Part 4 Vietnamese (Hán-Việt)

A large share of the Vietnamese vocabulary was borrowed from Chinese and is known as Hán-Việt (Sino-Vietnamese). Although modern Vietnamese is written in the Latin-based Quốc Ngữ alphabet, each Sino-Vietnamese morpheme corresponds to a Chinese character (chữ Hán / Hán tự) with a regular reading — just as Japanese on-yomi and Korean hanja readings do. This part groups those characters by phonetic component and orders them by the frequency of their readings, so that recognizing one character helps you guess the reading of its relatives. There is no standard published Hán-Việt character list, so the inventory here is 2,150 characters reconstructed as exactly those used by the confirmed Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary (see below). Each character is shown with its Hán-Việt reading(s), an English keyword, and example Sino-Vietnamese words written in Hán tự with their Quốc Ngữ spelling.

Sources & acknowledgements

Hán-Việt readings are from the Unicode Unihan database (kVietnamese) with the Unicode L2/23-251 corrections, supplemented by the WinVNKey Hán-Việt reading databases compiled by Thanh Sơn Lê and Học D. Ngô, which draw on the dictionaries of Thiều Chửu (Hán Việt tự điển, 1943), Nguyễn Quốc Hùng (Hán Việt tân tự điển, 1975), and Trần Văn Chánh (Tự điển Hán Việt, 2000). Word definitions are from vnedict by Paul Denisowski (CC BY 3.0). Character keywords are from Unihan; Han-character word forms are from CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA). Word-frequency ordering uses the Leipzig Corpora Collection (Vietnamese) and the OpenSubtitles frequency list.