Basic Vietnamese grammar — the good news for English speakers

Word order: SVO, like English

Vietnamese puts the verb in the middle: Subject + Verb + Object — the same skeleton as English.

Prepositions work like English too: ở (at/in), đến (to/arrive), với (with), cho (for/give).

Verbs never change form

Vietnamese verbs have one form, always. No -s for 'he', no -ed for past, no -ing. The verb ăn (eat) stays ăn whether it's I, you, they, yesterday, or tomorrow.

Instead of saying 'Vietnamese has no tense', it's more accurate to say: verbs don't conjugate for tense — time and aspect are expressed through context and small marker words. The dedicated article on verbs and time covers đã / đang / sẽ.

No grammatical gender

Unlike French, Spanish or Portuguese, Vietnamese nouns have no gender. No 'le/la' problem, no agreement endings. A table is just cái bàn; a dog is just con chó.

Nouns also don't need plural marking: sách can be 'book' or 'books'. When quantity matters, Vietnamese uses a number + classifier (see classifiers) or words like các and những before the noun.

Modifiers follow the noun

The one word-order habit to retrain: adjectives, possessors and demonstratives come after the noun — the reverse of English 'good coffee'. The big exceptions are numbers (and các / những), which come before it.

Possession: của and the shorter way

The possessive marker is của: sách của tôi = 'my book' (literally 'book of me'). With close relations — family, people, home, country — Vietnamese often drops của: nhà tôi (my house), mẹ tôi (my mother).

This, that, that over there

đấy is an especially northern-leaning variant of đó — you'll hear it a lot around Hanoi; southerners generally prefer đó. Both travel well.

Where things are: ở and có

Summary

SVO order, no conjugation, no gender — but modifiers trail the noun, possession uses của, and 'where is…' is ở đâu. Next: pronouns and address terms — the socially loaded part of Vietnamese.

Mini practice