The best AI apps to practice speaking Vietnamese

What you need to practice speaking Vietnamese

Vietnamese takes work. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the 24th hardest for English speakers, at 6,096 effort points. That’s about twice what Spanish takes (2,941), right between Thai (6,184) and Russian (6,067).

The alphabet is the easy part: it’s Latin letters, and the marks on them tell you exactly how to say each word. The grammar is friendly too: no verb endings, no genders, no plural endings. What makes Vietnamese hard is the sound, and the little words that change with who you’re talking to.

• Six tonesA different tone is a different word. Ma is a ghost, má a cheek (and mom, in the south), mà means but, mả is a grave, mã a code, mạ a rice seedling. The marks show you the tone, so reading them is easy. Hearing them, and saying them at full speed, is the hard part. You learn that by hearing it, over and over.
• Anh, chị, em or bác?Vietnamese has no plain “you”. You pick a word by age and relation: anh (older brother) for a man a bit older than you, chị (older sister) for a woman a bit older, em (younger sibling) for someone younger, bác for someone older than your parents. And you call yourself the matching word: talking to an older man, you’re em. Tôi and bạn are the textbook pair, but with someone older, bạn sounds off.
• Ư, ơ, and an ng at the startƯ is an “oo” with your lips spread, as in a smile: thư, a letter. Ơ is close to the “uh” in “duh”: cơm, rice. And words can start with ng, a sound English only has at the end of “sing”: ngon, tasty, and Nguyễn, the most common family name.
• ClassifiersTo count things, a little word goes between the number and the noun: hai con mèo, two cats, ba cái bàn, three tables, một quyển sách, a book (cuốn in the south). Leave it out and it sounds wrong straight away. Everyone gets these wrong at first, so you want them fixed while you talk.
• Lots of Vietnamese you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: Vietnamese videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeA language this hard takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Vietnamese. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Vietnamese YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories written at your level. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itKnowing a word isn’t the same as using it, with the right tone, the right classifier and the right anh or em. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Vietnamese? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the basics with a course like Duolingo (free), Ling or Pimsleur, and come back when you want to talk. Ling and Pimsleur both teach the northern accent, like our teachers.

What it looks like in Vietnamese

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, what kind of word it is, and an example with a translation. Its family and its forms are one tap away. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Vietnamese teachers

Two teachers, both from the north of Vietnam: Minh from Hanoi, and Lan from Sapa, in the mountains of the far north. So both speak with a northern accent, the one most courses teach. Saigon, in the south, sounds different: there mả and mã sound the same, and d and gi sound like a y, not a z. Plenty of words differ too. We don’t have a southern teacher yet.

• 
  Lan Tran

  Sapa · Vietnamese
• 
  Minh Nguyen

  Hanoi · Vietnamese

Input: Vietnamese to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Vietnamese you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Vietnamese YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance. It’s also the way to hear the south: pick a video from Saigon.
• Stories written for youRead writes Vietnamese texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Vietnamese word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Vietnamese on Duolingo: 1.81 million learners, it says. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Jumpspeak · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending