Learn Vietnamese letters and tones by playing

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, which makes it look easy, and then adds seven letters and five tone marks that change the word completely. The marks are the whole game.

Seven letters English does not have

ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư and đ are separate letters, not decorated versions of a, e, o, u and d. ơ and o are as different as o and e; mixing them up gives you a different word. Learning to see them as distinct shapes, rather than "o with a thing", is step one, and it is why the games treat each of them as its own target.

Six tones, five marks

Northern Vietnamese has six tones: level (no mark), sắc (á), huyền (à), hỏi (ả), ngã (ã) and nặng (ạ). Southern speech merges hỏi and ngã, but writing keeps both. The classic demonstration is ma, má, mà, mả, mã, mạ — six words, one spelling skeleton. Any Vietnamese teaching material you meet will assume you can hear and write all of them.

The six tones and how to type them →

Telex, and why typing teaches the tones

Almost nobody types Vietnamese with a dedicated keyboard. They use Telex, where you type the base letter and then a key that applies the mark: as gives á, af gives à, ar gives ả, ax gives ã, aj gives ạ, and doubling gives you the letter variants — aa is â, aw is ă, ow is ơ, dd is đ. Because the tone is a keystroke, typing forces you to decide the tone consciously on every syllable, which is exactly the practice most learners skip.