[zui]

Best feature also most confusing aspect of Vietnamese: the "pronoun" system. The way you uses a pronoun in a sentence reveals your relationship toward that person, your social standing to that person, and your emotion toward that person (not necessary all at once but certainly more nuanced than "you")

[atmosx]

Can you elaborate a bit, possibly add examples? Sounds very interesting.

[zui]

In Vietnamese, there are some noun used as pronoun. Therefore the number of pronoun in usage is much more diverse than say English pronoun. For example, the word pronoun "you" in English is used for both addressing the second person both singular and plural. However, there is no one translation for "you" in Vietnamese.

How you would address the person you speaks to depend on the circumstance:

- If you are a child and you are speaking to your parent, "you" would be "ba/cha/bố" (father) or "mẹ/má" (mother).

- If you are speaking to your sibling, then "you" would be "anh/chị/em" (older brother/older sister/younger sibling).

- If you are on the street and speaks to a person around your age "anh/chị" (even if they are the same age or younger than you a little bit, it's show polite to refer to them as if they are your older sibling). This show that you can express politeness through the usage of pronoun.

- On the flip side, if you are really casual, you can use "mày", which usually mean "you" but very impolite. Some people can take offense if you use this to refer to them.

- Also the word "you" translate to different word for each person in your family tree (same thing with Mandarin if I remember correctly) as you refer to people in your family by their relationship to you, and there isn't just a direct translation for the English pronoun "you" for conversation around the family.

One of the thing I appreciate from English is that you just need to say the word "you" when refer to the person you are speaking to. You never have to worry about the context of the conversation that you are having and adjust your pronoun usage accordingly. When I speak Vietnamese, I often just estimate their age and use "anh/chị/bạn" (older brother/older sister/friend" accordingly. Also I try to use their name in place of the pronoun, which can sound weird sometime.

On the other hand, you can get away by not saying any pronoun in some case, mostly very casual case.

Non exhaustive list can be found here (along with an in-depth explanation of how this mess works): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_pronouns