Vietnamese Body Parts + How to Say Where It Hurts (Saigon Style)

Picture this: it's 2 in the afternoon, the sun is trying to melt your face off, you ate street food from a cart you probably shouldn't have, and now your stomach is doing acrobatics. You stumble into a nhà thuốc (pharmacy) and the lady behind the counter looks at you like "so… what's wrong?" This whole post exists so you can answer her — quickly, correctly, and without miming a tummy ache like a sad clown.

Seriously, that's it. Vietnamese doesn't make you conjugate anything or memorize a scary grammar chart here. Đau + the part = "my ___ hurts." Once you know the body parts, you can complain about literally anything. And let's be honest, complaining about small aches is a core human joy. Let's build your vocabulary from the head down.

Start at the top: the head and face

We'll go region by region so it sticks. First, everything from the neck up.

Notice something? Vietnamese doesn't fuss about singular vs plural. Two eyes, one eye — both are just mắt. Nobody's counting. Now let's actually use them, because a word you've never said out loud is basically a stranger.

The middle bits: neck, throat, shoulders, back

Now we move south to the parts that ache after a long day hunched over your phone (no judgment — same here).

A quick heads-up on two sneaky ones: cổ is the neck, but họng is the throat — the inside part that gets scratchy when you're getting sick. When you feel a cold coming, it's almost always đau họng you want.

Arms, legs, and the knee that betrays you

Last cluster — the limbs. Good news: Vietnamese is refreshingly lazy here.

Here's the fun part: tay covers both your hand and your whole arm, and chân covers your foot and your whole leg. Context does the work. If you point at your hand and say đau tay, everyone gets it. If you're limping and say đau chân, nobody's confused about which end hurts.

The pharmacy scene: steal this whole conversation

Okay, back to that melting-in-the-sun moment. Here's a mini script you can basically memorize. Walk in, and go:

She might ask if it's the runny kind of trouble (it usually is), poke around for symptoms, and then hand you something. When she does, a polite close:

Swap đau bụng for whatever's wrong — đau đầu, đau họng, đau răng — and the same script carries you through 90% of pharmacy visits in Saigon. Notice the friendly dạ at the start and chị ơi to get her attention — that politeness is the oil that makes everything run smooth here.

Does this change between North and South?

Mostly, no — đau đầu is đau đầu everywhere. But there are a couple of spots where a Saigon ear and a Hanoi ear hear different words, and this is exactly the kind of thing that makes people go "oh, so THAT'S why my textbook sounded off."

That third row is the sneaky one for our topic. In the South, when you feel unwell you say bị bịnh. Up North, ốm means "sick" — but in the South ốm just means "skinny"! So if a Saigonese friend says nay tui hơi mệt, chắc bị bịnh, they mean "I feel sick today," and nobody's talking about weight. The body parts themselves, thankfully, are the same on both ends of the country.

Frequently asked questions

And that's the whole toolkit. Fifteen body parts, one tiny word, and now you can complain about your aches like a true Saigonese. The best way to lock it in is to actually say these out loud with someone who'll gently fix your tones — which is exactly what a live lesson is for. If you want to learn Southern Vietnamese online with people who grew up ordering pho and haggling at the pharmacy in this exact dialect, come hang out with us.