Vietnamese, for real conversations
Most courses hand you words. Vietnamese hands you a harder problem first: before you can say anything, you have to decide what to call the person in front of you — and get it wrong and the sentence is rude, not just incorrect. HiAn starts there.
Free to start. No account needed. · iPhone · iOS 17 and later
Not because the grammar is hard — it is not. Because the first decision in every sentence is social, and a phrasebook cannot make it for you.
There is no neutral “you” in Vietnamese. You pick a word based on age, relationship and setting, and the word changes what you call yourself too. HiAn builds your actual family tree and drills the pronouns you personally need.
Knowing a sentence is not knowing a conversation. 95 dialogues run end to end and stop where it is your turn — because the right reply depends on what was just said to you.
Every phrase is graded for how a person actually says it. Where the textbook form and the natural form differ, HiAn shows you both and tells you which one lands.
You produce one dialect and understand both. Every recording exists in a Northern and a Southern voice, and the 39 phrases that genuinely differ carry a clip for each.
Real screens from the shipping app, not mockups.
You are dating or married into a Vietnamese family and the pronouns are the thing standing between you and being liked.
You understand a great deal and freeze when it is your turn. HiAn flips the order and puts production first.
Coffee, landlords, hospitals, the ward office. The situations you meet in a week, in the order you meet them.
The forty sentences that change how a trip goes, in a voice you can copy.
Spaced repetition on every phrase you meet. What comes back today is what you were about to forget — not what came next in a list.
Wrong answers are matched to the right one for length and for meaning. A four-word option beside a fourteen-word one is answerable by shape alone, and HiAn drops that question rather than ask it.
Record yourself and see your pitch curve against the native one. There is no percentage, because a percentage on pronunciation would be invented.
The whole curriculum and all 6,292 recordings ship inside the app. No streaming, nothing to download, and no lesson that stops working in a lift or on a flight. Nothing you learn leaves the device unless you ask it to.
HiAn is free to start with no account and no card. The free tier includes 8 lessons, 20 free scenarios spread across every world, all 1,025 words forever, and the full spaced-repetition schedule on everything you learn. A Premium subscription opens all 11 worlds, the full 1,712-phrase library, all 95 conversations and all 79 drills.
At fifteen minutes a day, most learners handle everyday exchanges — a coffee order, a taxi, greeting family — within three to four months. Vietnamese has no verb conjugation and no cases, so the grammar goes quickly; the two things that genuinely take time are the tones and the pronoun system.
Because Vietnamese has no neutral "you". You choose a word based on the other person's age, your relationship and the setting, and that choice also changes the word you use for yourself. Get it wrong and the sentence is not ungrammatical, it is rude. HiAn builds your real family tree and drills exactly the pronouns you need.
Learn the one your people speak: Northern if your family is around Hanoi, Southern if they are around Ho Chi Minh City. The two are mutually intelligible and differ in a handful of everyday words and some consonant sounds. HiAn teaches you to produce one dialect while training you to understand both.
Yes, completely. The entire curriculum and all 6,292 native recordings ship inside the app. There is nothing to download and every lesson works on a plane or underground.
No. The whole app works without one. Signing in — with Apple only — exists so your progress is backed up and can follow you to a second device, and you can delete that account from inside the app at any time.
Not yet. HiAn is currently an iPhone app and needs iOS 17 or later.
No, and that is deliberate. HiAn shows your pitch curve next to a native speaker's and tells you where the movement differed. There is no percentage, because a pronunciation score would be an invented number rather than a measured one.
Eight lessons, twenty conversations, the whole word module and every review feature — with no account and no card.
Get it on the App Store