Lesson 1: Topic–comment and basic word order

Vietnamese sentences are often organized around what you are talking about first, and then what you want to say about it. This is called the topic–comment pattern, and it is one of the most important things to notice early on.

At a basic level, Vietnamese can look similar to English. You will often see sentences that resemble Subject–Verb–Object order. However, Vietnamese is not built around the subject in the same way English is. Instead, sentences are frequently shaped by context and topic.

Consider a simple sentence:

Anh ăn cơm.
“He eats rice.”

This looks straightforward. But Vietnamese allows much more flexibility than English. The sentence does not have to be built strictly around “he” as a grammatical subject. What matters more is what the sentence is about.

Very often, Vietnamese brings the topic to the front and then adds a comment about it:

Sách này tôi đọc rồi.
“This book, I’ve already read.”

Here, sách này (“this book”) is the topic. The rest of the sentence is a comment about that topic.

Because context carries so much weight, Vietnamese frequently drops explicit subjects when they are obvious:

Ăn rồi.
“(I/you/he) already ate.”

Who ate is not stated, because the situation already makes it clear. This happens constantly in real Vietnamese.

Word order is therefore more flexible than in English. Elements can move to the front to set context, emphasize something, or clarify what the speaker is talking about. Meaning is not determined by position alone, but by how the sentence fits into the surrounding context.

Xong bài tập hôm nay rồi.
(I) have already done my homework for today.

A useful thing to remember is that Vietnamese sentences are shaped less by fixed rules and more by information flow. You will see many variations in real input. The important part for now is to notice the pattern: topic first, then comment, with context doing much of the work.