Vietnamese Characters On WWW
 

Unfortunately a coding standard  for writing and reading Vietnamese on the Internet still does not exist. There are many sources of Vietnamese software and fonts and converting programs. An excellent Unibrowser from VietGate allows you, for example, to view web pages created with different Vietnamese fonts and converts between them.

However, in order to maintain absolute independence from many kinds of  Vietnamese fonts, I decided to use VIQR standard to write Vietnamese in these online lessons. VIQR is a rule to write Vietnamese just by combining together ASCII characters. If you can manage to learn it, you'll be able to communicate with all other people from Vietnam on the Internet.

As the only one language in South East Asia, which uses Latin characters instead of  ideographic one,
Vietnamese has many charaters identical with English. Characters which do no exist in English are simulated in the following way.

All charaters not listed here are written in the same way as in English.

 

Original Vietnamese	Written in VIQR
	a(
â	a^
	dd
ê	e^
ô	o^
	o* or o+
	u* or u+

Another problem for foreigners learning Vietnamese is different tones of the same word. The accent sign is always put above or below the vowel, whose tone is affected. In VIQR they are put right behind that vowel:
 
 

ma	ma
má	ma'
mà	ma`
	ma?
	ma~
	ma.

 

Well,  that's the way Vietnamese texts will be written in these lessons. Let's try something to check you knowledge in VIQR, what is the original text of this transcript:
 

Co' co^ng ma`i sa('t co' nga`y ne^n kim  .

The answer is here!