Trà̂n Hoài Bá̆c - Easy Vietnamese: learn to speak Vietnamese quickly!

Thus, you will not find a detailed description of the pronunciation of each tone and sound. Instead, you will find approximations. We hope that once you listen to the recordings you will be able to mimic these sounds and then practice what you have acquired by communicating with native speakers. We will now look at the Vietnamese tone, vowel, and consonant systems. THE TONE SYSTEM Vietnamese is a tonal language, which means that the tone used for a sound can cause it to become a different word conveying a different meaning. In written Vietnamese, there are only five tone marks indicating five different tones, with the sixth tone the level tone receiving no marking.

Bear in mind that different dialects may or may not produce all these tones in their speech. For example, the southern dialects normally use only five tones out of six, and this can sometimes cause some misunderstanding for language learners. Fortunately, spoken words always carry enough contextual information to tell us what is being said. 1. The level tone () has no diacritic to represent it and is articulated at a relatively high pitch, like the pitch we use when we stick out our tongues and say ah at the doctors office.
ma / ma / ghost 2. The rising tone () is represented by the acute accent and produced at a very high pitch.
m / m / mother; cheek 3.

The falling tone () is indicated by the grave accent and pronounced at a rather low pitch.
m / m / but; who/that/which 4. The low-rising tone () is expressed by the question mark minus the dot. It starts at a low pitch and then rises.
m / m / grave, tomb 5. The broken, low-rising tone () is symbolized by the tilde. In its articulation, the voice starts low and rises abruptly, resulting in a glottal stop.
m / m / horse (in Sino-Vietnamese ) 6. The lowest tone () is expressed by the dot placed beneath a vowel.

Its production involves the dropping of the voice to the lowest possible pitch.
m / m / rice seedling In southern dialects, the broken, low-rising tone represented by the tilde is generally replaced by the low-rising tone, making m sound very much like m. We can now sum up the tone system in the following table:

TONE MARK	TONE LEVEL	EXAMPLE	MEANING
No mark	(level)	ma	ghost
(rising)	m	mother
`	(falling)	m	but
(low-rising)	m	grave
~	(broken, low-rising)	m	horse
.	(low-falling)	m	rice seedling