The word for "you" depends on who is asking

Vietnamese grammar has no tenses to conjugate, no genders and no plural endings, and once the tones are in your ear the sentences are short and logical. What takes longer is everything the grammar asks you to decide about the person in front of you — and what happens to the tones when a native speaker is not slowing down for you.

Pronouns are family words, and you choose them by age. There is no neutral "I" and "you": both depend on how old the other person is relative to you. A man a little older is anh, a woman a little older chị, anyone younger em. Someone around your parents' age is cô if a woman and chú if a man, someone older than your parents bác, and the elderly ông and bà. The pairing runs both ways: speaking to an anh you call yourself em, and to a cô or a bác you call yourself cháu, niece or nephew. Tôi is the neutral "I", correct and a little cool.

The tones blur at speaking speed. In conversation tones run into one another and soften, and sentence-final particles — nhé, à, ạ — add a melody of their own on top. It is normal to understand a careful speaker and lose a market stallholder completely. Ask for từ từ, slowly, and listen for the shape of the sentence rather than each word.

Nouns come with counting words. You do not say "two coffees" but "two glass coffee": hai ly cà phê. Animals take con, most objects cái, and a baguette in the south is một ổ bánh mì. Get the classifier wrong and you are still understood; leave it out of a number and you sound abrupt.

Prices drop their thousands. Nearly every price runs into the tens or hundreds of thousands of đồng, so nobody says the thousands. Menus write 35k; a stallholder may say ba mươi lăm or just ba lăm and mean 35,000. The word for thousand is nghìn in the north and ngàn in the south, and a million is triệu. Check every note as you hand it over: the blue 20,000 and the blue 500,000 are easy to confuse in a dim street.

Six tones, and an alphabet that only looks familiar

Vietnamese is written in Latin letters, and that is the trap. The alphabet, quốc ngữ, was worked out by Catholic missionaries in the seventeenth century and became the national script in the twentieth, so every sign in Hà Nội can be sounded out — and almost everything you sound out the English way will be wrong. The marks are not decoration. A hook or hat on the letter changes the vowel; a mark above or below changes the pitch. Northern speech has six tones, the south folds two of them together into five, and a syllable on the wrong one is simply a different word. Add consonants that do not do what they say — a bare d that is a z or a y, a crossed đ that is the ordinary d — and finals like the t of Việt or the c of Bắc that close the mouth and release nothing.

Start with the tune, not the letters. Take the five phrases on this page and copy the melody of each one before you worry about the vowels: in xin chào the first syllable stays level and the second falls; in cảm ơn the first syllable dips and the second stays level. Say each syllable as its own clean beat, because that is how the language is written and how it is heard. And keep your phone handy. Vietnamese spelling records every tone, so anything you cannot get across aloud can be typed or shown, and it will be read exactly as you meant it.

Six things that catch visitors out

Chopsticks never stand upright in a bowl. Rice with chopsticks planted in it looks like the bowl set on an altar for the dead, with incense sticks rising from it. Rest them across the bowl or on the holder, and don't tap the rim with them to call for more. When eating together, dishes are shared from the middle and it is a kind gesture to pick a good piece for the oldest person at the table before helping yourself.

The wet towel and the peanuts are not free. In many local restaurants a sealed packet of cold towel, khăn lạnh, and a plate of peanuts or spring rolls appear unasked. Open them and they go on the bill, usually for a few thousand đồng; leave them sealed or untouched and they don't. It is a system, not a scam, but it is worth knowing. The same goes for the bottles of water left on the table in some places: drink one and it is counted.

The bill comes when you call for it. Nobody brings it unasked, and you can sit as long as you like. When you are ready, catch someone's eye and say em ơi, tính tiền (ting TYEN), the bill please. At street stalls you often pay on the way out, to whoever is cooking.

Tết closes the country. The Lunar New Year, usually in late January or February, is the biggest event of the year. Workers go home to their families, trains and flights sell out weeks ahead, prices rise in the days before, and for several days afterwards many restaurants, shops and offices are shut. Before the holiday the cities fill with branches of peach blossom in the north and yellow mai blossom in the south, and children receive lucky money, lì xì, in red envelopes. Travelling then is possible, and moving, but plan it.

The little fires on the pavement are offerings. Shops and homes keep an altar, and on the first and fifteenth days of the lunar month you will see people burning paper money and paper goods, vàng mã, in metal bins on the pavement for their ancestors. Walk around, don't step over, and never help yourself to the fruit on an altar, however casual the setting.

Your hotel will want your passport. Accommodation has to register foreign guests with the local authorities, so reception may keep your passport for a few hours or ask to hold it for your stay. This is ordinary practice, not a warning sign; a photocopy of the photo page and visa in your bag is useful while it is behind the desk.

English in the Old Quarter, Vietnamese everywhere else

In the places most visitors spend their first days — the Old Quarter of Hà Nội, the tailors of Hội An, District 1 in Sài Gòn — English goes a long way. Hotel staff, tour desks, café baristas and a great many students speak it well. Step one street back, onto the plastic stools of a breakfast quán, into a covered market or onto the back of a motorbike taxi, and it thins out fast. Many older people and street vendors, and most people outside the cities, speak only Vietnamese.

That is where pointing, a calculator and a few words carry you. Food is the easy part: most street kitchens cook one dish, so the only questions are how many and how much, and the menu in this kit covers both. Directions are harder, because place names are only recognised with their tones. Keep the address of your hotel written out in full, diacritics included, and show it rather than say it. The ride-hailing apps help here too, since they take the destination in writing and fix the fare before you set off.

Expect to be noticed. Children shout hello from doorways, and you will hear yourself called Tây, literally "Western", which is description rather than insult. A xin chào back, with a nod, turns a stare into a smile. The effort counts for more than the accuracy: a stallholder who has just heard you mangle a tone will often laugh, correct you once, and then go out of her way to help.

Calling across the room, and the little word at the end

Politeness lives at the ends of sentences. Because the grammar never changes, Vietnamese marks respect with small words around the edges. Dạ in front of an answer is deference; ạ on the end of a sentence is its partner, and cảm ơn chị ạ, thank you to an older woman with that final ạ, is about as polite as a visitor ever needs to be. In the north the respectful yes is vâng; in the south it is dạ on its own.

Getting attention means calling someone by their family title. In a restaurant or café you call the staff with em ơi (em UH-ee), literally "younger sibling!", because the people serving are usually young. It is normal, not rude, and saying it a little loudly across a busy room is how it works. For an older stallholder it becomes chị ơi or cô ơi. Guessing someone's age generously older is always the safer mistake.

Age is asked about openly, because the grammar needs it. Someone you have just met may ask how old you are within a minute, and it is not prying: they cannot choose the right pronoun until they know. Answering lets them place you, and they will often then tell you what to call them. Marital status and children often follow for the same reason, as a way of fitting you into the family map.

Refusing is gentle and sideways. To turn down a seller, không, cảm ơn with a smile and a small shake of the hand is enough; thôi, roughly "never mind", closes the matter. At a meal, refusing food outright sounds ungracious, so the polite form is no rồi, I'm already full. You will also be refused this way: a vague "maybe later" or a laugh usually means no, and pressing for a straight answer costs the other person face.

From the hill country to the Delta

Vietnam is long and thin, and its speech changes as you travel down it. The Hà Nội accent is the one heard on national news: d, gi and r all sound like a z, and all six tones are kept apart. In Sài Gòn — officially Hồ Chí Minh City since 1976, still Sài Gòn in everyday speech — those letters become a y, the tones settle into five, and final n and ng blur together. Vocabulary shifts too: a bowl is bát in the north and chén in the south, a glass cốc or ly, pork thịt lợn or thịt heo, a piece of fruit quả or trái.

The centre has the strongest accent of all. Huế, the imperial capital of the Nguyễn emperors until 1945, speaks with a low, rolling melody that even other Vietnamese find hard, and uses its own everyday words: mô for where, tê for there, răng for why and rứa for like that. Its cooking has a name for being the hottest and the most fiddly in the country — bún bò Huế and the little steamed bánh bèo both come from here.

South of Sài Gòn the Mekong spreads into the Delta, a flat green country of canals, orchards and rice. Life runs on the water — the floating market at Cái Răng outside Cần Thơ starts before dawn, with each boat hoisting a sample of what it sells on a pole. Southern speech here is broad and relaxed, and there are long-established Khmer communities with their own temples and language.

In the northern mountains, around Sa Pa and up through Hà Giang to the Chinese border, Vietnam's ethnic minorities make up much of the population. The country officially recognises fifty-four ethnic groups, and in the highlands Hmong, Dao, Tày and others speak their own languages at home. Vietnamese is the shared second language, so a market there may be conducted in it carefully and slowly on both sides.

Vietnam, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• The Đồng Văn plateau in Hà Giang is a sea of grey limestone pinnacles, farmed by pouring soil into pockets between the rocks so maize can be planted in them.
• Vietnamese barely uses I and you: you address people with family words, so a stranger about your own age is anh or chị, older brother or sister, and you call yourself em.
• Cà phê sữa đá is built on sweetened condensed milk rather than fresh milk, a habit left over from the days when dairy was almost impossible to keep in the tropics.
• Bún bò Huế comes from the old imperial city and is built on lemongrass and fermented shrimp paste, making it a good deal spicier and more pungent than phở.
• Most Vietnamese coffee is robusta grown in red basalt soil in the Central Highlands around Buôn Ma Thuột, which is what makes the cup so dark and bitter-sweet.
• Bánh chưng is sticky rice, mung bean and pork wrapped in green dong leaves into a neat square and boiled overnight, its shape standing for the earth.
• The north has four seasons and a genuinely cold, damp winter, while the south has only two, wet and dry, and stays warm the year round.
• The saola, a horned forest animal so rarely seen that it is nicknamed the Asian unicorn, was unknown to science until it turned up in the Vũ Quang forests in 1992.
• Thương is a kind of love English has no word for: not romance but a protective tenderness born of caring for someone, felt for a parent, a child or an old friend.
• The áo dài is a long silk tunic slit to the waist over loose trousers, and the cut worn today was designed in Hanoi in the 1930s by tailors borrowing from Paris.
• Bánh xèo, a turmeric-yellow rice crêpe folded over pork and prawns, is named for the xèo, the sizzle the batter makes as it hits the hot pan.
• Quan họ, the love songs of Bắc Ninh, are sung unaccompanied by pairs of men and women who answer each other verse for verse, and UNESCO lists them as heritage.
• Bát Tràng, a village on the river outside Hanoi, has been throwing and firing ceramics for centuries, and its blue-and-white ware is still made workshop by workshop.
• Mỹ Sơn is a valley of brick towers raised by the Chăm kingdom over the course of a thousand years, and how the bricks were bonded so tightly is still not fully understood.
• Hạ Long Bay is a drowned limestone landscape of roughly 1,600 islands and pillars, most of them too sheer to stand on, rising straight out of the sea.
• Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, a system called chữ Quốc ngữ that missionaries pieced together and printed as a dictionary in Rome in 1651.
• Before the alphabet, Vietnamese was written in chữ Nôm, characters built out of Chinese ones, and the country's best-loved poem, Truyện Kiều, was composed in it.
• Đà Nẵng's Marble Mountains are five marble-and-limestone hills named for the five elements, metal, wood, water, fire and earth, and hollowed out with caves turned into shrines.
• Đông Hồ folk prints are cut on woodblocks and coloured with dyes ground from leaves, charcoal and rust, on paper brushed with crushed seashell so the surface glitters.
• Đồng bào, the word for one's fellow countrymen, means from the same womb, after the legend of a dragon lord and a mountain fairy whose hundred children hatched from one sac.
• The red-shanked douc, a monkey with maroon stockings, white whiskers and a gold face, lives in the forest of Sơn Trà on the headland above Đà Nẵng.
• The letter đ, with a bar through it, is a separate letter of the alphabet sounded like an English d, while a plain d is pronounced z in the north and y in the south.
• Bún chả is a Hanoi lunch: charcoal-grilled pork patties dropped into a bowl of sweet-sour broth, with cold rice noodles and herbs dunked in by the handful.
• At the Cái Răng floating market near Cần Thơ, boats advertise by hanging a sample of their cargo, a pineapple or a bunch of greens, from a tall bamboo pole called a cây bẹo, readable from across the water.
• The country pinches so narrow in the middle that near Đồng Hới you can cross from the coast to the Lao border in about fifty kilometres.
• The Vietnamese alphabet has no F, J, W or Z: the f sound is spelled ph, and French words were respelled to fit, so savon became xà phòng for soap and gare became ga for a railway station.
• Cà phê trứng, egg coffee, was worked out in Hanoi in the 1940s when milk was scarce and a barman whisked egg yolk with sugar instead, floating a warm custard on the cup.
• Coffee is drunk on plastic stools a foot off the ground, turned to face the street rather than the table, because half the point is watching what goes past.
• Vietnamese describe their own map as a bamboo carrying pole with a basket of rice at each end: the Red River delta in the north, the Mekong delta in the south.
• Nguyễn is the family name of such a large share of the country that people are addressed, and even listed in directories, by their given name, which comes last.
• The Mekong reaches the sea in Vietnam through a fan of channels, which is why Vietnamese calls it Cửu Long, the nine dragons.
• Sơn Đoòng in Quảng Bình is the largest cave passage on Earth, wide enough to swallow a city street and open enough where the roof fell in to grow its own jungle.
• Fansipan stands 3,147 metres above Sa Pa and is the highest point not only in Vietnam but on the whole Indochinese peninsula.
• Water puppetry grew out of flooded paddies in the Red River delta: the puppeteers stand waist-deep behind a bamboo screen and work the figures on rods under the water.
• The currency is the đồng, a word that simply means bronze or copper, left over from the days when money came as strings of cast coins with square holes.
• Chùa Một Cột, the One Pillar Pagoda in Hanoi, was first built in 1049 as a small wooden shrine balanced on a single stone column, shaped to look like a lotus rising from its pond.
• Văn Miếu in Hanoi was founded in 1070 and grew into the country's first university; stone stelae carried on the backs of tortoises still list the men who passed its doctoral exams.
• Hillsides around Mù Cang Chải are cut into rice terraces that follow the contours of the slope, turning mirror-silver when flooded and gold just before harvest.
• Most homes keep an altar to their ancestors, and relatives gather for the đám giỗ, the anniversary of a death, an occasion that traditionally outranks any birthday.
• Nouns take a classifier, and the sorting is not what you would expect: con marks living creatures, yet a knife is con dao and a river con sông, as though both were alive.
• Fresh rolls, gỏi cuốn, are never fried: the rice paper is dipped in water for a few seconds until it turns soft and see-through, then wrapped round prawns, pork, noodles and herbs.
• The fourth animal of the Vietnamese zodiac is the cat rather than the rabbit used elsewhere in Asia, so a whole generation here is born in the year of the cat.
• Trà sen is green tea scented with lotus, layered with the tiny stamens picked from blossoms on Hanoi's Tây Hồ lake; it takes more than a thousand flowers to perfume a single kilo of tea.
• Parks fill before six in the morning with badminton, exercise classes and đá cầu, a game of keeping a feathered shuttlecock in the air using only your feet.
• Cơm tấm began with broken grains that millers could not sell, and Saigon turned that leftover rice into a plate with grilled pork chop and a steamed egg-and-pork cake.
• At Tết the first person to cross your threshold in the new year, the xông đất, is thought to set the household's luck, so families quietly arrange for someone lucky to arrive.
• When the national football team wins, cities fill with đi bão, riding the storm, as families pour onto their motorbikes with flags and circle the streets half the night.
• English has borrowed very little from Vietnamese, but pho and banh mi have both made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, losing their accents on the way in.
• Hội An was one of Asia's great trading ports in the 1600s, and the tiled covered bridge its Japanese merchants built still crosses the stream at the end of the old street.
• The Nguyễn court moved the capital to Huế in 1802 and walled it inside a moated citadel, with a purple forbidden city at its heart reserved for the emperor's household.
• Phở is breakfast, and the bowl changes as you travel: nearly bare in Hanoi, served in the south with a side plate of bean sprouts, húng quế basil, lime and chilli to add yourself.
• Nước mắm is made by packing anchovies with sea salt in wooden barrels and leaving them a year; the fish sauce of Phú Quốc island carries a protected origin label in Europe.
• Hoàn Kiếm, the lake in the middle of Hanoi, means lake of the returned sword, after a king who is said to have handed a magic blade back to a golden turtle that rose to claim it.
• Bia hơi is brewed without preservatives and delivered daily in steel kegs to Hanoi street corners, where a keg is expected to be drunk before the day is out.
• Huế makes nón bài thơ, poem hats, with verses and pictures cut from leaves and hidden between the layers of the conical hat, visible only when you hold it up to the light.
• Hà Nội means inside the rivers, from the loop of the Red River that once wrapped the city, while its older name Thăng Long, ascending dragon, still turns up in poetry.
• Đông Sơn bronze drums were cast in the Red River delta more than two thousand years ago, their faces covered in concentric rings of dancers, birds and long boats.
• Hùng Kings' Day is a public holiday for legendary founders, and crowds climb to the temples on Nghĩa Lĩnh hill in Phú Thọ to burn incense for ancestors said to have ruled millennia ago.
• For Tết Trung Thu in autumn children carry star-shaped lanterns through the streets behind lion dancers, and families cut dense moon cakes into small wedges.
• Sơn mài lacquer is built up in dozens of layers rubbed back with water and charcoal, with crushed duck-egg shell inlaid to supply the whites that black lacquer cannot give.