Learn the Top 100 Vietnamese Words: Pronouns, Tense Particles and Two Cards to Fix

Deck IY1219 — Vietnamese Vocabulary: Top 100 Essential Words holds 98 cards drawn from a subtitle frequency list. If you expect numbers, days, colours or food, they are not here: there is not a single one. What the deck actually gives you is the skeleton of a Vietnamese sentence — pronouns, tense particles, classifiers and connectors — and that is a far better thing to learn first than bread and blue.

Ten cards that carry the grammar

Those ten build most of what you will say in week one. là links two nouns (and disappears before adjectives — tôi mệt, not tôi là mệt). đã and sẽ mark past and future, and rồi at the end of a sentence says the event is done. được and bị are the passive pair: được for something good happening to you, bị for something bad. The deck teaches them forty cards apart and never connects them — put them on one card.

Two backs are simply wrong

Card 40 glosses where → nào. It is not. Nào means which; where is đâu. Change that card before it fossilises.

Card 44 glosses those → nhưng, which is the exact same back as card 42 (but → nhưng). The intended word is những, the plural marker. One missing tone mark turned a plural into a conjunction — an accidental but perfect demonstration of why Vietnamese is never typed without diacritics. While you are there: thế (card 35) and thể (card 32) also differ by nothing but their hook.

The pronoun problem

Twelve of the 98 cards are person words: tôi, anh, ta, chúng, cô, em, con, ông, nó, cậu, mình, bà. Each gets one English gloss — "you (informal)", "he (elderly)", "she/miss" — as if Vietnamese had pronouns. It has kinship terms, and they flip direction with who is speaking. Em is you to someone younger and I when you address someone older. Con is child, and also I when you talk to a parent. Anh covers older brother, you to a man your senior, and I to a younger woman.

Study tip: rebuild these as a table with three columns — the term, who it points at when it is the subject, who it points at when it is the object — rather than reviewing twelve isolated cards. Note too that chúng alone is not they; it is a pluraliser (chúng tôi, chúng ta, chúng nó), and Vietnamese has two words for we: chúng tôi excludes the listener, chúng ta includes them. The deck never says so.

What else you get, and what to add

Covered: tôi, không, là, có, đi, làm, biết, nói, nghĩ, thấy, nghe, tìm, tin, cần, nên, đừng, người, con, bạn, mẹ, bố, nhà, việc, chuyện, điều, tên, đầu, giờ, lỗi, và, nhưng, vì, nếu, thì, như, vậy, thế, rất, quá, nhiều, cả, chỉ, thôi, nữa, còn, cũng, lại, trước, trên, vào, ra, lên, từ, tại, về, của, cho, với, để.

Three gaps worth five minutes of card-writing. đang, the present-progressive marker, is missing — the deck gives you two thirds of the đã / đang / sẽ triad. There are no greetings, yet card 71 hands you xin: add xin chào and cảm ơn yourself. And bố and mẹ are the northern forms; if you are heading to Saigon, write ba and má on the same cards.

Search for IY1219 in your library at flip-it.app.

Related: Vietnamese Vocabulary: How to Remember 1000 Words · Memorize Vietnamese Food and Menu Vocabulary