Memorize Vietnamese Food and Menu Vocabulary: 156 Words from Pho to Fish Sauce

The deck is called Vietnamese Travel & Food Vocabulary (code TF2554) on Flip It, but go through the 156 cards and you will not find an airport, a hotel, a bus or a single direction. What you get instead is something more useful and more focused: a complete Vietnamese menu, from the rice at the bottom of the bowl to the sentence you say when you stand up to pay. Study it as a restaurant deck and it is excellent; expect a phrasebook and you will be lost at the bus station.

What is actually on the cards

Roughly 130 of the 156 cards are food and drink, grouped by kitchen logic: rice and noodle dishes, sauces, aromatics, proteins, vegetables, fruit, desserts, drinks. You will learn cơm (rice), cơm tấm (broken rice), xôi (sticky rice), phở bò, phở gà, bún chả, bún bò Huế, bánh mì, bánh xèo, gỏi cuốn, chả giò, bánh tráng, lẩu (hot pot), cháo (congee), canh chua (sour soup), nước mắm, nước chấm, mắm tôm, tương ớt, sả (lemongrass), nghệ, rau răm, tía tô, rau muống, măng, nấm mèo, giá đỗ, thịt heo, thịt vịt, tôm, mực, ốc, trứng vịt lộn, chả lụa, đậu hủ, sầu riêng, măng cụt, chôm chôm, thanh long, nhãn, bưởi, mít, chè, cà phê sữa đá, trà đá and nước mía.

The last 22 cards are the only ones you can speak out loud: thực đơn (menu), hóa đơn (bill), bao nhiêu tiền? (how much?), tôi muốn…, tôi không ăn…, ăn chay (vegetarian), plus the taste words cay, ngọt, chua, mặn, đắng and ngon.

Sample cards

Tip 1: the slashes are a North-South map, so label them

Several backs give two words with a slash and no explanation. They are not synonyms, they are regions. Thịt heo / thịt lợn (pork), thơm / dứa (pineapple), mè / vừng (sesame), rau mùi / ngò (coriander), đậu hủ / đậu phụ (tofu), chả giò / nem rán (fried spring roll): the first form in each pair is what you hear in Saigon, the second in Hanoi. Decide where you are eating, cut each card down to that one word and push the other into the hint field.

Tip 2: two backs to correct before your first review

Catfish → Cá lóc is wrong: cá lóc is snakehead. Vietnamese catfish is cá tra, cá basa or cá trê. And Shallot → Hành is too loose, since bare hành covers onion and scallion generally; the small purple shallot fried into hành phi is hành tím. Fix both while the deck is still new.

How to work through it

Start with the last block, not the first: those 22 cards give you ordering, price and politeness, and they make every food noun immediately usable. Then take the food sections at 20 cards a day, one section per sitting — about a week in total. Best drill: read a real street-food menu aloud, since the deck teaches exactly the words printed on it.

Search for TF2554 in the Flip It library. If you want the grammar and pronouns that hold these nouns together, work through the companion guide to the first 1000 Vietnamese words.