how close is the Vietnamese language to Chinese Mandarin?

7 Comments

1. Brennus says:

   September 18, 2009 at 9:37 am

   Not very close at all. While Vietnamese is replete with Chinese borrowings (loanwords) due to two thousand years of Chinese rule in Annam / North Vietnam, it is not a Sino-Tibetan language like Chinese. It is most closely related to Malayan, Indonesian, the languages of the Philippines and possibly Thai.
2. anji says:

   September 18, 2009 at 9:37 am

   I would say not so close… i speak mandarin chinese and i don’t and can’t understand vietnamese even if i tried, basically, they don’t sound alike
3. adam says:

   September 18, 2009 at 9:37 am

   The are similar as far as being tonal languages and monosyllabic. Their sound structures are quite different as are the tones. Vietnamese has adopted the roman alphabet with diacritic marks whereas Mandarin utilizes traditional Chinese characters. Learning Chinese writing is a separate class all in of itself. I personally like the sound of Vietnamese better. I love Vietnamese food, too. But, that’s just my preference. Grammatically, they are both similar. Good luck!
4. veryhappyforyou says:

   September 18, 2009 at 9:37 am

   quite close, i think these are dialects of each other or fraternal twins
5. Jen says:

   September 18, 2009 at 9:37 am

   You cannot understand one language by knowing the other. The writing is also completely different.
6. GuitarMaster says:

   September 18, 2009 at 9:37 am

   Er.. pretty darn different, I would say!
7. stevethanhdpham says:

   September 18, 2009 at 9:37 am

   by learning ancient vietnamese which is also known as sino vietnamese, the vietnamese language in speech is very different from mandarin chinese, although some words are similar in pronunciation like trung quốc is close to zhong1 guo2 if you know classical chinese which is old ancient chinese script not the same as conversational script like mandarin today, ancient vietnamese structure is more like that here’s an example: 馬 (horse) this would be read to the chinese as ma3 to vietnamese people who can read this classical script as mã, these are pronounced very similarly, however, the vietnamese today do not use mã to mean horse anymore only in ancient poetry, the word used today is ngựa, so for sure, vietnamese and chinese people would not be able to draw this connection, plus in terms of writing system, for the chinese 馬 and ma3; for the vietnamese ngựa