Vietnamese, read deeply
Reading well in your first language is the foundation of every other one — vocabulary, background knowledge and the stamina for long texts all start here.
A guide to reading in Vietnamese: choosing books by age, reading deeply rather than skimming, and taking notes that last.
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Vowels
Consonants
Letter combinations
Tones
Flashcards Study decks — open a folder to practise its cards. 6
A language’s literature is not confined to one country. Each period below names the places where the language is native, with a few works that stand for the whole era.
980–1400 Lý and Trần: literature in classical Chinese Đại Việt — Thăng Long and the Zen monasteries
The first written Vietnamese literature used classical Chinese, but its content was entirely local: assertions of sovereignty, war proclamations, and Zen poetry by kings who became monks. Reading it explains why national consciousness in Vietnam is so old.
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Nam quốc sơn hà
南國山河
Khuyết danh, tương truyền Lý Thường Kiệt · ~1077
Four lines regarded as the first declaration of independence. Every Vietnamese schoolchild knows them.
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Hịch tướng sĩ
諭諸裨將檄文
Trần Quốc Tuấn · 1284
A proclamation written before the war against the Mongols. Argument, but with the cadence of a war drum.
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Cư trần lạc đạo phú
居塵樂道賦
Trần Nhân Tông · ~1300
A king who defeated the Mongols, abdicated and became a monk, writing on keeping the Way while living in the world.
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Thiên đô chiếu
Chiếu dời đô
Lý Công Uẩn · 1010
The edict announcing the move of the capital to what is now Hanoi. Two hundred and fourteen characters that begin a thousand years of a city.
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Quốc tộ
Vận nước
Thiền sư Pháp Thuận · ~980
Four lines answering a king who asked how long his dynasty would last. Possibly the oldest surviving Vietnamese poem by a named author.
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Cáo tật thị chúng
Có bệnh bảo mọi người
Thiền sư Mãn Giác · 1096
A dying monk notes that spring flowers fall and return, then that last night one apricot branch bloomed in the yard. Six lines.
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Thuật hoài
Tỏ lòng
Phạm Ngũ Lão · ~1300
A general who held a spear against the Mongols confesses he still blushes to hear tales of ancient heroes. Four lines.
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Bạch Đằng giang phú
Phú sông Bạch Đằng
Trương Hán Siêu · ~1340
A traveller rows down the river where two invasions were sunk, and is told that terrain wins battles but virtue keeps countries.
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Đại Việt sử ký
Lê Văn Hưu · 1272
The first Vietnamese national history, now lost, but quoted at length inside the chronicle that replaced it two centuries later.
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Thiền uyển tập anh
Khuyết danh · ~1337
Biographies of sixty-odd Zen masters, and the main source for almost everything known about Vietnamese Buddhism before 1400.
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Việt điện u linh tập
Lý Tế Xuyên · 1329
Twenty-seven tutelary spirits of the realm, written down so the state could officially recognise them. Mythology as administration.
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Lĩnh Nam chích quái
Trần Thế Pháp · ~1370
The strange tales of the south, including the dragon lord and the fairy whose hundred children became the Vietnamese people.
1400–1700 The rise of chữ Nôm Đại Việt under the Lê
The Vietnamese built a script of their own out of Chinese characters to write their own speech. Chữ Nôm was harder than Chinese — you had to know Chinese first to read it — but it let literature sound in Vietnamese for the first time.
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Quốc âm thi tập
國音詩集
Nguyễn Trãi · ~1440
The earliest surviving Nôm collection, by the author of the great proclamation of victory over the Ming. A high official later executed with his clan; the poems keep longing for a garden.
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Hồng Đức quốc âm thi tập
洪德國音詩集
Lê Thánh Tông và Tao đàn · ~1495
Nôm poetry by the king and his court poetry society — a sign the vernacular was now thought worthy of courtly literature.
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Bình Ngô đại cáo
Nguyễn Trãi · 1428
The proclamation of victory over the Ming, opening with the claim that Đại Việt has its own civilisation and its own emperors. The country's second declaration of independence.
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Ức Trai thi tập
Nguyễn Trãi · ~1440
The classical-Chinese poems of the same man, written mostly after he withdrew from a court that would later execute three generations of his family.
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Lam Sơn thực lục
Nguyễn Trãi (tương truyền) · 1432
The official account of the ten-year uprising, written while the men in it were still alive to disagree with it.
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Nam ông mộng lục
Hồ Nguyên Trừng · 1438
A captured prince, serving the Ming court that took his country, writes down what he remembers of home. Vietnamese memory in exile.
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Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư
Ngô Sĩ Liên · 1479
The complete chronicle, from the legendary Hùng kings to the fifteenth century. The single most cited source in Vietnamese history.
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Thập giới cô hồn quốc ngữ văn
Lê Thánh Tông · ~1490
A king writes in Nôm rather than Chinese, addressing ten kinds of wandering soul. Vernacular literature with royal permission.
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Truyền kỳ mạn lục
Nguyễn Dữ · ~1547
Twenty tales of ghosts and spirits in which the wronged are usually women and the wrongdoers are usually officials.
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Bạch Vân quốc ngữ thi tập
Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm · ~1570
Nôm poems by the sage everyone consulted and nobody could recruit, arguing that the wise place is the quiet one.
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Bạch Vân am thi tập
Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm · ~1570
The classical-Chinese half of the same body of work, and the source of the prophecies later generations kept reading the future into.
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Thiên Nam ngữ lục
Khuyết danh · ~1700
Eight thousand lines of national history in Nôm verse, so that people who could not read Chinese could still learn where they came from.
1700–1900 The height of chữ Nôm: verse novels and laments The divided north and south, then the Nguyễn dynasty
Two centuries that produced work Vietnamese people still recite from memory. The lục bát metre — six syllables then eight, rhyming inside the line as well as at the end — lets a story run to thousands of lines and still be held in the head. That is why this literature lives in collective memory rather than only on paper.
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Truyện Kiều
傳翹 · Đoạn trường tân thanh
Nguyễn Du · ~1820
The central work of Vietnamese literature: 3,254 lines on a girl who sells herself to save her father. People tell fortunes by it, quote it, and argue with it in daily speech.
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Chinh phụ ngâm
征婦吟
Đặng Trần Côn; bản Nôm Đoàn Thị Điểm · ~1740
The lament of a wife whose husband has gone to war. Written in classical Chinese, but it is the Nôm translation that readers keep.
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Thơ Hồ Xuân Hương
胡春香詩
Hồ Xuân Hương · ~1800
Double-edged Nôm poems that describe a landscape and something far more physical at once, mocking scholarly hypocrisy. A rare independent woman’s voice in East Asian letters of the time.
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Cung oán ngâm khúc
Nguyễn Gia Thiều · ~1780
A concubine, once favoured and now forgotten, works out that the palace was the trap and beauty was the bait.
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Văn tế thập loại chúng sinh
Văn chiêu hồn
Nguyễn Du · ~1815
A funeral oration for ten kinds of unmourned dead, from generals to beggars, given equal weight in the same poem.
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Lục Vân Tiên
Nguyễn Đình Chiểu · ~1858
Composed orally by a blind poet and sung across the south for a century. The southern counterweight to Truyện Kiều.
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Văn tế nghĩa sĩ Cần Giuộc
Nguyễn Đình Chiểu · 1861
The first Vietnamese literary work to make peasants the heroes: farmers who picked up knives against French rifles and lost.
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Thơ Nguyễn Khuyến
Nguyễn Khuyến · ~1890
A top examination graduate resigns rather than serve the French, goes home, and writes the finest poems anyone has written about a village pond.
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Thơ Trần Tế Xương
Thơ Tú Xương
Trần Tế Xương · ~1900
Failed the examinations eight times and turned the humiliation into satire, including a famous poem thanking his wife for feeding him.
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Hoàng Lê nhất thống chí
Ngô gia văn phái · ~1800
A historical novel about the collapse of the Lê, written by a family who watched it happen and could not agree on whose side to take.
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Thượng kinh ký sự
Lê Hữu Trác · 1783
The country's greatest physician is summoned to the capital to treat a prince, and quietly records how sick the court itself is.
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Vũ trung tuỳ bút
Phạm Đình Hổ · ~1800
Notes written during the rain on tea, examinations, ghosts and the price of things. The best picture we have of daily life in old Hanoi.
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Truyền kỳ tân phả
Đoàn Thị Điểm · ~1730
Strange tales by a woman scholar, and unusually for the genre the female characters are given reasons rather than fates.
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Bích Câu kỳ ngộ
Khuyết danh · ~1800
A scholar in Hanoi falls in love with a woman who steps out of a painting. Nôm verse romance at its most delicate.
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Nhị độ mai
Khuyết danh · ~1800
A loyal family destroyed by a corrupt minister, and a plum tree that blooms twice to say the wheel will turn. Enormously popular for a century.
1900–1945 The Latin script and the New Poetry Hanoi, Huế and Saigon under colonial rule
The Latin-based quốc ngữ was far easier to learn than Nôm, and that changed everything: within two generations literacy became ordinary, newspapers multiplied, and poetry dropped Tang metrics for personal feeling.
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Thơ Xuân Diệu
Thơ thơ · Gửi hương cho gió
Xuân Diệu · 1938–1945
The emblematic New Poetry voice: hurried, hungry for life, shaped by French verse yet unmistakably Vietnamese.
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Đây thôn Vĩ Dạ
Hàn Mặc Tử · 1938
Written when its author was already ill with leprosy and living apart. The images ache with beauty, and nobody is certain who the poem is addressed to.
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Số đỏ
Vũ Trọng Phụng · 1936
A satire in which an illiterate hustler rises to the top of a Europeanising colonial society. Vicious, funny, and still accurate.
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Chí Phèo
Nam Cao · 1941
A peasant is pushed into becoming a thug and then finds no way back to being a person. The character’s name has become a common noun in Vietnamese.
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Thi nhân Việt Nam
Hoài Thanh và Hoài Chân · 1942
The anthology that decided who counted in the New Poetry movement, and is still the reason we read the poets we read from that decade.
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Lỡ bước sang ngang
Nguyễn Bính · 1940
New Poetry that kept the village in it: folk metre, a sister marrying away, and none of the French borrowings his contemporaries loved.
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Điêu tàn
Chế Lan Viên · 1937
A seventeen-year-old writes in the voice of the vanished Champa kingdom, filling his first book with towers, skulls and blood.
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Lửa thiêng
Huy Cận · 1940
Sadness given a landscape: rivers, wide skies and the feeling of being very small, in the most musical Vietnamese of the period.
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Tiếng thu
Lưu Trọng Lư · 1939
Short, quiet poems built on a question about a deer stepping on yellow leaves. Almost every Vietnamese schoolchild meets it.
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Nhật ký trong tù
Hồ Chí Minh · 1943
A hundred and thirty-odd classical Chinese quatrains written in a Chinese jail, mostly about being cold, hungry and moved between prisons.
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Tố Tâm
Hoàng Ngọc Phách · 1925
Usually called the first modern Vietnamese novel: two young people in love, defeated not by villains but by their own families' expectations.
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Đoạn tuyệt
Nhất Linh · 1935
A young wife takes the old family system to court and wins. The Tự Lực văn đoàn arguing its case in the form of a novel.
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Nửa chừng xuân
Khái Hưng · 1934
The same argument told more gently: a woman refuses to be a second wife, and pays for the refusal for the rest of her life.
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Gió đầu mùa
Thạch Lam · 1937
Short stories in which almost nothing happens: a cold morning, a coat given away, a train passing a dark provincial station.
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Vang bóng một thời
Nguyễn Tuân · 1940
Portraits of men who did one old thing perfectly — drinking tea, beheading, calligraphy — as that world was disappearing.
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Tắt đèn
Ngô Tất Tố · 1937
A peasant woman sells her dog, then her child, to pay a head tax. The clearest indictment of the colonial village in Vietnamese fiction.
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Bước đường cùng
Nguyễn Công Hoan · 1938
A farmer is ruined by compound interest rather than by any single disaster. Banned by the colonial administration within months.
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Dế Mèn phiêu lưu ký
Tô Hoài · 1941
A young cricket learns not to be arrogant and walks the length of the country. Translated into dozens of languages, and still every child's first book.
1945–1975 Literature of the war years North and South Vietnam
Thirty years of continuous war produced a literature largely in service of the struggle, yet what survives best are the poems that kept something private inside the collective.
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Tây Tiến
Quang Dũng · 1948
A regiment crossing the northwestern mountains. Heroic and grieving at once — and once criticised for being too romantic.
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Việt Bắc
Tố Hữu · 1954
A long poem in lục bát and folk call-and-response, on the parting between the resistance and the mountain people who sheltered it.
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Đất nước
Nguyễn Đình Thi · 1955
An autumn morning in Hanoi turns into a country standing up. Written across seven years, which is why the tone changes halfway through.
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Sóng
Xuân Quỳnh · 1967
A love poem written in the middle of a war, in which a woman says what she wants without asking anyone's permission.
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Bài thơ về tiểu đội xe không kính
Phạm Tiến Duật · 1969
Truck drivers on the Trường Sơn road joke about the windscreens they no longer have. War poetry written in plain speech.
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Dáng đứng Việt Nam
Lê Anh Xuân · 1968
A soldier dies standing at an airfield and leaves no name. The poet was killed a few months after writing it.
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Đất nước đứng lên
Nguyên Ngọc · 1955
A Bahnar village in the central highlands fights the French. One of the few works of the period to put a highland people at the centre.
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Rừng xà nu
Nguyễn Trung Thành · 1965
A forest that keeps growing back however often it is shelled, used as the image for a village that does the same.
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Vợ nhặt
Kim Lân · 1962
During the 1945 famine a man acquires a wife for the price of four bowls of noodles, and the story is somehow about hope.
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Vợ chồng A Phủ
Tô Hoài · 1952
A Hmong woman held as a debt-bride in the northwest highlands finally cuts a rope. The most anthologised short story in the country.
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Người mẹ cầm súng
Nguyễn Thi · 1965
A southern woman with six children joins the fighting. Written from interviews, and the author was killed in the Tết offensive three years later.
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Dấu chân người lính
Nguyễn Minh Châu · 1972
A campaign novel by a writer who would spend the next decade quietly taking apart everything this book takes for granted.
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Nhật ký Đặng Thuỳ Trâm
Đặng Thuỳ Trâm · 1970
A young doctor's diary, taken from her body by an American officer who kept it for thirty-five years before returning it to her family.
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Tôi không còn cô độc
Thanh Tâm Tuyền · 1956
Free verse from Saigon that broke with rhyme and metre entirely. The southern avant-garde, and unpublishable in the north for decades.
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Vòng tay học trò
Nguyễn Thị Hoàng · 1966
A teacher in Đà Lạt falls for her student. A scandal in the south when it appeared, and out of print for nearly fifty years afterwards.
1986 đến nay Đổi Mới and the contemporary Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora
After Đổi Mới, literature was allowed to speak about the war differently: not the victory but the cost. At the same time a Vietnamese-language literature grew abroad, in the United States, France and Australia.
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Nỗi buồn chiến tranh
Thân phận của tình yêu
Bảo Ninh · 1990
A war novel from the winning side with no note of victory in it. Withdrawn for a time, it is now the most translated Vietnamese novel.
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Tướng về hưu
Nguyễn Huy Thiệp · 1987
The story that opened Đổi Mới literature: a retired general no longer recognises the family, or the society, he fought to protect.
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Cánh đồng bất tận
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư · 2005
A novella set in the Mekong delta and written in southern speech — the strongest voice in twenty-first-century Vietnamese fiction.
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Thời xa vắng
Lê Lựu · 1986
A man spends the first half of his life loving what he is told to love, and the second half wanting what he cannot have. Đổi Mới begins here.
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Mùa lá rụng trong vườn
Ma Văn Kháng · 1985
One Hanoi family after the war, coming apart as the market arrives. The novel that noticed the change before the policy named it.
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Chiếc thuyền ngoài xa
Nguyễn Minh Châu · 1987
A photographer takes a beautiful picture of a boat at dawn, then watches the family on it beat each other. Art and reality, in twenty pages.
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Thiên sứ
Phạm Thị Hoài · 1988
A girl decides at fourteen to stop growing and watches Hanoi from a window. Banned at home, translated widely abroad.
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Bến không chồng
Dương Hướng · 1990
A northern village where the men did not come back, and the women who stayed grow old around the absence.
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Mảnh đất lắm người nhiều ma
Nguyễn Khắc Trường · 1990
Two clans fight over a village, using the local Party branch as a weapon. Rural politics written as a ghost story.
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Người sót lại của Rừng Cười
Võ Thị Hảo · 1991
Five young women guard a supply depot in the forest, and only one comes out. What the war did to women, said without decoration.
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Sông Côn mùa lũ
Nguyễn Mộng Giác · 1990
Two thousand pages on the Tây Sơn rebellion, written in California by a man who left in 1981. The major novel of the Vietnamese diaspora.
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Ánh trăng
Nguyễn Duy · 1984
A man in a city flat meets the moon during a power cut and is ashamed of having forgotten it. Four short stanzas about forgetting the war.
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Cơ hội của Chúa
Nguyễn Việt Hà · 1999
Hanoi in the 1990s: young people with degrees, no jobs worth having, and a lot of beer. The first novel of the market economy.
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Đi tìm nhân vật
Tạ Duy Anh · 2002
A man reads about a murdered boy in the paper and starts looking for him, which turns into looking for himself. Withdrawn shortly after release.
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Tuổi thơ dữ dội
Phùng Quán · 1988
Boy soldiers in the Huế resistance, written over eighteen years by an author who had been banned for most of them.
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Mắt biếc
Nguyễn Nhật Ánh · 1990
A boy loves a girl from his village for his entire life and never says so properly. Generations of Vietnamese teenagers have cried over it.
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Cho tôi xin một vé đi tuổi thơ
Nguyễn Nhật Ánh · 2008
An adult remembers being eight and deciding, with three friends, to rename everything in the world. Won the ASEAN literature prize.
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Sông
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư · 2012
Three people travel the length of a Mekong river that may not exist, each running from something they will not name.
2020– The 2020s: still being written Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora
A decade still running cannot have a settled canon, and saying so is more honest than presenting a provisional list as though it were fixed. What the books below have instead is evidence: a major prize, a wide readership, or a translation record.
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Biên sử nước
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư · 2020
A novel about water and a delta turning saline, written in deliberately fragmented prose.
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Từ Dụ thái hậu
Trần Thùy Mai · 2019
A historical novel of the Nguyễn court’s inner palace; Writers’ Association prize 2020. Long and widely read.
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Một ví dụ xoàng
Nguyễn Bình Phương · 2021
A death-row case reconstructed from the fragments people remember. Took the Writers' Association prize in 2021 and the SEA Write Award the year after.
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Từ giờ thứ sáu đến giờ thứ chín
Nguyễn Một · 2023
A young man dodging conscription in the south before 1975, and a love story that the end of the war interrupts. Writers' Association prize, 2023.
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Tuyệt không dấu vết
Nguyễn Việt Hà · 2023
A man goes looking for someone who has disappeared from Hanoi, in a novel more interested in the city than in the answer. Writers' Association prize, 2023.
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Một mùa hè dưới bóng cây
Nguyễn Tham Thiện Kế · 2023
Short stories from the midland provinces, written in long unhurried sentences. Writers' Association prize for prose, 2023.
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Nhân sinh kép: Sống hai cuộc đời
Đức Anh · 2023
Speculative fiction in which some people carry two consciousnesses in one body. Won the Writers' Association Young Author prize in 2023.
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Đi trốn
Bình Ca · 2020
Five children evacuated during the bombing run away into a cave system and have an adventure. War from a child's height.
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Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương
Lý Lan · 2022
A century of one Mekong delta family, seen through a religious movement born in the marshes. By the novelist who also translated Harry Potter into Vietnamese.
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Mùa hè không tên
Nguyễn Nhật Ánh · 2023
Another village childhood from the writer who has sold more books in Vietnam than anyone: a summer, a group of friends, and the end of being a child.
A curated list by age, fiction beside non-fiction. Reading widely builds vocabulary in a way no wordlist can.
Primary Roughly 6–11 — short sentences, pictures, and enjoying it before anything else. 5 books
Fiction
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Dế Mèn phiêu lưu ký · 1941
Tô Hoài · Diary of a Cricket
An arrogant cricket learns what arrogance costs. Tô Hoài's sentences are clean and exact; this is the book that teaches Vietnamese children how a sentence works.
About 130 pages. Readable from around age eight.
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Đất rừng phương Nam · 1957
Đoàn Giỏi · The Southern Land and Forest
A boy separated from his family travels the Mekong Delta. Its vocabulary of rivers, fruit and forest trades is richer than any textbook's.
About 250 pages, thick with southern dialect.
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Cho tôi xin một vé đi tuổi thơ · 2008
Nguyễn Nhật Ánh · Ticket to Childhood
An adult remembers being eight, when he and his friends decided to rename everything in the world. Funny and sad at once.
About 210 pages. Adults enjoy it too.
Non-fiction
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Truyện cổ tích Việt Nam · 1957
Nguyễn Đổng Chi · Vietnamese Folk Tales
The folk tales collected by Nguyễn Đổng Chi. Tấm Cám, Thạch Sanh, Sọ Dừa — the cultural bedrock every Vietnamese metaphor rests on.
A multi-volume set; each tale stands alone.
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Lịch sử Việt Nam bằng tranh · 1997
Trần Bạch Đằng (chủ biên) · Vietnamese History in Pictures
Vietnamese history as comics, from the Hùng kings onward. The gentlest way in for a child.
A long series; pick volumes by period.
Lower secondary Roughly 11–15 — longer stories, harder characters, ideas that start to weigh something. 5 books
Fiction
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Tuổi thơ dữ dội · 1988
Phùng Quán · A Fierce Childhood
Teenage scouts in the resistance against the French at Huế. Written for young readers and never hiding the deaths.
About 700 pages in two volumes. Long, but it pulls you along.
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Vừa nhắm mắt vừa mở cửa sổ · 2000
Nguyễn Ngọc Thuần · Open the Window, Eyes Closed
A boy learns to name the flowers in his garden by smell alone. Light, near-poetic, and among the loveliest things in Vietnamese children's literature.
About 160 pages. It rewards slow reading.
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Mắt biếc · 1990
Nguyễn Nhật Ánh · Blue Eyes
An unrequited love that lasts a lifetime, from village to city. The most reread of Nguyễn Nhật Ánh's novels.
About 250 pages. There is a film.
Non-fiction
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Nhật ký Đặng Thùy Trâm · 2005
Đặng Thùy Trâm · Last Night I Dreamed of Peace
The diary of a twenty-seven-year-old doctor at the Quảng Ngãi front, kept for thirty-five years by the American soldier who found it.
About 320 pages. Worth reading with an adult.
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Việt Nam sử lược · 1920
Trần Trọng Kim · A Brief History of Vietnam
The first complete history of Vietnam written in the Latin script. The style is dated but clear, and it is still where many people start.
About 600 pages. Read by chapter, not straight through.
High school Roughly 15–18 — difficult prose, adult subjects, read to think rather than to find out what happens. 5 books
Fiction
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Số đỏ · 1936
Vũ Trọng Phụng · Dumb Luck
An uneducated chancer climbs to the top of colonial Hanoi society. The sharpest satire in Vietnamese literature, and still accurate.
About 220 pages, full of 1930s slang.
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Chí Phèo và các truyện ngắn · 1941
Nam Cao · Chí Phèo and Other Stories
A peasant pushed by his society into becoming a thug. Nam Cao writes poverty without pity, and his sentences are a model.
Short stories; read them one at a time.
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Nỗi buồn chiến tranh · 1990
Bảo Ninh · The Sorrow of War
The war seen from inside, with no heroics. The most translated and most discussed Vietnamese novel abroad.
About 300 pages, told out of sequence.
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Truyện Kiều · 1820
Nguyễn Du · The Tale of Kiều
Three thousand two hundred and fifty-four lines of lục bát verse. It is the work of Vietnamese literature, and also the store of idiom Vietnamese still speaks in.
Get an annotated edition; it is dense with Chinese allusion.
Non-fiction
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Thi nhân Việt Nam · 1942
Hoài Thanh & Hoài Chân · Vietnamese Poets
An anthology of the New Poetry of 1932–41 with criticism attached. The criticism has itself become literature.
About 400 pages; read one poet at a time.
Adult No ceiling on length or difficulty — the ones worth returning to. 5 books
Fiction
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Cánh đồng bất tận · 2005
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư · Endless Field
A family living on a boat, drifting the Mekong Delta. Deeply southern in voice, merciless, and beautiful.
A novella; about 200 pages with the accompanying stories.
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Thời xa vắng · 1986
Lê Lựu · A Time Long Past
A man who lives his whole life according to what others want. The novel that opened Vietnam's Đổi Mới literature.
About 400 pages.
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Vang bóng một thời · 1940
Nguyễn Tuân · Echoes of a Bygone Age
The pastimes of the last Confucian gentry — tea, poetry games, an executioner's craft. Nguyễn Tuân writes the most fastidious Vietnamese ever set down.
About 200 pages. Archaic vocabulary; expect to look things up.
Non-fiction
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Việt Nam phong tục · 1915
Phan Kế Bính · Vietnamese Customs
Vietnamese custom at the start of the twentieth century, recorded by a man both inside and outside it. The source for why much of today still looks as it does.
About 350 pages in early-century prose.
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Việt Nam văn hóa sử cương · 1938
Đào Duy Anh · Outline of Vietnamese Cultural History
The foundational survey of Vietnamese culture — family, village, belief, writing. Still cited after nearly ninety years.
About 400 pages. Scholarly but readable.
Things a foreigner keeps getting wrong until somebody says them out loud — the customs, taboos and habits of mind sitting behind the language.
There is no neutral I — pronouns change with the relationship
Vietnamese addresses people with kinship terms: anh, chị, em, cô, chú, bác, ông, bà. The same person can be em to one listener and anh to another within a single conversation. So before you can say your first sentence you must estimate the other person's age and standing. This is the biggest barrier for foreigners, and also what makes Vietnamese sound far warmer than neutral pronouns do.
Asking your age on first meeting is normal and necessary
Because pronouns depend on age, the question is grammatical rather than nosy. People often ask indirectly: what year were you born? or are you the same age as me?. A foreigner who refuses to answer leaves the conversation stuck, because the other person does not know what to call them. If exact age feels uncomfortable, an approximate range is enough to unblock things.
Show the other 50
Give and receive with two hands, especially with elders
Business cards, money, gifts, a cup of tea — two hands is the basic marker of respect. When pouring tea or alcohol, serve the eldest first and yourself last. Receiving with one hand is not ungrammatical but reads immediately as thoughtless. The gesture is small and noticed far more than foreigners expect.
Tết stops the entire country — it is not an ordinary holiday
Lunar New Year runs for several days, shops close and everyone travels to their home province. The first person to enter a house in the new year is believed to set its luck, so the visit is sometimes arranged in advance. During the first three days people avoid sweeping the floor, for fear of sweeping fortune out. Do not schedule business in this window; there will be nobody to do it with.
Almost every home has an ancestor altar
The altar usually occupies the most dignified position in the house, with photographs, incense and fruit. Death anniversaries are counted on the lunar calendar and the family gathers to make offerings. This is not quite religion in the Western sense; Buddhists, Catholics and the non-religious all keep it. Guests should avoid turning their back on the altar or pointing at it, and never put objects on it.
Shoes come off before entering a home, however modest
You will see footwear lined up outside doors at private homes and at many small eateries too. Hosts usually keep indoor slippers for guests. Some shops and small offices observe it as well. When unsure, look at the feet of the person ahead of you — that is always the answer.
A large Sino-Vietnamese layer sits under the modern vocabulary
A great many abstract and academic words are Chinese in origin: quốc gia, độc lập, giáo dục, kinh tế. Learners from China, Japan or Korea recognise them immediately and build vocabulary far faster. But the layer gives meaning only, not pronunciation, and the quốc ngữ spelling gives no hint of the original characters. For Western learners it is simply vocabulary to be learned like any other.
Six tones, and the northern and southern systems differ
Hanoi speech distinguishes all six tones, while much of the south merges hỏi and ngã into one. Learners should therefore pick one variety as their model rather than mixing them. A wrong tone does not produce an accent, it produces a different word: ma, má, mà, mả, mã and mạ are all separate. Speakers of Chinese, Thai or Lao have a clear advantage here.
Eating happens on the pavement, on low plastic stools
Pavement stalls are not the cheap option but where the best food in many cities is found. A stall typically makes exactly one dish and has done so for decades. You share a table with strangers, and that is entirely normal. Do not ask for something off the stall's list; they cook what they cook.
Coffee is a slow ritual, not a drink to carry away
The phin filter drips for several minutes, and waiting is part of the point. Vietnam is the world's largest exporter of robusta, so the taste is stronger and more bitter than the arabica Westerners expect. Cà phê sữa đá uses condensed milk because fresh milk was scarce under French rule. Cafés are places to meet, to work and to sit for hours.
Motorbikes rule the road, and crossing it works counterintuitively
The safe way to cross is to walk at a steady, slow pace without stopping — riders will steer around you. Stopping mid-road is the dangerous act, because it breaks their prediction. A family of four on one bike is an everyday sight, and bikes carry improbably large loads. The traffic looks chaotic but runs on a fairly consistent internal logic.
People avoid a flat no and avoid causing loss of face
Let me see or that may be difficult is usually a refusal. Criticising someone in front of others does damage that outlasts whatever you were trying to say. A smile can signal embarrassment or discomfort as readily as pleasure. Foreigners used to directness should learn to hear what is left unfinished rather than only what is said.
The script is Latin, but that represents a historical rupture
Before quốc ngữ, Vietnamese was written in chữ Nôm, built on Chinese characters. The Latin system was developed by missionaries from the seventeenth century and became the official script in the twentieth. The result is that Vietnamese readers today cannot read their own ancestors' texts directly, including Truyện Kiều. For a foreign learner this is an enormous gift: you can read from day one.
North and south differ in accent, vocabulary and ascribed character
Hanoi is seen as more formal and standard, Saigon as more relaxed and open — these are stereotypes, but they genuinely shape how people talk about each other. Vocabulary differs on everyday things: bát versus chén, mũ versus nón. The war and the years after 1975 remain sensitive, and families carry very different memories. A foreigner does better listening than concluding.
Multigenerational households are common and elders’ opinions carry weight
Grandparents often live in and help raise the children, and big decisions are usually discussed by the whole household. Adult children living with parents until marriage is ordinary rather than a sign of dependence. Care of ageing parents falls to the children rather than to services. Westerners routinely underestimate how far the family participates in personal decisions.
Do not pat people on the head, children included
The head is regarded as the highest part of the body and the feet the lowest. Patting an adult's head is therefore quite offensive, and it is best avoided even with children you do not know well. Pointing your feet at a person or at an altar is likewise rude. When sitting, mind where your feet are aimed, particularly in temples and homes.
Bargaining is normal in markets but not in shops
In traditional markets and with street vendors the first price is an opening one, and haggling is part of the transaction. In supermarkets, labelled shops and restaurants the price is fixed. Bargain cheerfully rather than sharply; the aim is a price you both accept, not a victory. If you have asked and negotiated, buy — walking away after agreeing reads as breaking your word.
An invitation to eat may be a greeting or a real invitation
Passing someone who is eating, please, join us is courtesy rather than a literal offer. But if you are invited to a home and the invitation is repeated a few times, it is real and should be accepted. Bringing fruit or a cake to a home is enough and is appreciated. Hosts press more food on you, and declining gently several times is a normal part of the meal.
The lunar calendar runs alongside the solar one in daily life
Death anniversaries, temple days, the full moon and the first of the month are all lunar, and wall calendars print both. Many people eat vegetarian on the first and fifteenth of each lunar month. Wedding dates, shop openings and ground-breakings are often chosen for auspicious timing on this calendar. If someone says the tenth and your calendar disagrees, they are probably speaking lunar.
A smile does not always mean happiness
Vietnamese people may smile out of embarrassment, when criticised, when they have not understood, or while delivering bad news. It softens the situation rather than making light of it. Foreigners sometimes get annoyed, reading it as not taking things seriously. The productive response is to lower your voice and ask again gently rather than increasing the pressure.
Tipping is not expected, though it is spreading in big cities
At everyday eateries and in taxis, rounding up is enough and nothing further is expected. In restaurants and hotels serving international guests, tipping is increasingly customary. Some places already add a service charge to the bill, so check before adding more. Not tipping is in no way considered rude.
Teachers are held in high regard and have their own holiday
20 November is Vietnamese Teachers' Day, when students and parents bring flowers and gifts. The phrase tôn sư trọng đạo reflects a long Confucian tradition. Students commonly stand to greet a teacher entering the room. It also means students rarely contradict a teacher openly, so foreign teachers should actively make space for questions.
The death anniversary matters more than the birthday
The death anniversary is kept every year by the lunar calendar: the family gathers, cooks a meal and burns incense. In many households a grandparent’s giỗ is remembered more precisely than one’s own birthday. For a foreigner, being invited to one is a signal that you are now counted as family rather than as a guest.
Wedding money is calculated, not chosen freely
The sum in the envelope is weighed against the cost of the banquet, the closeness of the relationship, and what that family once gave you. Many households keep a written record so the gift can be returned later. Giving too little leaves the hosts out of pocket; giving too much places an obligation on them at your own wedding.
The middle name used to signal gender, and sometimes the branch of the family
In a full name the middle element Văn traditionally marked a man and Thị a woman — a convention now much loosened and rarely chosen by young parents. Some lineages use a fixed middle name per generation to distinguish branches. Foreigners should note that Vietnamese address one another by the *last* element of the name, not the family name: Nguyễn Văn An is called anh An.
Roughly four in ten Vietnamese carry the surname Nguyễn
Nguyễn was the surname of the last dynasty, and at various points people adopted it to avoid trouble or to show allegiance. The result is that the surname is nearly useless for telling people apart. This is the practical reason Vietnamese lists are alphabetised by given name rather than family name, unlike Western practice.
Your quê is where your ancestors are from, not necessarily where you were born
Someone born and raised in Saigon may still say their quê is Nghệ An, because that is their father’s place. The question where is your quê? asks about origin, not residence. This explains why the whole country moves at Tết: people are not travelling but going home.
The southern accent merges two tones into one
Standard Vietnamese has six tones, but in the south the hỏi and ngã tones are usually not distinguished in speech. That is why southern writers commonly confuse the two diacritics, and why a learner using southern audio will not hear the difference the textbook describes. Choose one accent to learn first, then get used to the other.
Nouns need a classifier, and the wrong one sounds very odd
Con is used for animals, cái for inanimate things, quyển or cuốn for books, tờ for paper, chiếc for one of a pair. But con also takes knives, roads and rivers — so the animals rule is only half true. Learners coming from Chinese, Japanese or Korean already know the concept, but the categories do not line up.
Chinese characters left daily life but not the vocabulary
Vietnam abandoned Chinese characters and chữ Nôm for the Latin quốc ngữ during the first half of the twentieth century, faster than Korea and more completely than Japan. Yet around sixty per cent of the vocabulary remains Sino-Vietnamese. A Chinese speaker gains a large advantage here, and so does a Vietnamese learning Chinese — the benefit runs both ways.
The first three days of the year carry many prohibitions
No sweeping, for fear of sweeping out the year’s fortune; no lending or repaying money; nothing broken; no white or black clothing. The first person to enter a house on the first morning — the xông đất custom — is held to set the fortune of the whole year, so families often invite a suitable person in advance. As a foreign guest, do not simply turn up at someone’s house early on that morning.
The seventh lunar month is the ghost month, and big decisions are postponed
During this month many people avoid weddings, business openings, and buying a house or a vehicle. The fifteenth is both Vu Lan, the day of filial gratitude to parents, and the day of offerings to wandering souls. Shopkeepers complain that trade is slow, and that is a genuine economic effect rather than only a superstition.
Trăm phần trăm means empty the glass, and the toast is hard to decline
At a drinking meal people call out one two three, dô and drain the glass together. Declining can read as withholding respect, particularly when a senior is present. The accepted way out: say at the start that you cannot drink for health reasons, and hold a soft drink so you can still raise a glass with everyone.
Karaoke is a communal activity, sometimes on the pavement
Besides karaoke bars with private rooms there are wheeled speakers that neighbours bring out and sing into in front of the house. This is such a frequent source of neighbourly conflict that many local authorities have issued noise rules. A foreigner invited to sing is generally not permitted to refuse — singing badly is fine, not singing is the problem.
A guest is poured tea, and drinks at least a mouthful
A teapot sits ready on the table in most homes, and pouring for a guest is the first act. Refusing outright is discourteous; a mouthful and then leaving it is enough. The pourer is usually the youngest present, serving the eldest first — the same logic as the order at a meal.
Ăn cơm means to have a meal, whether or not rice is in it
The construction matches Japanese ご飯 and Korean 밥 exactly — a trace of rice having once been the centre of the concept of eating across the whole region. Have you eaten rice yet? also serves as a greeting rather than necessarily an invitation. Learners from Japan or Korea recognise it at once; Westerners often wait for an invitation that was never made.
Phở in Hanoi and phở in Saigon are two different dishes
Northern phở has a clear broth, few herbs and almost nothing added at the table. Southern phở is sweeter and arrives with a plate of herbs, bean sprouts and two sauces. Both are correct, and arguing which is the real one is a national pastime — do not take a side too seriously on first acquaintance.
Fish sauce is the measure, and every region mixes it differently
The dipping sauce is mixed from fish sauce, sugar, lime, garlic and chilli — and the proportions change by region, by dish and by household. A shared bowl of it is normal at a family table. To a foreigner the smell of undiluted fish sauce can be a shock, but the mixed dipping sauce is another thing entirely.
The conical hat and áo dài are real clothing, not tourist props
The conical hat is still worn daily in the countryside and at markets because it genuinely works against sun and rain. The áo dài is the uniform of a great many secondary schoolgirls and the formal dress for weddings and festivals. Being photographed in one is welcomed, but do not treat it as a costume.
In Vietnam that war is not called the Vietnam War
The usual name inside the country is the resistance war against America. That framing places it in a long line of resistance wars rather than as a single event. The subject can be discussed openly, but the perspective differs sharply between generations, and between people at home and the overseas community.
The overseas Vietnamese community is large, and its Vietnamese differs slightly
Large communities exist in the United States, Australia, France, Canada, Germany and Japan, mostly formed after 1975. Overseas Vietnamese often preserves a southern accent and some words now rare at home, while lacking vocabulary coined since. A learner should know which variety they are being taught.
Condensed milk in coffee is a historical accident, not a preference
The French brought coffee, but fresh milk kept badly in a tropical climate before refrigeration was common, so sweetened condensed milk took its place. The habit stayed and became an identity. Vietnamese coffee is also mostly Robusta rather than Arabica, which is why it tastes stronger and more bitter.
Addresses have alleys within alleys, joined by slashes
An address like 25/7/3 means house 3, in sub-alley 7, off alley 25 of that street. Many homes sit deep in lanes a car cannot enter. This is why delivery riders telephone rather than follow a map, and it is worth knowing before you book a car.
Lucky numbers have real market value, and 49 and 53 are avoided
Number plates and phone numbers thick with 6, 8 and 9 sell for a great deal, while 4 and 7 are avoided. The ages 49 and 53 are held to be years of misfortune — there is a saying that 49 has not passed before 53 arrives. This reckoning comes from the sexagenary calendar rather than from homophones as in China, so do not reason across from Chinese.
People avoid calling a baby chubby or beautiful
Folk belief holds that praising a small child too warmly draws the attention of spirits who may harm it. So people sometimes say the reverse, calling a child ugly or scrawny. In many areas children were given deliberately unattractive names so they would be easy to raise. A foreigner praising a baby with good intentions may leave the grandparents uneasy.
At work people still address each other by age, not by job title
Colleagues call each other anh, chị or em according to age, even when the younger person is the senior. That produces awkward cases which Vietnamese resolve by feel rather than by explicit rule. Unlike Korea, where the job title replaces the name entirely, in Vietnam the kinship system still outranks the corporate one.
Mourning dress is white, and the mourning band has a hierarchy
Descendants wear a white mourning band, and its form differs according to the relationship with the deceased. Funerals commonly involve a band, run for several days, and neighbours come to work rather than only to pay respects. Condolence money goes in an envelope and is usually an odd sum, the reverse of wedding money.
Those born after 1986 grew up in a different country
The Đổi Mới reforms of 1986 opened the economy, and the gap between the generations either side of that line is wide — in living standards, in English, in outlook. Older people remember ration coupons; the young grew up with smartphones. In conversation, remember that two Vietnamese people in the same room may hold entirely different memories.
English is treated as the route upward, and started very young
English centres are everywhere and many parents start children at kindergarten age. IELTS is used for domestic university admission, not only for studying abroad. As a result an English-speaking foreigner meets a great many people wanting to practise — which can be both an opportunity and an obstacle to learning Vietnamese.
Some things should not be given as gifts
A clock suggests counting down a life; knives and scissors suggest cutting a relationship; a cat is thought to bring bad luck; handkerchiefs are associated with tears. If a knife must be given, the recipient hands over a token coin to make it a sale. The clock taboo resembles the Chinese one but for a different reason — homophony there, imagery here.
The host puts food in your bowl, and an empty bowl gets refilled
Placing food in a guest’s bowl is an expression of hospitality, and refusing repeatedly can disappoint the host. If you have had enough, leave a little in the bowl rather than finishing it — a clean bowl signals that you want more. Japanese and Korean convention runs the other way on this point, so do not transfer the habit directly.
The hardest part for a foreigner is the pronouns, not the tones
Tones are hard but finite: six of them, learnable. The address system has no end point, because every new person requires you to decide again who you are in that relationship — and getting it wrong is either disrespectful or distant. Chinese and Korean speakers find it easier than Westerners do, but still have to learn it from the beginning.
Why reading well in Vietnamese makes English come faster, and how to choose books at each age.
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