Learn Vietnamese with short stories

Stories to read in Vietnamese, with the English beside each paragraph. They open in the browser, with no account needed, and each free one is also a free Vietnamese–English ebook for Kindle, Kobo or any e-reader: downloading needs a free account, no payment (which file to pick).

Open the Vietnamese–English library, where you can search the stories and filter them by level.

Want to hear it too? Vietnamese stories with audio are narrated, free, with a speed control.

By level:

• Beginner (A1–A2): Easy Vietnamese short stories for beginners, with English translation · 166 stories
• Intermediate (B1–B2): Intermediate Vietnamese short stories, side by side with English · 192 stories
• Advanced (C1–C2): Advanced Vietnamese stories, with the English alongside · 33 stories

Every story here carries its level on the Common European Framework, from A1 for beginners to C1 and beyond, so the library works as a set of Vietnamese graded readers, most of them free: start at the level where you understand most of a page, and move up when the English beside it is something you check only now and then.

Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, so you can start reading from the first day. Its words do not change their endings: no conjugations, no plurals, no cases. Time and number come from small words such as đã (already, for the past) and sẽ (will), which makes sentences easier to take apart than they first look.

What takes time is the tones and the marks that show them: ma, má, mà, mả, mã and mạ are six different words. With the English beside each paragraph, you can follow the story while the marks and the words they make become familiar.

For Vietnamese speakers, a parallel text is a way into books in English without stopping at every idiom or phrasal verb. Read the English and look across to the Vietnamese when a sentence doesn’t land.

It works for families abroad too: one book, two languages on the same page, so children growing up with English can keep reading Vietnamese with their parents and grandparents.

391 English stories in the library have Vietnamese alongside: Học tiếng Anh qua truyện ngắn.

Long out of copyright and easy to find as EPUBs. Any of them makes a good first Vietnamese–English parallel text:

• Truyện Kiều, Nguyễn Du
• Lục Vân Tiên, Nguyễn Đình Chiểu
• Số đỏ, Vũ Trọng Phụng
• Tắt đèn, Ngô Tất Tố

Or use a book you already own: the method works best with something you actually want to read. See how to read a parallel text to get the most from it.