Most lists of Vietnamese phrases hand you twenty translations and leave out the thing that governs all of them, which is that Vietnamese has no neutral word for "you." Get that wrong and a perfectly pronounced sentence still lands oddly. Get it right and a badly pronounced one usually works. This guide covers what a traveler actually says in a week here: calling a waiter over, asking a price, refusing ice, finding a hospital, and counting to ten in a country where prices are spoken in thousands with the thousands left off. It also gives you an honest answer on the tones, which matter less than phrasebooks claim in a quiet cafe and more than you would like over traffic.
The Pronoun Problem: There Is No Neutral You
There is no all-purpose "you" in Vietnamese, and no warm all-purpose "I" either. You address people with kinship terms chosen by how old they look relative to you and, mostly, by gender. Someone clearly younger is em. A man roughly your age or older is anh, a woman is chị. Your parents' generation is chú or cô. Anyone older than that is bác, gender neutral and the safest guess a visitor can make. Genuinely elderly is ông or bà.
They come in reciprocal pairs, which is what catches people out: choosing what to call someone also chooses what you call yourself. With anh or chị you are em; with bác, ông or bà you are cháu in the north or con in the south. Tôi sidesteps all of it and is safe rather than polite, described in the research as non-polite rather than impolite. Bạn, which phrasebooks love, means "friend," not a general "you."
So being asked your age a minute after meeting is not nosiness. It is someone working out which term applies before they can speak to you. If you look younger, greet first. The full table is in our guide to saying hello in Vietnamese.
The Working Phrase Set: Eleven Things Worth Saying
Start with the one phrasebooks bury. To get a waiter's or a driver's attention you do not say "Xin lỗi." You say their pronoun plus the vocative particle ơi: "Em ơi!" to young staff, "Anh ơi!" or "Chị ơi!" to anyone older. It sounds the same in Hanoi, Hue and Ho Chi Minh City, and the dictionary's own example is "Em ơi, tính tiền!" (Wiktionary). Waving is what every other visitor does.
The respellings below ignore tone on purpose, because the tone lives in the diacritics. Read "kh" as a raspy h, the sound in Scottish "loch," and "uh" as the vowel in "hurt" without the r.
| English | Vietnamese | Say It Roughly Like | When You Use It |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excuse me / I'm sorry | Xin lỗi | sin loy | Apologizing, squeezing past |
| Excuse me! (calling someone over) | Anh ơi! / Chị ơi! / Em ơi! | ayng oy / chee oy / em oy | Summoning staff |
| How much is it? | Bao nhiêu tiền? | bow nyew tyen | Markets, stalls, taxis |
| Too expensive! | Đắt quá! (north) / Mắc quá! (south) | daht kwah / mahk kwah | Bargaining |
| Where is...? | ... ở đâu? | ... uh doh | Goes at the END |
| I don't understand | Tôi không hiểu | toy khohm hyew | Constantly |
| I don't speak Vietnamese † | Tôi không nói được tiếng Việt | toy khohm noy duhk tyeng vyet | Ending a longer conversation |
| The bill, please | Tính tiền! | ting tyen | After "Em ơi!" |
| Delicious! | Ngon quá! | ngon kwah | Delights cooks, reliably |
| Water | Nước | nuh-uhk | Ask for nước lọc or nước suối |
| I'm vegetarian | Tôi ăn chay | toy an chai | See the warning below |
† Dagger phrases, here and below, are built from verified words but were not attested as fixed expressions in a dictionary or academic source. They will be understood; whether they are what a Vietnamese speaker would say is another question.
Two notes on the table. "Where is" runs backwards from English, place first and ở đâu last: "Nhà vệ sinh ở đâu?" And thank you gets its own treatment, since cảm ơn and cám ơn are both correct, in our guide to saying thank you in Vietnamese.
Food and Water: Words That Change Your Order
Nước on its own means water in the general sense, and asking for it in a restaurant may get you tea. For drinking water ask for nước lọc, filtered, or nước suối, bottled mineral water. To decline ice, "Không đá" † is the everyday phrasing; đá literally means stone, which is why iced milk coffee is cà phê sữa đá. For anyone avoiding fish, "Không nước mắm" † rules out both the raw sauce and the diluted dipping mixture with lime, sugar, garlic and chili. And Ngon quá, delicious, is worth practicing: the ng is the sound at the end of "singer," moved to the front.
⚠️ Vegetarians should assume fish sauce is present until told otherwise. It turns up in dishes with no visible meat, including vegetable stir-fries and the sauces served alongside plain food. "Tôi ăn chay" is the phrase to lead with, and chay is a Buddhist dietary term before it is a preference, so it implies no meat, no fish and traditionally no alcohol or pungent alliums. Look for a quán chay, a vegetarian eatery, which cluster near pagodas.
Numbers and Prices: The Missing Thousands
One to ten runs một, hai, ba, bốn, năm, sáu, bảy, tám, chín, mười, roughly moht, hi, bah, bohn, nahm, sow, bye, tahm, cheen, muh-uh-y. A hundred is một trăm. A thousand is một nghìn in the north and một ngàn in the south. Two irregularities appear in compounds: năm becomes lăm above ten, so fifteen is mười lăm, which exists so it is not heard as "ten years," and bốn often becomes tư.
Now the part that confuses visitors. Banknotes here run into the hundreds of thousands, so spoken prices drop the units. Đồng goes first, then usually nghìn or ngàn too. A 25,000 đồng bánh mì is quoted as "hai mươi lăm nghìn," or just "hai mươi lăm." If a street quote sounds absurdly small, it is shorthand, and you add three zeros.
⚠️ The word for "hundred" is where this gets genuinely ambiguous. Trăm is used colloquially, inside compounds, to mean 100,000 đồng, so "hai trăm rưỡi" is 250,000 đồng (Wiktionary). A spoken "hai trăm" can therefore mean 200, 200,000 or 2,000,000 depending on what is being sold. When the number matters, hand over your phone and ask them to type it in. Our guide to the Vietnamese dong covers which notes are easy to confuse.
The Six Tones: What Getting Them Wrong Costs
Six tones, written as diacritics. No mark at all is ngang, level, where the absence is the tone. A grave accent is huyền, falling low. An acute is sắc, rising. A hook is hỏi, which dips before it recovers. A tilde is ngã, rising with a creak. A dot below the vowel is nặng, short and cut off. Hỏi is the tone adult English speakers most persistently fail to produce.
The classic demonstration set is ma, mà, má, mả, mã, mạ, the paradigm used in the Journal of the IPA's illustration of Hanoi Vietnamese (Kirby, Journal of the IPA). Two popular glosses attached to it are looser than they look. Má is "cheek," and the "mother" reading is specifically southern, since the northern and standard word for mother is mẹ. Mã is "code," and the "horse" reading survives inside Sino-Vietnamese compounds, not as a free-standing word. Most of the country does not speak six tones either: southern and central Vietnamese merge hỏi and ngã into one, giving five, while northern speech keeps them apart (Bauman et al., University of Maryland CASL). All six marks stay in the writing system nationwide regardless.
So how much does accuracy matter? The cleanest evidence is from Mandarin, not Vietnamese, and should be read that way. Researchers flattened the pitch contour of Mandarin sentences, destroying tone. In a quiet room, intelligibility fell from 94.5 percent to 93.6 percent, no meaningful difference. In babble noise at zero decibels signal to noise, the same manipulation cost nearly twenty points, 79.8 down to 60.1 (Patel, Xu and Wang, Speech Prosody 2010). Context rescues you, and noise takes the rescue away. That is recovery, not invisibility, and your hardest moments are the study's worst case: isolated words shouted over traffic. Say whole phrases, not bare words, and write numbers and place names down.
Politeness Particles: What One Syllable Changes
Dạ is the most misunderstood word in Vietnamese and it costs nothing to use. It is not a word for "yes." Dictionaries define it as an initial particle expressing politeness and respect, with no referential content, and it attaches as readily to a negative answer as a positive one, so "Dạ, không" is a polite no, not a contradiction. The closest English analogue is "please": remove it and the sentence means the same, less politely. Ạ does the same job from the other end, so "Cảm ơn chị nhiều ạ" is the fully polite northern thank you very much. One syllable, no grammar attached.
Politeness here is also directional. A junior answers a senior with vâng or dạ, and a senior answers a junior with ừ or ờ. Using ừ upward is a real discourtesy, while using vâng downward just sounds strange. Vâng is northern and dạ its southern equivalent, and the whole particle system, including why a Vietnamese "yes" is not always agreement, is unpicked in our guide to saying yes and no in Vietnamese. The biggest lever is not a particle at all, though. Research on Vietnamese politeness treats omitting an address term as a norm violation in itself, so "Cảm ơn" and "Cảm ơn chị" are not the same speech act.
North and South: What You Will Hear in a Day
Three differences will hit you within a day. The first accounts for most of the "why does this sound nothing like my phrasebook" feeling: the letters d, gi and r. In Hanoi they collapse into a z sound, so dạ is ZAH and giúp is ZOOP. In Ho Chi Minh City they surface as a y or a rolled r, so dạ is YAH. The second is the yes particle, vâng in the north and dạ in the south. The third is the word for expensive, đắt labeled northern and mắc central and southern (Wiktionary).
Assume the capital preserves more and you have it backwards, at least for consonants. Hanoi is the merging dialect, collapsing tr into ch, s into x, and r, d and gi into one sound, which makes ra, da and gia homophones there. Southern speech keeps those apart, so it is closer to the spelling. Neither is the correct one. Greetings vary less than travelers expect, though, since Vietnamese runs no morning, afternoon and evening series at all, which our guide to saying good morning in Vietnamese takes apart.
Trouble: The Words to Have Ready
Vietnamese draws a line English blurs. Giúp means assist, the word for a stuck suitcase or a wrong turn. Cứu means rescue, so in a genuine crisis you shout "Cứu với!" †, not "Giúp tôi với" †. Cấp cứu is emergency medical aid and is the phrase for a taxi driver. Hospital is bệnh viện, roughly "beng vyen," so "Bệnh viện ở đâu?" asks where the hospital is. Police here are công an, roughly "kohm ahn." You will also hear cảnh sát, the general word for police forces elsewhere, which survives in compounds such as cảnh sát giao thông, the traffic police.
⚠️ Learn cứu and giúp as two different words, not two ways of saying the same thing. Shouting the "assist me" verb during a medical emergency understates what is happening, and the pause while somebody works out what you mean is the last pause you want.
One thing we are deliberately not printing is the three-digit emergency numbers. They are on every travel blog, we could not confirm them against a Vietnamese government source, and a wrong number dialed in an emergency is worse than no number. Get them from your hotel's front desk at check-in, and save your consular details before you fly, which our guide to Vietnamese embassies and consulates covers.
What Ten Words Actually Buy You
Here is the honest version. You do not need any of this. You can point at a menu, put numbers into a calculator and complete essentially every transaction in tourist Vietnam without a syllable of Vietnamese, and plenty of travelers do. Measured on getting things done, the return on ten phrases is close to zero.
The return is social, and it is disproportionate. Informants in published fieldwork on daily deference rituals repeatedly cite the proverb "Lời chào cao hơn mâm cỗ," a greeting is worth more than a feast, which ranks the ritual above food. Using a kinship term correctly is not a display of vocabulary. It shows you worked out where the other person sits relative to you and thought it worth getting right. That is why the reaction to "Chị ơi, tính tiền!" is so out of proportion to how hard it was. Two calibrations, then. Verbal thanking is less routinized here than in English, so no thank you for a small courtesy is not rudeness. And a minimal reply is not a snub, since a senior answering a junior with a nod is doing the correct thing for their position, as our guide to asking how are you in Vietnamese explains.
One piece of paperwork before the fun part. Your entry point has to match what you put on your eVisa application, and that mismatch is the small error that becomes a long conversation at the counter, which our Vietnam visa guide covers. Sort it early, then spend the flight practicing "Em ơi."