Vietnamese vowels

I'm sitting on my couch on a rainy Saturday afternoon reciting Vietnamese vowels over and over with my wife and child having to endure the painful repetition in our small living space. The Foreign Services Institute Vietnamese course is very thorough but very repetitive. You can see how it's designed for diplomats because only a government appointed linguist could come up with such a clinical course.

Rather than you having to go through it all yourself, here are the Vietnamese vowels in a much more concise form. But the repetitive exercises no doubt have the benefit of really driving it home.

The vowels are like this:

i = i as in 'machine'

ê = a as in 'late'

e = e as in 'keg'

a = a as in 'bah'

o = aw as in 'saw'

ô = o in 'obey'

ơ = o as in 'throw' (teensy difference to the above one)

u = u as in 'thru'

ư = u as in 'sugar' (this one is hard - the way it works best in my mind is like saying the normal 'u' but as if you were stuffy from a cold)

What is that, like nine vowels? What are you doing Vietnamese people? Nine? Seriously?

On the plus side most of them seem pretty manageable. ô and ơ are annoyingly similar - they're both said the way we say it when we recite the English alphabet. But ơ seems to be more accentuated - much like when Cleveland on Family Guy says 'Oh Nooo!' - that's ơ.

u and ư. This one is a real pain in the ass. u is really like 'ooo' and ư less so - ư is more like a mild grunt.

The two other things I've picked up are that a Vietnamese 'x' is just an 's', and 'd' or 'gi' are just 'y' as in 'yet'. All the other consonants I've seen are the same as English.

By the way I'm on page 13 of 370 pages.