Vietnamese conjunctions and negations

We’ve gone through lessons on Vietnamese nouns, Adjectives then Verbs and Adverbs. Those are the most fundamental building blocks of any sentence. In this last lesson of our express course on Vietnamese Grammar, we’ll learn negation and conjunctions.

Negation

The way we Vietnamese saying no is also very similar to the English way. The equivalent of not is không in Vietnamese. To be specific, let’s consider the following example in which a verb is negated.

In the English negative sentence, we need to put does not in front of the verb read. In the Vietnamese translation, we use the word không in the place of does not. This word không would be the main negation word for most cases.

Let’s take another example to see how adjectives are negated. Consider the following:

Here, we again use không in front of the adjective thú vị(“interesting”) to negate it.

The summary of this section?

Conjunctions

Now that we’re aware of most of the basic sentential constructs in Vietnamese, it seems appropriate to learn about conjunctions so that we can connect simple sentences into more complex ones.

Let’s begin with and, which connects ideas that support each other, and but, which contrasts opposite ideas. The equivalent of and and but in Vietnamese are và and nhưng, respectively. Let illustrate their usage with the following two examples.

We can observe in these two examples that và(“and”) and nhưng(“but”) are used exactly in the place of their English counterparts. In the first example, and is used to connect two nouns while but is used in the second example to connect two adjectives. Let’s look at an example where we use and to connect two simple sentences:

Here, the Vietnamese usage of và(“and”) is, again, totally similar to the English usage of and.

There is another frequently used conjunction: or, whose Vietnamese equivalent is hay, which share a very similar usage to or.

The related construct either…or is expressed by the single word hoặc.

Below are a couple of examples to illustrate hay and hoặc.

To conclude what we’ve just learned about Vietnamese conjunctions

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