close the gap.

Pro tip: have your destination written in Vietnamese on your phone. Tones make addresses hard to say correctly, and showing beats mispronouncing.

Shopping and Bargaining

Bargaining is normal at markets, not in supermarkets or malls. Smile, keep it playful, and be ready to walk away.

Numbers matter here. Learn at least một, hai, ba, bốn, năm (1 to 5: moht, hai, bah, bohn, nam) and nghìn (thousand: ngeen), since prices come in thousands of đồng.

Emergencies

Emergency numbers in Vietnam: 113 (police), 115 (ambulance).

Small Talk

Vietnamese people are curious and friendly with foreigners. Expect these questions, and use them back.

That last one is a real greeting, not a dinner invitation. "Rồi" (zoy, "already") is the standard answer.

How to Actually Learn These

Here is the uncomfortable part: memorizing this page gets you maybe 30% of the way. Vietnamese is tonal, so the gap between "read it" and "say it so a phở vendor understands you" is wider than in almost any other language.

The fix is a simple loop: listen to native audio, repeat out loud, compare, repeat again. This is called shadowing, and for tones it is not optional. Your ear has to absorb the pitch contours before your mouth can produce them, and you will not hear your own mistakes without a native recording to check against.

This is exactly the workflow Hyperpolyglot is built around. You add the phrases you actually need (this whole list, or your own: your hotel address, your allergy, the dish you love), get native audio for each one, and drill them with listening and shadowing until they come out automatically. Your phrasebook becomes yours instead of generic. Available on iOS, Android, and Web.

Start with ten phrases, not forty. Greetings, cảm ơn, cho tôi, tính tiền, bao nhiêu. Once those are automatic, add the rest situation by situation. Forty phrases said with decent tones beat four hundred read silently off a screen.

Keep Reading

• The Shadowing Technique -- how to practise pronunciation with native audio
• Spaced Repetition -- how to keep your essential phrases in memory
• Language Islands -- how to turn a phrase list like this one into fluent-sounding speech