Vietnamese conjunctions and negations – YourVietnamese
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.
Verb negation:
Shedoesn’tread fastCô ấykhôngđọc nhanh
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:
Negation of adjectives
The storyisn’tinterestingCâu chuyệnkhôngthú vị
Here, we again use không in front of the adjective thú vị(“interesting”) to negate it.
The summary of this section?
Vietnamese Negation
Use không in the place of doesn’t, don’t or isn’t, aren’t, etc.
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.
Examples of and and but
I likethis colorandthat colorTôi thíchmàu nàyvàmàu kiaThis methodissimplebuteffectivePhương pháp nàyđơn giảnnhưnghiệu quả
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:
Connecting simple sentences
His idea is greatandI really like itÝ tưởng của anh ta hayvàtôi thực sự thích nó
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.
Example usages of hay and hoặc
Do youlikethis colororthat color?Anhthíchmàu nàyhaymàu kia?Pleasedoeitherthis questionorthat questionXin vui lònglàmcâu hỏi nàyhoặccâu hỏi kia
To conclude what we’ve just learned about Vietnamese conjunctions
Vietnamese Conjunctions
Use và(“and”), nhưng(“but”), hay(“or”), hoặc (“either…or”)
the way you use them in English.
If you have questions related to this post, please comment below.
