Quốc Ngữ is much better than 𡨸漢 Chữ Hán and 𡨸喃 Chữ Nôm! Back when we wrote with Chinese characters, literacy was only about 3% - now it's 95%.

But Quốc Ngữ is still not as good a script as it should be. The biggest problem is obvious: the Latin alphabet doesn't have all the letters we need. That's why we have to use digraphs like ch gh gi kh ng nh ph th tr and diacritics like ă â đ ê ô ơ ư. Many other languages that use the Latin alphabet have the same problem - English also uses ch ng th, and French uses â ê ô. The Latin alphabet is just not a very good alphabet!

But it's worse for Vietnamese, because we also need to use diacritics to write the tones, as in ạ ã á à ả. When we combine the two types of diacritics, we make our letters hard to read: the diacritics are too small, too similar, and too common. But it's very hard to read without them! (For example, watch this.) It's too bad the Portuguese missionaries didn't think of using vowel digraphs like English ou or French ai.

Not only are we missing many letters, but we don't use the letters we have consistently. Sometimes, we write c as q or k, or we write i as y, or we write d as gi, or g as gh, or we have to write ưa as ươ - why? How does that help us?

And even though we are using "the same alphabet" as European languages, we don't use the same letters for the same sounds, like b d g or x. My friend Weeng has to write her name as Quynh - crazy! So it's harder for foreigners to read Vietnamese names, and it's harder for us to learn foreign languages or to type on foreign keyboards.

There's one other big problem with Quốc Ngữ: we can't tell the difference between the end of a word and the end of a syllable - both are written as spaces. We do that so that dãm an doesn't look like dã man. But then we can't tell where words begin and end. In Chinese pinyin, they use an apostrophe where needed between syllables. But we can't do that because it would look like the horn in ơ ư ! Maybe we could use a hyphen where needed instead: dãm-an dã-man.

Maybe we could fix all these problems: replace diacritics with digraphs, always use the same letters to write the same sounds, use a hyphen to separate syllables, and so on. There are numerous proposals for how to reform our alphabet. But if we're going to make everybody learn to read and write all over again, why don't we just use a better alphabet?

There's a new alphabet called Musa. It has all the letters we need, for Vietnamese and for the other languages of the world. And they always represent the same sounds. The letters are featural, so letters that sound alike will look alike, and that makes them easy to learn.

Musa has a lot of letters, but they're all composed of only ten basic shapes, and the keyboard needs only 26 keys. For example, here's how to write một bảng chữ cái tốt hơn cho tiếng Việt in Musa:

On the next page, we'll teach you how to write Vietnamese with Musa. Why not take a look?

Musa for Vietnamese