Vietnamizer – make your writing look Vietnamese

by Jakub Marian

Tip: Are you a non-native English speaker? I have just finished creating a Web App for people who enjoy learning by reading. Make sure to check it out; there's a lot of free content.

Vietnamese is an interesting language in that it uses the most diacritical marks of all languages that use the Latin alphabet in their written form (it contains additional 69 different letters with diacritical marks). I’ve noticed that it uses them to such a degree that almost anything written with so many diacritical marks starts looking Vietnamese at first sight.

Just for fun, I decided to write a script that adds Vietnamese diacritical marks randomly to a text. To achieve greater authenticity, it adds them with the same probability distribution as with which they are used in real written Vietnamese. The option Use only characters with diacritics causes the script to avoid letters without diacritical marks to make the words look even “more Vietnamese”.

By the way, have you already seen my brand new web app for non-native speakers of English? It's based on reading texts and learning by having all meanings, pronunciations, grammar forms etc. easily accessible. It looks like this:

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