Say "Hello" in Vietnamese

Xin chào is the hello every phrasebook opens with, and it is correct, but it is also slightly stiff, a bit like answering the phone with "good day to you". What Vietnamese speakers actually say most of the time is chào plus a pronoun, and picking the pronoun is the whole skill.

The pronoun depends on how old the other person looks relative to you. Getting it roughly right matters more than getting it exactly right. The effort is what registers.

Xin chào works with anyone and offends no one. Use it while you are still working out which pronoun the situation calls for.

This is the everyday form. The pronoun you choose is a guess about the other person's age relative to yours, and native speakers make that guess constantly and without fuss.

Vietnamese has six tones, and they change meaning outright rather than just accent. The respellings on this page are a crutch for an English reader and they cannot carry tone at all. "Chow" tells you nothing about whether your voice should fall, rise or break in the middle.

So treat the written line as a reminder and the audio as the actual lesson. Play a phrase, say it back, play it again. That loop is the only part of this that teaches tone.

The pronoun you picked for the greeting carries on through the rest of the conversation, including in place of "you".

Getting the pronoun approximately right matters more than getting it exactly right, which the table above covers. Two things it does not cover are worth more than a closer guess at how old someone is.

The first is bạn. Textbooks teach it as you, and it is, between people of roughly the same age who are roughly equals. Used with someone clearly older it is not neutral, it is flat, the way addressing a professor by surname alone would be. When in doubt, anh or chị and a small error in the direction of respect costs nothing.

The second is that you have to use a pronoun for yourself too, and it is the mirror of theirs. If you call a man a little older than you anh, you are em in the same conversation. Vietnamese has no fixed word for I that works everywhere, and tôi, the one dictionaries give, is neutral to the point of coldness in ordinary conversation.

Written Vietnamese is the same everywhere. Spoken, the gap between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City is wide enough that the two are not always instantly mutually clear, and it starts with the letters in these greetings.

In the north, d and gi are said like a z. In the south they are closer to a y. So dạ, the politeness word you will hear constantly in the south, is roughly ya there and za in Hanoi.

That word is the clearest regional marker of the lot. In the south dạ opens a polite answer and softens almost anything. In the north the equivalent polite yes is vâng. Both are understood everywhere, and which one you pick tells a Vietnamese listener where you learned.

The phone is answered with a lô, not with chào and not with a pronoun, which is convenient: it is the one moment in Vietnamese where you do not have to work out who you are talking to before you can speak.

In writing, the diacritics are not decoration. They carry the tone and the vowel, and Vietnamese written without them is genuinely ambiguous rather than merely untidy: the same bare letters can be several different words. Older phones forced people to drop them and the habit survives in some casual typing, but anything you write should carry them. This is also the reason the respellings on this page can only get you close.

Start with xin chào, and move to chào anh and chào chị as soon as you are comfortable guessing. Nobody will mind a wrong guess, and the attempt is what people respond to.

For the tones, use your ears rather than this page. Photograph the signs and the menus around you, play the words back, and copy what you hear.