frequency of vowels in usage

[wblostatsea13]

I am wondering if there is a significant difference in frequency of use of vowels in Vietnamese language. This could really help beginning learners like myself who are overwhelmed by the number of phonetic pronunciations and who receive sms messages missing accent marks.

For example, which of the following phonetic pronunciations of "a" used most frequently? Can they be ranked? Are there some that are used so infrequently that they would rarely be seen in common communication? If someone could create a table ranking the vowels as frequent, not frequent, rarely used.

Also it would be helpful to understand if there is a common sequence - a common preceding letter or following letter.

Maybe this has already been done so if someone could point me to a resource that would be great.

á,à,ả,ã,ạ,ă,ắ,ằ,ẳ,ẵ,ặ,â,ấ,ầ ,ẩ,ẫ,ậ

or

é,è,ẻ,ẽ,ẹ,ê,ế,ề,ể,ễ,ệ

or

í,ì,ỉ,ĩ,ị

or

ó,ò,ỏ,õ,ọ,ố,ồ,ổ,ỗ,ộ,ơ,ớ,ờ,� �,ỡ,ợ

or

ú,ù,ủ,ũ,ụ,ư,ứ,ừ,ử,ữ,ự

[waguz]

I completely agree with your request, I would apreciate to know frequency of vowels as well. Hope that someone will aswer to us.

[meomok]

I don't think we can estimate how often one is used more than the others. If you look into a Vietnamese dictionary you would see what I mean because there would be a meaning for cam, a different one for cám, càm, cảm, cạm etc...

We, Vietnamese, understand text messages without the accent sign is because we know the context, just like how English can still be read and understood correctly when wrongly spelled Or how a correct meaning of an English word can still be picked up when it actually has dozens of other meanings - words like go, have, get etc...

Sorry for not being so helpful

[vietnamese4u]

unfortunately, all of vowels you listed are frequent used. So you have to learn them all closely. I hope this link will help you a bit
http://vietnamese4u.wordpress.com/20...-vi%E1%BB%87t/
good luck and remember Vietnamese is not difficult hehe

[ttl]

It may look overwhelming to enumerate all possible vowels. But let's put them into groups and it may be easier.

The first group is the basic one:
a, e, ê, o, ơ, ô, u, ư, i, y

i and y are pronounced mostly the same when stand alone. Notice that I didn't put ă and â in the group: they are close vowels, and we will talk about these later.

Naturally, the basic vowels are most frequent vowels in the language. Noticed that I also put ê, ơ, ô and ư in as basic vowels. The basic vowels represent how open is the mouth (a is more open than u) and how to position the tongue (e vs. ê).

The next group is those with ` (huyền) tonal:
à, è, ề, ò, ờ, ồ, ù, ừ, ì, ỳ

These are basic vowels added with a tonal.

In term of frequency, these two tones forms roughly half of the tones in sentences (not of different words in dictionary, but of words count in daily speeches and texts). These are called "thanh bằng" group.

The rest of the tonals: ', ?, ~, . (as in á, ả, ã, ạ) and the closed vowels form the "thanh trắc" group and they represents roughly 40% of the spoken words. The frequency is in the above order.

Now, let's talk about ă and â. They could only be with a certain ending consonents:
ăc, ăm, ăn, ăng, ăt,
âc, âm, ân, âp, ât

I would study these separately from other vowels. These accounts for less than 10% of the spoken words.

I would agree with the previous posters: trying to learn words most useful to you, rather trying to learn them based on tonals or how frequent a vowel appears.

Linh