Basic Vietnamese Grammar and Syntax

Vietnamese is an analytical language: grammatical relations are largely expressed through word order, auxiliary words, and context, rather than changes in endings.

What Feels Unfamiliar to Russian Speakers

Verbs typically do not conjugate by person and number. There is no Russian-style case system or adjective agreement by gender/number.

The basic word order is often close to subject + verb + object.

Tense and Aspect

Instead of changing verb forms, context and markers are used, for example:

• đã — already/completion, often associated with the past;
• đang — ongoing process;
• sẽ — future.

They should not be mechanically considered exact equivalents of Russian tenses: temporal information is often already clear from the context.

Negation

The basic marker is không: Tôi không biết — "I don't know".

Questions

The có ... không? structure is typical. Question words (gì, ai, đâu, khi nào, bao nhiêu) often remain in the position of the sentence element they replace.

Adjectives as Predicates

For many properties, a separate verb "to be" is not required: Nhà đẹp — literally "house beautiful".

là is used primarily for identification/classification, not before every adjective.

Classifiers

When counting and referring to nouns, classifiers are frequently used: for example, con for many animals, cái for a broad class of objects, quyển/cuốn for books.

Particles and Context

Conversational naturalness heavily depends on particles (ạ, nhé, nha, đi, thôi, mà, chứ, etc.) and on what can be omitted if the information is clear from the situation.

Connections

These structures serve as material for impromptu speech. A special system of subjects/addressees is described in Forms of Address and Pronouns.