How to type Vietnamese using Telex
Hotkeys on Windows
Switch between keyboards with Windows + Space
Key
Letters
From yourvietnamese.com[1].
| Letter group | â, ê, ô, đ | ư, ơ and ă |
|---|---|---|
| Telex | letter + letter |
letter + w |
| Example | aa |
aw |
| Output | â | ă |
The 5 diacritics
From yourvietnamese.com[1:1].
| Diacritics | acute ´ | grave ` | hook ̉ | tilde ~ | dot . |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Telex (letter +) |
s |
f |
r |
x |
j |
| Example | as |
af |
ar |
ax |
aj |
| Output | á | à | ả | ã | ạ |
Other notes
From yourvietnamese.com[1:2].
And there you go! Congratulation on having learned how to type Vietnamese. But before we conclude, let’s do some exercises to make sure everything has been well understood. How would you type ớ? Yes, it’s: ơ + the acute accent, so that the Telex typing sequence is “ows”.
Now, how about the word đặng? If your answer is “ddawjng” for Telex, you’ve got it! The only note here is that instead of typing the dot right after the ă (i.e, “awj” for Telex), you can delay the dot till completing the whole word, which means your typing sequence could have been “ddawngj” for Telex. In fact many Vietnamese use this second way of typing the accent mark after completing the alphabet.
Now, if you have asked if it’s possible to defer the “breve” on top of the a till finishing the whole word, which means typing “ddajngw” instead of “ddawjng”, the answer is yes. It’s possible because the typing software, which understands our conventions, would easily figure out that your “w” is to change the a to ă. However, this type of deferral is not used by many people and is also not recommended for the reason that it may actually slow you down. Indeed, when you finish the world, you probably need to “look back” at the word and see what kind of “symbol” you need to add to the vowels. In addition, since ă, for example, is part of the Vietnamese Alphabet, it makes sense that we type it as one single unit.