Vietnamese used to look very different… 

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In ancient times, China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan all used the same type of writing (Traditional Chinese characters). That means, if we don't understand each other verbally, we can still communicate through writing. Very interesting.

back when i was 5, my grandad often tried to teach me chữ nôm cause he used to teach it to people but when the france colonized vietnam,it was removed from school and my grandad became unemployed.And i hated chữ nôm because is too hard to learn and study so i avoided when ever my grandad tried to teach me.Later i got told that my grandad was litterally the only person from my homeland that knew chữ nôm and he wanted to teach me it because he wanted to pass it down to the next genaration which me :(

A nicely detailed (and entertaining) description of Chữ Nôm! And congratulations on getting sponsored!

I am fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese and now I live in Vietnam learning Vietnamese. Sometimes when I don't know a word in Vietnamese I say the Cantonese word and more often than not people actually understand what I mean :D

Trước học văn thấy nhắc đến chữ Nôm, nhưng nhờ video này mình mới thật sự hiểu và được thấy trông nó ra sao :)) Cảm ơn bạn vì video bổ ích!!

Spent seven years learning and mastering Chinese, swore I'd never learn another language but now I want to learn Viet just for this fun stuff.

I get excited whenever I see a new linguistic video about a Sinosphere language (CJKV). It's interesting that Vietnamese, unlike Korean and Japanese, didn't develop a native phonetic script, but continued with the logographic type.I think that's mostly because of language structure.Japanese and Korean are agglutinative, so they need phonetic script to represent particles, suffixes, conjugations etc, while Vietnamese is analytical, same like Chinese, which means no inflection, and logographic writing just fits well into analytic languages, so no need for a phonetic script.

Never expected someone would explain Vietnamese History in such a way in English :0 +1000000000000 respect!

Mình rất cảm ơn bạn vì đã làm ra video này. Cách mà bạn truyền đạt rất tích cực T.T. Bởi vì trước giờ mình rất buồn khi tưởng rằng dường như chỉ có mình là thích tìm hiểu về chữ nôm trong khi bạn bè trang lứa thì lại chẳng biết một chút gì cả, thậm chí đôi khi còn đánh đồng với chữ hán. Cũng không trách được, thời đại bây giờ mà học chữ Nôm thì chẳng có gì để thực dụng trong xã hội cả nên tự khắc chẳng còn mấy ai quan tâm nữa, từ đó sinh ra nhiều lỗ hổng kiến thức với những quan niệm sai lầm. Thực sự coi xong video của bạn phần nào trong mình cảm thấy ấm lòng hơn hẳn. Những thông tin mà bạn đã chia sẻ sẽ cực kì hữu ích đối với những người mới bắt đầu tìm hiểu về chữ Nôm hoặc là chưa có kiến thức căn bản (Tất nhiên là đối với những ai biết tiếng Anh). Hơn hết, cách trình bày của bạn rất dễ hiểu, mặc dù là tóm tắt nhưng vẫn đầy đủ. Cách dẫn của bạn cũng rất dễ thương và hài hước nữa! 🥺

Hi, I'm a Vietnamese Canadian and I find your videos very helpful and informative. It's nice connecting a bit with my culture. If you don't mind could you expand on the Vietnamese texts that you said Vietnamese people know and what they're about, and maybe the meanings behind them? it is hard to find complete translated works here. Thank you.

This is interesting. Thank you for making this. I will point out that for someone who can read classical Chinese, we can read more of that poem example than you first state. 如果 does mean if in modern Chinese, but in classical Chinese it can be read "as like a fruit" too, and that's how I initially understood it. It's not a reflection necessarily of Vietnamese grammar per se, as classical Chinese would have done the same. Where it differs is that the kind of fruit "jackfruit" would of had the descriptor before not after... ie. maoguo instead of quamit, as in Vietnamese. Additionally, while I have never seen the character em specifically, I immediately knew it meant "my" because classical Chinese uses "ang" 俺 as the pronoun historically, and many Chinese dialects today still do. The female distinction, however, I have not seen before. Again, the thing that is different is the possessive pronoun goes after the subject in Vietnamese, whereas in Chinese it would precede it. (ie. My body versus Body mine). For me as a classical Chinese reader, I initially understood "Body mine like a fruit 'blah tree' blah 'another blah tree'. The hardest one for me was the character tren. My initial guess was something like 'besides' or 'following'. I was focused on the bottom 连 part, and not the 上 on the top. Nonetheless, this was great. Thank you for sharing.

This is really interesting because Korean had something very similar between 7th and 10th century AD (unified Silla period). It was called Hyangchal, used to write a collection of Hyangga- many of them Buddhist poems written by monks at the time. Similar to how you describe the Chữ Nôm system, Hyangchal uses homophonic Chinese characters for native Korean words (including grammar structures), and very occasionally uses Chinese loan words (back in the day they used more native Korean words than now). There are basically 0 resources for the average person (except for an inaccurate recording by a Japanese RU-vidr) and virtually all Koreans can't read it (even scholars have to make educated guesses). There are also virtually no accurate English translations on the internet as many of these western scholars do not have the cultural understanding behind these poems. I found this fascinating, like you did with Chữ Nôm, and created this channel to explore the reconstructions of this language. Great video!

One thing to note: Chữ quốc ngữ is actually the product of Portuguese missionaries.

One the things that got me really interested in Vietnamese was chữ nôm! Thank you for sharing more about this awesome script, it's a shame that not more people know about it, much less know how to read it.

"em" can also means 'younger' as in age as a bro, sis, and the same age as them at any gender, despite it has a 女 radical. Remind me the english words 'girl' in Middle Ages, it used to refer for youngs in any gender, at the time 'boy' were derogatory as a servants or slave.

After learning japanese for about a year. I was pleasantly surprised to find out just how much our languages had in common since it made learning chinese loan words significantly easier. From there, I started looking into other languages in the sinosphere and chữ Hán Việt. After countless hours of sleeping or slacking off in Ngữ Văn I never thought me of all people would ever take an interest in the subject. I never knew history and geography could have such a massive impact on so many cultures/languages. It's really nice to see someone else who had the same experience as you. Also thanks for recommending rikaikun that thing is a life saver

The Jackfruit poem really hits different when you understand Vietnamese 😂

As a Chinese I must say, you foresaw my reaction 100% in 1:20 😂 that is literally me trying to understand the sentence by recognising only the Chinese characters sometimes I have the same experience with reading Japanese

This was so easy to understand as i am korean and basically it was like this in korea even after we made our own alphabet. Japan also does something similar but slightly different

Ahhhh, that is gorgeous! Thanks a lot for a video! I’ve studied Chinese and watched some short videos about Vietnamese. So cool to find out about this writing system.

Amazing, this is the kind of content creator we need nowadays

Dude, this is brilliant work! Thank you so much for the excellent and informative video! You have no idea how precious and valuable this is to the preservation of Vietnamese culture and history. I wish there will be and App for this Chữ Nôm dictionary by inputing the Vietnamese charectors. Please keep up the great work! Very much appreciated! Peace!

This was far more entertaining and educational than I expected... Thank you for doing this.

Such a great channel I have just discovered. I wanted this video for so long. Thank you.

As a true vietnamese, i can confirm i understand every single thing this man says

I've just watched 2 videos of Keit for the past 2 days and I love them all really love your content 🥰

if im not wrong some Japanese Kanji was adopted by sound just kinda like this as well. Very educated and entertaining video as usual, love your work here!

Really like your videos, never imagined that vietnamese could be so interesting and rich, thanks

It’s great finding people around the world how have the same interests as you 😢

Well, the first time i came to this channel was when i see u post the video “thought on Cantonese as a Viet” i didn’t think u would go serious with the language cuz i dont see u upload video very often. This video proof me wrong by showing ur effort doing the research on the dead language that me myself - a vnm born on vn land cant even read that language. I shall give u my subscribe and wish u can forever make me surprise with every video u upload. ❤ for u

One thing that I thought: since there are too many Chu Nom to make it practical to revive it, wouldn't it at least be used as determinatives for those homophones? The Korean still use Hanja for this in some occasions, writing first the phonetic Hangeul and then writing the Hanja there to show the meaning. I think it would be neat to see a revival of the Vietnamese Chu Nom for such occasions. Thank you for the great work you pit into this video, you gained a new subscriber with it.

It's interesting how if you swap the order of the nouns and adjectives you get grammatically correct Chinese. Like Chinese it appears that Vietnamese also excludes the use of definite and indefinite articles. As a Chinese speaker, this makes Vietnamese feel very familiar, and possibly easier to pick up.

I find that the closest Chinese language I know of to Vietnamese is Cantonese because of its tonality and similar pronunciation. When I visited Hanoi with a little bit of prior Vietnamese language experience, I found myself understanding about 20-30% of native Viet conversations. I'm sure there are other Chinese dialects close to the Vietnamese border that sound even more similar though.

Great video, and funny too! I always wanted to know more about this subject! Thank you for making this video ❤

Never saw any better explanation on chữ Nôm. Really specific in linguistic knowledge yet compound enough for a non linguist to understand. Thank you, keep it going. You deserve a Ph.D.

Tôi là người Việt Nam tôi rất cảm kích vì bạn làm ra được video này (Cười thật to😂😂😂😂😂)

My grandfather used it, he used it for poetry and writing among his peers.

Very well made! The only suggestion I would have is to briefly elaborate at the end of the video the comment you made at the start about very few oeople today knowing how to read the characters. I would have been interested in hearing just a little more about that. But this is a great video, and I would enjoy watching more of your videos.

One of the reason why chữ nôm wasn't included in the curriculum is because after the declaration of independence in 1945, most of the country was illiterate, and you cannot grow a country if no one knows how to read. So a program called "Bình dân học vụ" was formed, which basically taught people how to read latin style vietnamese (chữ quốc ngữ) since it's much more easier and systematic to read them.

Thanks for making this video! It's always great to see more stuff about Chữ Nôm. Studying it ended up being my COVID hobby. It's kind of sad that it's fallen to the wayside: besides the hundred years of literature written in it, Chữ Nôm (and Han Nôm) provide a lot of neat windows into the development of the language, give context for how Viet fits among the CJKV languages, and provides additional perspective on how different writing systems can work, especially coming from knowing only Latin writing systems. I remember when I first was learning it I was delighted to see another dimension of information that could be encoded in a logographic system, and it seemed to fit so well with Vietnamese (which now I come to realize might be due it being an analytical language).

i am happy to know that very tropical fruits "jack fruits" has a character, which consists of 木(tree) and 蔑(contempt). i suppose they may use 蔑 to express some disappointment when they cut open it to find there were mostly non edible cotton there.

Thank you. Very detailed and informative.

Great and informative video about chu nom. Thank you

Imagine having to learn a completely separate language just to be able to write anything down. This was the European experience with Latin. It made the bar to literacy far too high.

I think being logoraphic isn't necessarily an advantage over chữ quốc ngữ linguistically. It's true that chữ Nôm provided more context per word thus allowing info to be exchanged more efficiently and effectively. However, by needing more words/sentences to provide the full context, simple sentences in chữ quốc ngữ can be more easily turned into wordplays, puns, and double entendre even in written form. This imho makes our current language much more witty, colourful, and harder to master. Take the example sentence of your video: "Thân em như quả mít trên cây" (I don't know anything about chữ Nôm so I trust your translation) In chữ Nôm, the word "em" alone allows the reader to know that this is a feminine, first-person pronoun. On the other hand, in chữ quốc ngữ, the sentence alone could be used by either a man/woman addressing themselves or a man/woman addressing another man/woman because "em" is not inherently gendered nor first-person.

You explained the chữ nôm too good, bruh I didn't even into it before but I do now. Love this content ❤

Thanks for the great video and a lot of work.

xin cho hỏi bạn là youtuber người Việt à lần đầu thấy youtuber là người Việt mà dám làm content tiếng Anh cho cả thế giới xem đáng nể !!

Việt Nam, Trung Quốc, Đài Loan, Hongkong, Nhật Bản và Hàn Quốc có nền văn hoá tương đồng. Điều đó được thể hiện qua các kiến trúc cổ, văn hoá gia đình và chữ viết. Có lẽ Trung Quốc là cái nôi của nhóm 6 quốc gia này. Bởi hầu hết chữ viết cổ của các quốc gia đều là chữ phổn thể. Sau này có Việt Nam và Hàn Quốc là dùng một bộ chữ mới hoàn toàn, còn Nhật Bản tuy cũng có bộ chữ mới nhưng vẫn còn nhiều chữ giống chữ Trung giản thể ngày nay.

Very interesting video! Crazy how languages develop

thank you bro for making video about my country's history, nice content, keep it up

In Vietnam, we are a group trying to unify characters that have the same meaning so that they are unified. And grow widely among the public. Aim to restore Nom script in Vietnam.

As Chinese myself, this is so interesting, i want to learn more characters that is not in mandarin but looks really similar

Omg that is so cool!! When I used to see words in Chữ Nôm, I would thought either it's very difficult Chinese or 亂碼, I never even stopped to think I could be a complete different language and it makes so much sense.

Very amazing video about Chu Nom!

very informational and interesting you make great videos!

Vietnamese, please bring back the Chu Nom alphabet!

Thank you for your video ❤😊

This is so interesting! Thank you

As a HongKonger, I already know that a lot of languages has used the base Traditional Chinese writing system in their language developing process, but I never knew how, and was kind of curious, now I know, it’s got me into thinking about learning Vietnamese :D btw your Cantonese is so good! Good job on the video!

Hey a fellow user of the Hán Nôm dictionary! :D I only use it to check all meanings of specific Kanji characters for my translation work though...

Damn this channel is gonna blow up some day. Im subscribing!!

Yoooo, I think I like your video!! Thank you so much!!

Nhiều bạn trẻ giờ còn tưởng ông bà ta nói được cả tiếng Trung Quốc chỉ vì đọc được chữ Hán 🤣 ông bà ta tạo nên chữ nôm cũng bằng nguyên tắc lục thư của Hứa Thận (chỉ thiếu tượng hình), còn lại hình thanh, hội ý, giả tá, chỉ sự, chuyển chú đều có cả.

Omg, my first language is cantonese and i've been looking for people who study the relationships between our languages. Instant subscribe

Bro the drawings really enhance the learning experience. I like me drawings of stickmen because you can tell whoever made this actually put time into drawing. The simplicity makes it look cute in a way. Especially that one shot when they are holding up the chraicters made by Vietnam, Korea, and Japan.

nice video! I have always wonder what writing was like in the past

this video is 1000 times better than studying history in school

Cảm ơn admin rất nhiều vì đã làm ra video này, dù là tóm tắt nhưng vẫn đầy đủ và rất dễ hiểu. Love from Việt Nam 🇻🇳

A helpful and informative video. OMG!!!

very informative video. Keep it up !

Vietnamese is one of the hardest languages i ever tried to learn .but Chinese with its characters is harder if you only count reading and writing .but middle Vietnamese would be one of the hardest languages ever for me. apart from maybe some native american languages.

Delightful video! It's a bit unfortunate that the majority of Vietnam do not even know of the existence of Chữ Nôm, & those who know of it find the system to be utterly perplexing. I'm from Hong Kong, & there seem to be a growing number of Chinese using this historical script as an aid to learn Vietnamese. I guess it's not as daunting for Chinese (or even Japanese familiar with kanji) to analyse & break apart Chữ Nôm when we put in the time. & with all the information readily available on the net nowadays, Chữ Nôm is actually an excellent tool for those familiar with the phono-semantic radicals to memorise native Vietnamese lexicon. Obviously I have no problem with the Sino-Viet vocabulary with my mother tongue being Cantonese (with a bit of guessing, Quoc Ngu literally looks like Cantonese romanised, plus my major was Japanese & linguistics), but native Viet are a bit difficult for me to memorise in my advanced age so Chữ Nôm functions as a fantastic mnemonic. Regarding a Chữ Han 腋 used for native "nách"... I believe nách is from the same root as "dich"... so it's not using a Chinese character for a Vietnamese word, but rather, it's a variant of scholarly "dich" and colloquial "nách". Like NOSE and NASAL in English (Yes "nasal" is from Latin, but it's clearly from the same Indo-European root). 筆, 房, 茶 are other examples (I believe there's a list on Wiki). Same as 巾 can/ khan... LOL the same word. Vietnam is a big country, there were (& are still) many dialectal variations, or fossilised pronunciations from early eras that became thought of as native Vietnamese words when they were also from earlier forms of Chinese (again, examples in English: yard & gard(en), candle & chandelier). Even the ridiculous Chữ Nôm character for "Chữ Nôm"... it clearly is just 字南! Yes, the *rules* say the you'd *have to* read it official as standard Sino-Viet "Tu Nam" (but OBVIOUSLY it's the same as "Chu Nôm!!!") As you've studied Japanese, you would know that 1 kanji will have both a Sino-Japanese pronunciation (on'yomi) AND a native Japanese reading (kun'yomi). Same with Hokkien. Even other Chinese languages will sometimes assign 2 or 3 readings to a Hanzi. 樂 can be [ngok] in Cantonese, Viet [nhac], Japanese [gaku], Korean [ak], Mandarin [yue] or Cantonese [lok], Viet [lac], Jap [raku], Kor [nak], Mandarin [le]... so I believe some Chu Nom characters were quite redundant. A theory is that the Vietnamese elite deliberately made Chữ Nôm more complex than it should so that the peasants would remain illiterate, uneducated & thus powerless. Also, when you were breaking down Jackfruit, one of my favourite Vietnamese poems (& a great Chữ Nôm primer) by poetess Hồ Xuân Hương 胡春香 (1772-1822), 如果 is definitely not modern Chinese "if" It should be broken down as classical Chinese 如 "as" "like" ...then 果 is "fruit" "My body is like a jackfruit (hanging) on a tree." But yeah, keep up the good work! Love your content that shows off a healthy curious mind.

Hay quá dậy! Ủng bạn làm nội dung như thế này lắm nheeee!

this thought me how to say a word in Tiếng việt, like Chữ Nôm and Chữ Quốc Nôm and other stuff love this story, it make alot of sense! Cảm ơn Keit Stuff

I thought you were Vietnamese at first, your pronunciation is quite impressive to me

Chữ Nôm uses Chinese characters to write Vietnamese, while chữ Quốc Ngữ uses Latin characters to write Vietnamese.

Very impressive channel, keep it up bro. You knew many languages

i love your videos so much!!!!

Learnt a lot through this video, even consider to study chữ Nôm in the future now, linguistics is just a fun field to explore to me. One thing i want to be sure of tho, so the sound (the phonetic aspect) of Vietnamese has always been this way since chữ Nôm, right? As in we only change the way we write, not how we speak, so hypothetically, if a modern Vietnamese traveled back in time, he could still speak and be understood, just couldn't write?

As someone who speaks three languages including Mandarin Chinese, I found this most interesting! Keep it out!

Didn't know chữ Nôm was that badass. Thanks for your info.

Wow very informative vid, i never knew how chữ nôm came to be

As a Chinese speaker learning Vietnamese, this was very interesting to watch

Very informative, thank you very much. I’ve been very curious how Chữ Nôm different with Chinese. Ironically, now I am learning about the root of Vietnamese language via English, by Latin alphabets which are familiar by Chữ quốc ngữ, haha

insightful video ❤

Great video!! Keep it up

Native Vietnamese here, I find your vids super helpful. Keep it on bud❤

1 số ít người Việt thế hệ trẻ hiện nay cũng đang tìm tòi và học hỏi chữ Hán Nôm

Excellent video! I've actually been learning how to write Chữ Nôm and Classical Chinese in my spare time. Good to see you promoting Chữ Nôm. It's sad not a lot of people are able to read it anymore.

If ever a language needed Hangulisation it’s this one.

The script that was first used by the ancient Vietnamese before the northern influence was Khoa Dau. Currently, this script is still in the northern relics of Vietnam. Have you heard of it?

I really like your videos about Vietnamese language, you did make videos about Chữ Nôm that even Vietnamese like me don’t know. I hope you can make more video like this 👍

This is such a cool video! I didn’t know any of this

Question: Do you happen to know if Khải Thư fonts that I can type every Chữ Nôm characters? I've used both Han-Nom Kai and Hán-Nôm Khải but is there any other variant of Khải Thư fonts that I'm missing?

At 5:45 I think you made a mistake. The 1000 years of Northern Domination ended in 938 with Ngo Quyen's victory on Bach Dang river. From then till 1407 (Ming Conquest), Viet Nam was independent and not under rule by China.

I learned something today, thanks !

As a native Cantonese speaker, I deeply appreciate learning other languages. Keep making more videos!

didn’t know that Korean or Japanese did the similar, as a native traditional Chinese user I found this creation super interesting.