My friend asked me to help write a note that says “You are appreciated!” in Vietnamese for her nail technician who doesn’t speak English. The task seems simple enough, but not really. The rest of the note is easy, but in order to translate that “You” correctly into Vietnamese, I had to put my friend through a series of questions:

First, is this person older or younger than you? That is the most important answer and will narrow down the pool of possible pronouns by half.

If the answer is “older,” now I need to know HOW much older in relation to your age?

If the person is old enough to be your sibling, then you will refer to them as “anh” if they’re a man or “chị” if they’re a woman.

If the person is old enough to be in the same age group with your parent, now you need to gauge how much older relative to your parents? If they’re younger than your parents, then it’s any variation of “cô”/“dì” for woman or “chú”/“cậu” for man. If they’re older than your parents, then that’s much simpler: “bác” regardless of man or woman.

If the person is old enough to be in the same age group as your grandparents, then it’s “bà” for woman and “ông” for man.

If the answer is “younger,” then that simplifies things quite significantly. They’re either “em” if they’re about sibling’s age or “cháu” if they’re young enough to be your offspring.

….Are you dizzy yet? I haven’t even gotten into how YOU should refer to yourself in relation to the person you’re speaking to. That’s a lesson for another day. And we haven’t even gotten into the different pronunciations of the accents yet. 

And proper pronoun isn’t something you can gloss over in Vietnamese conversations either. If you improperly refer to a “bà” as “chị” or “em”, that is considered a gross act of disrespecting your elders - one of the most vile sins in a Confucian-influenced culture where filial piety is one of the key virtues.

And if you accidentally refer to a “chị” as “bà”, you can get cursed out for 3 generations because you just indirectly wished to shorten someone’s life by untimely aging them.

So if you’re starting on your journey to learn Vietnamese, or just thinking to start, I highly recommend that you give yourself at least a month to master the pronouns. It will only get more difficult from there, but you really can’t advance to higher levels if you don’t get past this first linguistics and cultural pitfall.