Learn Vietnamese from Native Speakers

Learn Vietnamese Guide to Pronunciation

The purpose of the Guide to Pronunciation is to familiarize a student with the pronunciation of Southern Vietnamese to the point where he can recognize and reproduce with fluency all its commonly occurring sounds and sequences of sounds.

The method underlying the presentation involves listening, contrasting, recogninzing, and imitating. The material has been presented as simply as possible, always with the beginning student, rather than the professional linguist, in mind. While some technical phonetic descriptions are included for those who understand them, they can be ignored by the student with limited linguistic background.

This guide should be used in conjunction with the audio recordings. To try to learn Vietnamese pronunciation by reading the text without reference to the audio recordings would be useless as trying to learn to play the piano by reading music without ever touching a keyboard.

The guide should be used not only as an introduction to pronunciation but also for remedial purposes later. Students having pronunciation difficulties should review appropriate drills repeatedly until the difficulties are cleared up.