Explore a free beginner passage with tap-to-translate tools and line-by-line translations.
Stichos generates live A0 and A1 reading passages with tap-to-translate words and full line translations in your language.
Lucia đi chợ buổi sáng
Lucia thức dậy sớm.
Lucia wakes up early.
Buổi sáng trời đẹp.
The morning weather is nice.
Lucia đi chợ Tân Định.
Lucia goes to Tan Dinh market.
Chợ rất đông vui.
The market is very busy and lively.
Lucia mua thực phẩm.
Lucia buys food.
Cô ấy đi tìm rau tươi.
She looks for fresh vegetables.
Một người bán hàng vẫy tay.
A seller waves.
Bà ấy rất thân thiện.
She is very friendly.
Lucia mua rau tươi.
Lucia buys fresh vegetables.
Lucia đi mua cá.
Lucia goes to buy fish.
Cá rất tươi.
The fish is very fresh.
Lucia mua một con cá.
Lucia buys a fish.
Lucia tìm mua đu đủ.
Lucia looks to buy papaya.
Cô ấy thấy một quả đu đủ.
She sees a papaya.
Quả đu đủ rất to.
The papaya is very big.
Quả đu đủ rơi xuống.
The papaya falls down.
Lucia nhanh tay bắt lấy.
Lucia quickly catches it.
Người bán hàng cười vui.
The seller laughs happily.
Lucia cũng cười vui vẻ.
Lucia also laughs happily.
Lucia mua quả đu đủ.
Lucia buys the papaya.
Lucia trả tiền.
Lucia pays money.
Lucia nói cảm ơn.
Lucia says thank you.
Lucia cầm túi đồ ăn.
Lucia holds the bag of food.
Lucia đi về nhà.
Lucia walks home.
Cô ấy cảm thấy rất vui.
She feels very happy.
Quick facts about Vietnamese
Speakers
About 86 million people speak Vietnamese as a first language and about 11 million as a second language (2019–2024 figures).1
Did you know?
Vietnamese marks tone in its spelling: the same syllable carries six different tone marks in ma, má, mà, mả, mã and mạ, and each is a different word.1
The main challenge
Tones. Northern (Hanoi) Vietnamese has six, while Southern Vietnamese merges the hỏi and ngã tones into one, so every word has to be learned with its tone and learners should know which variety they are hearing.1
About 97 million in total: roughly 86 million native speakers and 11 million second-language speakers.1
Primary script
Latin-based chữ Quốc ngữ, a 29-letter alphabet in which seven letters carry extra marks (ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư, đ) and five diacritics mark tone. Each syllable is written separately, so spaces divide syllables rather than words. Before the 20th century Vietnamese was written in chữ Hán and chữ Nôm.2,1
Word order & typology
Isolating (analytic) and tonal, with six tones in the northern standard; southern speech merges two of them (hỏi and ngã), leaving five. Subject–verb–object and topic-prominent; words do not inflect, nouns take classifiers, and modifiers follow what they modify.1,3
Official status
The national and sole official language of Vietnam. A recognised minority language in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.1
Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training set out the six-level Vietnamese Proficiency Framework for Foreigners (Khung năng lực tiếng Việt dùng cho người nước ngoài) in Circular 17/2015/TT-BGDĐT, which pairs Levels 1 to 6 (Bậc 1–Bậc 6) with CEFR A1 to C2. The column follows that pairing to describe reading difficulty; it is not a certified result.
Reference corpora
Because spaces separate syllables, Vietnamese corpus work has to segment text into words before anything can be counted.
Vietnamese Treebank: Built under the national VLSP project (Nguyen and colleagues, 2009), it set out to annotate about 10,000 sentences syntactically, using text from the daily newspaper Tuổi Trẻ.1,2
Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary: Sino-Vietnamese words (từ Hán-Việt) make up about a third of the lexicon and, by one estimate, up to 60% of the vocabulary in formal texts. Stichos keeps obscure Sino-Vietnamese roots out of early levels.3
Counting words, not syllables: Stichos's sentence-length limits count words, so cà phê, công viên and chúng tôi each count as one. A sentence is shortened by choosing a simpler idea, never by dropping a classifier, copula or head noun.
Vietnamese readability research began with formulas and has moved to graded corpora.1,2
Nguyen and Henkin (1982): Published in the Journal of Reading, the first readability formula for Vietnamese was meant for teachers of Vietnamese students who had resettled abroad. It combines average word length in letters with average sentence length in words; a 1985 follow-up revised it to tell native Vietnamese compound words apart from Sino-Vietnamese ones.1
Graded literature corpus: Luong, Nguyen and Dinh (2020) built a corpus of 1,825 Vietnamese literary texts at four difficulty levels, from very easy to difficult, for testing readability methods.2
Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a single readability score.
Time markers: Verbs never change form; time is shown with markers placed before the verb. A0 uses none of them. A1 adds đã (past), đang (ongoing) and sẽ (future), and A2 adds vừa and mới for something that has just happened.
Passive and clauses: A0 is one main clause. A1 joins clauses with và, and A2 adds nhưng and hoặc and the passive with được or bị. Cause (vì, nên), condition (nếu) and relative clauses with mà open at B1, and concession with tuy at B2.
Pronouns: Address in Vietnamese is built on kinship terms that encode age and status. Readers use the neutral tôi and bạn or the common anh and chị, avoid complex honorifics, and state the subject explicitly at A0 and A1.
Requests and possession: Beginner requests use cho tôi + noun (Cho tôi một ly cà phê). Possession is marked with của (bạn của Lan), which is usually dropped with kin and home (mẹ tôi, nhà tôi).
Related academic & framework resources
Thông tư 17/2015/TT-BGDĐT: The full text, in Vietnam's national legal database, of the Ministry of Education and Training circular issuing the Vietnamese Proficiency Framework for Foreigners, in force since 16 October 2015.
Latin-based chữ Quốc ngữ, a 29-letter alphabet in which seven letters carry extra marks (ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư, đ) and five diacritics mark tone. Each syllable is written separately, so spaces divide syllables rather than words. Before the 20th century Vietnamese was written in chữ Hán and chữ Nôm.
Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?
Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.
Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?
Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.
Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?
Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.
Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?
Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.
How does word lookup work while reading?
Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.
Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?
Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.
Do stories include audio or narration?
Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).