the best vietnamese learning apps
2026-07-06
4 minute read
This is a list of the apps I've used to learn Vietnamese.
Dictionaries
Unless you're on the ALG train, you will need a dictionary.
Mobile recommendation: dictbox
This app can load custom dictionaries. It'll serve you well at the beginning with the default options, and when it's time, you can load in a monolingual dictionary and also custom domain-specific dictionaries.
Browser recommendation: zoopdog
While Yomitan is more customizable, I recommend zoopdog because it has fewer infuriating UI bugs and its default VNEDICT is sufficient most of the time.
For slang, I suggest Claude. It's read the entire vietnamese internet and can figure it out most of the time.
Content
Of course, you need words to look up in your dictionaries! Where will they come from?
Visit my content index for a detailed list of the content I used to go from zero to conversational.
The apps involved:
- YouTube - You can find tons of vdramas and podcasts and essays here
- Fonos - Like Audible but in Vietnamese
- Voiz - Like Fonos but counterculture
- Elaborated: Fonos has the big titles, but Voiz often has deepcuts like Kafka's letter to his father. You could listen to Kafka's letter to his father in Vietnamese!
- Netflix - Leading streaming provider for Viet dubs
- VieON - Premium Vdrama platform
Memorization & Intensive Listening
For memorization there is no alternative to Anki. For sentence mining and intensive listening, there is no alternative to ASB Player. Both of these are FOSS.
With ASB player you can press a button to trigger repeat mode whenever you don't understand a sentence, and sit back while it loops in your ear over and over until it clicks. If it doesn't click and you need to check the subtitle, mine the sentence into Anki as a card with only audio on the front! Anki will periodically challenge you to hear it again, strengthening the weak aspects of your sound perception over time.
You can find a sentence mining setup tutorial here.
When I mine sentences (with audio!) from Netflix, it takes me literally one button press. Card creation time is near zero. At the end of a session, I'll have Claude generate the english field using Anki Connect. The english doesn't need to be perfect, just close enough to remind me of the vietnamese meaning.
Condensed Audio
The runtime of the movie Ocean Waves is 72 minutes, but only 38 of those minutes are speech. Watching or listening to the dub over and over to practice means listening to 34 minutes of non-speech every time. This can add up!
I have listened to the Vietnamese dub of Ocean Waves 24 times. When I listen, I get in more listening practice per minute by listening to a condensed version.
If you know you're going to repeat media many times, I suggest investing the time up front to condense it. Unfortunately, some technical knowledge is necessary to do this.
You can condense audio using a program called subs2cia. You need a Python environment, the audio file, and subtitles. It's via the subtitle timestamps that it knows what to cut and what to keep. The subtitles don't need to be in Vietnamese as long as the timestamps are good enough.
You can get audio from Netflix dubs using a program called narr. I actually had to edit the Go code to make this work for me, so programming and debugging knowledge may be necessary.