🇻🇳 Best Vietnamese websites for beginners

Comprehensible-input videos built from everyday scenes around Vietnam, graded beginner to upper-beginner and subtitled, with the whole library free on the site and YouTube and a Patreon for people who want to fund it. Filming in real locations means you pick up the vocabulary you will actually need in a market or a café rather than textbook set-pieces. Much of it is filmed around Đà Nẵng, so expect central and southern speech; the catalogue thins out above upper-beginner.

Thảo has been writing about learning Vietnamese since 2013, and the archive answers the questions beginners actually get stuck on: which dialect to pick, how tone marks behave in speech, why your pronunciation is not landing, and which resources are worth the money. It is free, ad-light and opinionated in a useful way. It is a blog, not a course, and posting has slowed since she left Vietnam, so treat it as a reference library.

A small, focused site that walks absolute beginners through the alphabet, the six tones and basic pronunciation with audio and interactive practice, then adds topic lessons such as greetings and introductions. Tones are the wall every Vietnamese learner hits first, and doing this before any phrasebook saves months of being misunderstood. There is no account or paywall; equally, there is no depth beyond the beginner stage.

NIU's Southeast Asian studies archive includes twenty lessons in spoken Vietnamese, an interactive pronunciation guide covering every consonant, vowel and tone with audio, flashcards, matching exercises and culture pages. The pronunciation guide in particular is still one of the clearest free explanations of the Vietnamese sound system. The site is visibly an early-2000s artefact — frames, font notes, occasional broken media — so use it for the audio reference, not as a modern course.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

A solo-built catalogue of podcasts, channels, textbooks, schools and Anki decks with short descriptions, plus guides on dialects, tones and study order — by far the fastest way to see what exists for Vietnamese, a language whose resources are scattered and hard to find. Free, with no ads or paywall. Some outbound links are affiliate links (disclosed on the site), so read its recommendations as a starting point rather than a verdict.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.