Things to know about Vietnamese
Vietnamese is the language spoken in Vietnam.
Learning Vietnamese Tones
As you work with your Vietnamese lessons, pay special attention to the tones used by the native speakers when they pronounce each word. Different tones can change a word's meaning. In many of the activities, you can listen to words as many times as you need to recognize their tones.
Typing Vietnamese Characters
Vietnamese is written in a variation of the Latin alphabet. In addition to the special characters which are part of the Vietnamese alphabet, Vietnamese also uses a variety of tonal marks to indicate different tones. These tones are an important part of the Vietnamese language. There are two methods for typing these characters.
The simplest method is to use the character suggestions. To do so, type the base character for the letter you want, then select that character from the set of special characters which appears. (If you don't see it, click 
to see more characters, if there are any available.)
The other method is to use the virtual keyboard with the layout set to Vietnamese. (If necessary, you can change the layout by clicking 
and selecting an option in the Keyboard Language menu.)
Locate the character you want on the virtual keyboard, then click on it or press the corresponding key on your physical keyboard. Many of the special characters appear directly on the virtual keyboard and can be typed by pressing the corresponding key. In addition, there is a row of tonal marks in place of some of the number keys. To type one of these tonal marks with a letter, first type the letter, then press the key for the tonal mark. Numbers are available by holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys at the same time.
See Typing Accents and Special Characters for details on both typing methods.