Typing Vietnamese using Telex and Vni Conventions
Typing â, ê, ô
As you can observe, these 3 letters all have the circumflex. The rule to type them are therefore similar:
- Telex: type the underlying letter twice. For example, to get â, your typing sequence is “aa”. Similarly, “oo” for ô and “ee” for ê.
- Vni: type the underlying letter + number 6. For example, to get â, your typing sequence is “a6″. Similarly, “o6″ for ô and “e6″ for ê.
Typing ư, ơ and ă
These first 2 letters share the “horn”; the last one is not quite the same but is close enough, at least according to the Telex way of typing.
- Telex: type the underlying letter + w. For exaple, to get ư, your typing sequence is “uw”. Similarly, “ow” for ơ and “aw” for ă.
- Vni: This convention consider the first 2 as one group and the last letter a different group:
- ư, ơ: type the underlying letter + number 7. That is, “u7″ for ư and “o7″ for ơ.
- ă: type “a8″
Typing the 5 diacritics
The Telex and Vni conventions for typing the 5 diacritics are summarised in the following table:
Typing diacritics:
| Diacritics | acute accent(“´”) | grave(“`”) | hook(” ̉ “) | tilde(“~”) | dot(“.”) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Telex | s | f | r | x | j |
| Example with a | á = as | à = af | ả = ar | ã = ax | ạ = aj |
| Vni | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Example with a | á = a1 | à = a2 | ả = a3 | ã = a4 | ạ = a5 |
And there you go! Congratulation on having learned the typing conventions of Vietnamese. But before leaving, let’s do some exercises. How would you type ớ? Yes, it’s: ơ + the acute accent, so that the Telex typing sequence is “ows” and the Vni’s is “o71″. The reminder here is that we type the Vietnamese alphabet letters before typing diacritics.
Now, how about đặng? If your answer is “ddawjng” for Telex or “d9a85ng” for Vni, you’ve got it! The only note here is that instead of typing the dot right after the ă (i.e, “awj” for Telex or “a85″ for Vni), you can delay the dot till completing the whole word. In other words, your typing sequence could have been “ddawngj” for Telex and “d9a8ng5″ for Vni. Many people find this deferral of typing diacritics help improve typing speed.
Now, if you have asked if it’s possible to defer the “breve” on top of the a till finishing the whole word, the answer is yes. It’s possible because the typing software, which understands our conventions, would easily figure out that your “w” or “8″ (for Telex and Vni, respectively) is to change the a to ă. However, this type of deferral is not used by many people and is also not recommended for the reason that it may actually slow you down. Indeed, when you finish the world, you probably need to “look back” at the word and see what kind of “symbol” you need to add to the vowels. In addition, since ă, for example, is part of the Vietnamese Alphabet, it makes sense that we type it as one single unit.
Regardless of what’ve been suggested or advised, as the ultimate goal is to get you type fast, you should use whatever method you feel most comfortable with.
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