How to read a Vietnamese shop sign

A Vietnamese street looks like an unreadable wall of colour and text until you notice how few words are actually on it. The same twenty repeat all day.

Learn those twenty words and a Vietnamese shop sign stops being decoration: the street becomes a directory of what is for sale on it. The menu words page does the same job for the board inside.

Which words are on almost every sign?

A Vietnamese shop sign is built from two words: one for the kind of business and one for what it sells. The first set is short enough to learn in an afternoon, and twelve words cover most of an ordinary street.

Add cafe, sua xe and bia hoi to that list of twelve and you can name most businesses on an ordinary provincial street without opening a translation app.

Cua hang, tiem and hieu: why are there three words for shop?

Three words do the same job, and the difference is region and age rather than what is inside. Cua hang is the neutral one and turns up everywhere. Tiem is the southern habit, so a haircut in Saigon happens at a tiem and in Hanoi at a cua hang. Hieu is older and slightly formal, and it survives mostly on bookshops and watch repairers.

Tap hoa is the one worth recognising properly. It is the household general store — soap, rice, batteries, beer, a sack of washing powder — and it is where a neighbourhood buys what a mini-mart would sell at a markup.

Nha nghi or khach san: which sign is the cheaper bed?

Nha nghi is the cheaper bed, usually well under 300,000 dong, and the word means guesthouse rather than hotel. The rooms are plain, clean often enough, and rented by the hour as readily as by the night, which is a fact about the trade rather than a warning.

Khach san is the hotel word and starts around 400,000 dong. Neither sign tells you anything about the state of the room, so the accommodation guide is the page that does.

Why does a gold shop take your dollars?

A vang bac shop deals in gold and silver, and in practice it is also the neighbourhood money changer. Gold shops have handled foreign currency for decades, their rate usually beats a bank's, and the transaction takes about a minute with no paperwork.

Two things to know before using one. The rate is worth asking at two shops rather than one, and changing money outside a licensed bank sits in a grey area of Vietnamese law that is enforced against the shop rather than the tourist. The money guide explains why an ATM withdrawal is still the simpler default.

Why is the phone number so large?

Because it is the working part of the sign. Customers reach a laundry, a repair stand, a gas-bottle delivery or a delivery kitchen by phone. So the printer sets the 10 digits at twice the height of the name.

The name itself is often the owner's given name: Quan Chi Hoa, Tiem Toc Hung. That is why so many signs read as one first name in enormous letters over a phone number in larger ones still.

What does the word before the name tell you?

The category, and it is worth reading. Quan Nem means a place selling nem and Quan Com means a rice place. Quan Nhau is a drinking restaurant where the food arrives with the beer, and the bia hoi guide covers that end of the evening.

Nha Hang is the step up to a proper restaurant, and the word itself is a price signal. The cheap eating guide sets out what the gap between a quan and a nha hang costs in practice.

Which signs are not shops at all?

Several, and visitors mistake them regularly. UBND at the top of a building stands for Uy ban Nhan dan, the People's Committee: a local government office rather than somewhere to walk into.

Cong An is police. Truong is a school. Y te or Tram Y te is a health station, and a Benh Vien is a hospital, which the health guide says more about. A red banner across a road with white or yellow text is not advertising anything: it is a state slogan, and the poster guide explains what it says.

Why does one street sell one thing?

Because trade streets came first and never entirely stopped. The Old Quarter in Hanoi, known for centuries as the 36 streets, still carries the trades in its street names: Hang Bac, silver; Hang Ma, votive paper; Hang Thiec, tin.

The pattern survives outside the old quarters too. Provincial towns keep a motorbike-parts street, a wedding-dress street, a hardware street. If you cannot find something, find its street: every shop on it stocks the thing.

What about the signs in English?

The English signs point at you, which is neither good nor bad but worth knowing. An English sign usually marks a business used to foreigners: easier, sometimes better, frequently more expensive.

The shop next door with no English is often the same product at the local price. That is the practical payoff of reading signs at all, and it applies hardest to food, laundry and anything sold by weight — the markets guide covers the version of this that happens without any sign at all.

Which shop signs should you walk past?

Very few, and the massage guide covers the one category where the sign genuinely tells you something: a lit neon massage sign late at night is a different business from the brightly lit shop with a price list by the door.

Otherwise a hand-painted sign is a good omen rather than a bad one. It marks a business too small and too long-established to need anything better.