VIETNAMESE VS ENGLISH: FUNCTION WORDS

Around 90% of Vietnamese speaking sentences and questions have "strange" "ambiguous" words that we call as Function words, Functors or Particle. They have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but specify the attitude or mood of the speaker***  You can't master them in your speaking in one or two months, but getting to know about them will help you a lot in listening. General speaking, they don't mean anything but make you sound very Vietnamese. Therefore, all you need to do is ignore words which are often located at the end of Vietnamese questions or requesting sentences.

Some commonly-spoken function words include: ơi, vậy, yar, yay, nhen, nhé, với.

It depends on the purpose of what you're going to say. For instance, "vậy", "yậy" or "yạr" are normally put at the end of questions and "với" is put at the end of imperative sentences. "Could you please pass me the phone?" = "Pass me the phone với" or when you want to call someone or attract someone's attention, you should use "ơi". "Mum/dad, please help me = Mum "ơi"/Dad "ơi", please help me!

And it is related to a very difficult but interesting case for people who want to learn Vietnamese of central people. "Chi", "mô", "răng", "rứa", "hỹ", etc.  are local special words that can be used commonly instead of the above words in the middle region of Vietnam. They are confusing but very "unique".

This is my own experience after nearly 10 years teaching Vietnamese and English. They are also common mistakes and opinions from my lovely students. Please source it and put the link at the end if you use any of these ideas as your reference.

***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_word