• Vietnamese is a tonal language with six distinct tones: no tone (ngang), highest tone (sac), falling tone (huyen), falling and rising tone (nga), up rising tone (hoi), and lowest tone (nang). It is very close to Western music which is based on seven musical notes.
• Vietnamese is a monosyllable language, i.e. each word is only one syllable and has a meaning by itself.
• Vietnamese writing system is Latin-born using Latin alphabet and old Greek marks to express tonal characteristics and diacritical marks like French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.
• Vietnamese language consists of five-thousand year history and culture. For instance, the English word "black" can be translated in different Vietnamese words depending on the meaning such as: den (mau den, black color), hac (dau hac, black oil), huyen (toc huyen, black hair), tham (moi tham, black lips), mun (dua mun, black chopsticks), o (ngua o, black horse; ga o or ga ac, black chicken), muc (cho muc, black dog), etc. Another example is the English word "to bring or to carry" can be: bung, mang, vac, bong, be, quay, ganh, doi, keo, day, loi, xach, etc.
• Vietnamese words never change form. Plural meaning is made by adding other word or words.
• To ask questions, you add word or words, not to reverse or change their position in a sentence.
• Vietnamese literature has many, many poems in different forms. The three distinct poetic groups or forms are as follows.

1. Typical Vietnamese form consists of six/eight (luc bat) words per line with rhyme in the middle and at the end alternately.
2. Chinese form with rhyme at the end. (Tho duong luat: That ngon bat cu, that ngon tu tuyet).
3. Western form with rhyme at the end. (Tho tu do).

• Vietnamese people are poetic by nature. Almost everybody can compose poems occasionally, from the kings and mandarins to encourage their solders to regular illiterate people working in rice fields or at the festivals.

• There are twenty-nine letters in the Vietnamese alphabet: 12 vowels and 17 consonants.
• Vietnamese words are up to six letters long, except the word "Nghieng", the one and only with seven letters.
• When you change position of any word in a sentence, you might change completely its meaning. The five-word sentence "No den sao khong bao", for example, can make up to 120 different sentences following mathematical rule of permutation.
• You can make a short sentence with only one tone mark. For instance, "Dua em, toi khong dua sang song" has no tones at all. Here is a sentence with all highest tone words: "Chac chan, no chien thang truoc nhat" meaning "he sure will win first."
• You can write a short story by using words beginning with the same letter. This is a story with all words starting with letter "B", " Ba ba ban banh bo bong. Ba bo banh bua bai. Ba bi Bay Bien bat bo bot ba bon bua. Ba buon buc biet bao" meaning "Mrs. Ba is selling cakes. She litters too much. She is arrested by policeman Bay Bien and put in jail for three or four days. She is very upset."
• A Story with all words beginning with letter "T" can have more than five hundred words including a short poem.

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