Vietnamese language You should distinguish between the modern Vietnamese language as spoken by Vietnamese people and Sino Vietnamese For about a thousand years Vietnam was under the domination of China While the people spoke Vietnamese the written language was actually classical Chinese This classical Chinese writing can also be understood by the Chinese Korean and Japanese However this written Chinese is not Vietnamese and ordinary Vietnamese people had to learn it like they would any other foreign language When read aloud in Vietnamese it sounds like gibberish While much of the Vietnamese vocabulary are borrowed from Chinese see the Sino Vietnamese article Vietnamese has a different syntax from Chinese Consider French and English While English borrowed a great deal of its vocabulary from French you can t assume that they have the same syntax and translate white horse word by word into French as blanc cheval However like the existence of French phrases in English some Chinese phrases are also seen in Vietnamese After quoc ngu is adopted there is no reason for Vietnamese people to write like the Chinese Written Vietnamese unlike classical Chinese is a transcription of what is said thus when spoken aloud it is perfectly understandable Classical Chinese are not understandable when spoken aloud it wasn t until the advent of vernacular Chinese in the early 20th century when that is possible in Chinese By that time Vietnam had long abandoned Chinese