Online Vietnamese courses for work with suppliers, plants and clients

Vietnam has about 100 million inhabitants and has become a major manufacturing base. Global electronics, clothing and footwear brands produce there, and many foreign companies run plants or sourcing offices in the north around Hanoi and in the south around Ho Chi Minh City. The trade agreement between the European Union and Vietnam entered into force on 1 August 2020 and aims to eliminate 99 percent of tariffs between the two sides.

The levels follow the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which describes ability on six levels from A1 to C2. They are guide values, and your employer sets the binding requirement.

Large Vietnamese communities live in the United States, especially in California and Texas, and in Australia, Canada, France and Germany. Health and social care staff there serve Vietnamese-speaking clients. Interpreting, for example in healthcare, requires C1 and professional training.

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the language school of the US State Department, places Vietnamese in the third of its four difficulty groups. It plans about 44 weeks of full-time training with 1,012 classroom hours to bring diplomats to confident professional use.

The hours per CEFR level are rough estimates for lessons plus self-study, derived from the FSI figures, because no official hour counts exist for Vietnamese. At five hours a week next to a job, B1 takes about 90 to 130 weeks.

The grammar is not what takes the time, because Vietnamese words never change their form. Working learners spend most of their hours on the six tones, on unfamiliar vowels and on listening. Phone calls and meetings at normal speed are therefore the last skills to settle, and a work-focused course should practise them with recordings from the start.

In Vietnamese, the words for I and you depend on age and relationship, at work as in the family. You address a slightly older colleague as anh (older brother) or chị (older sister), a younger one as em and much older or senior partners as ông or bà. Vietnamese colleagues often ask your age early on, because the answer tells them which form to use.

Formal and business vocabulary comes to a large part from Chinese. These Sino-Vietnamese words are frequent in contracts, letters and meetings.

Vietnamese has three main dialect groups: northern around Hanoi, central around Huế and southern around Saigon, officially Ho Chi Minh City. They share script and grammar and differ in pronunciation, tones and everyday words. Northern speakers use six tones, southern speakers five.

Choose the variety that matches your workplace. For plants and offices around Hanoi, learn the northern variety, which also serves as the standard in national news. For partners around Ho Chi Minh City and for most clients in the overseas communities, learn the southern variety.

Which proof fits depends on who reads it.

• Vietnam's official framework exam: Circular 17/2015 of the Ministry of Education and Training sets six levels, Bậc 1 to Bậc 6, against CEFR levels A1 to C2. A 2021 circular lets universities with Vietnamese studies programmes and state-assigned units run the exams in listening, speaking, reading and writing.
• ACTFL OPI: The Oral Proficiency Interview of ACTFL, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, is a 15- to 30-minute speaking test by phone. It is available in Vietnamese, rates you from Novice to Superior and is used by US employers for staff selection.
• CEFR self-assessment: The grid of the Council of Europe and Europass lets you place yourself on the levels A1 to C2 for each skill on your CV.

A work-focused course starts with a needs analysis, a conversation or questionnaire about your tasks, contacts and difficulties in Vietnamese. These modules usually matter:

1. Introductions and forms of address by age and rank.
2. Numbers, prices and quantities with classifiers, the short words before nouns that show the kind of thing.
3. Formal emails and letters that open with Kính gửi.
4. Phone calls and video meetings at normal speed, with tone practice.
5. The vocabulary of your plant, product or care setting, taken from your own documents.
6. The northern or southern variety, matched to your workplace.

Vietnam uses UTC+7 all year. It is 7 hours ahead of London in winter and 6 in summer, so early mornings in Europe fall in the Vietnamese afternoon and suit lessons before work.