D in Northern Vietnamese sounds like a soft Z...between English Z and English J.
D in Sourthern and Central Vietnamese sounds like the Y as in Yes.

I think we should change letter D in our writing to J for several reasons,

1) J sounds like G (followed by E or I) in all Western alphabets. This would explain why Gi and D sound the same in some Northern Viet accent.

2) J in French sounds like a Z, quite similar to how Northern Vietnamese says D.

3) D in Northern Vietnamese sounds like a soft Z...between English Z and English J.

4) J in German sounds like "Y" as in "Yes", similar to how Southern Vietnamese pronounce letter D

5) J in IPA code sounds like "Y" as in "Yes", again similar to how Southern Vietnamese pronounce letter D

6) People with the name Dung, Dũng, Dương wouldn't be embarrassed since their name would be written as Jung, Jũng, Jương. And people would pronounce their names more precisely.

We keep it as D and many foreigners mispronounce our words. They pronounce it with the English D instead of Z or Y.

why not just D -> Z then?

because it sounds like Y in Southern Vietnamese.

but letter D is not always pronounced as soft Z or Y as you said

Dung(correct) pronounced as D
Du~ng(name) pronounced like Z

XigonCongchua is speaking of the letter "D".

The letter "D" of the word "correct" is "Đ", and not "D".

my bad need to sharpen up my grammar

Yes, I'm talking about letter D, not letter Đ. Please don't confuse.

My sister bf was puzzling about this when I made fun on his Vietnamese.
I asked him how do you spell coconut (dua) in Vietnamese.
He told me, "dzua" and I was like the 'z' doesn't even exist in the Vietnamese alphabet.

When I pronounced 'd' and 'gi', i followed the method " gio' " as in windy so which mean I would say 'gi' lighter than 'd'.

So do you guys concur my idea?

It is not bad, the vietnamese writing will look more diverse, but the idea is hard to realize, almost never to realize.

we need to convince the Department of Education in Vietnam that changing letter D or J is better for us.

Ho Chi Minh brought it up once, as to change d->z
i dont think j can replace d. thinking about saying the word "just" and aplly it to Dung
besides, it is not necessary. Vietnamese is fine the way it is

Yeah J is not a good replacement.

it doesn't have to sound like English J. It can sound like French J or German J as I mentioned. Many letters in our alphabet don't sound like English letters anyway.

silly. why should we change it for the convenience of foreigners? it's our writing system. we know what it's supposed to be. are americans going to change their system to accommodate our tones?

No. It's for our purpose too. So the foreignors don't mispronounce our language. There's a big difference between the [d] sound and the [z] sound or the y sound.

agree with moo here. why the need to change to suit anyone else. at least our writing language is loosely based on latin alphabets rather than some caligraphy from china even harder to write.

I agree with Xigon a bit here. No matter how good something is doing there's always space for improvement.

Besides her reasons for the use of J instead of D, I want to point out that it also makes way for the removal of the Đ which requires the usage of more key presses on a keyboard and strokes when writing. Instead of dd for đ, we only need one d.

Why not?

Nowaday ,some Viet teeanagers use "j" for "i" )

^ They also use 3 for e


The Chinese have pinyin which makes it easy for foreigners to pronounce their words. For us, they mispronounce our D all the time.

Nguyen Tan Dung viet tieng anh la Nguyen Tan Dzung. Nguyen Tan Zung would look not so weird;) so yeah Xigon, I like that idea.