What’s the vowel? I eat this a lot and would like to say it properly.
“o” as in “foe,” so far as I know.
Helena writes:
> What’s the vowel? I eat this a lot . . .
You should try eating something other than vowels. They’re not very nutritious.
Waiters I’ve asked have said something like “fuh,” but odds are just as good that I didn’t hear right… nowadays I just order it by number.
A Vietnamese friend once told me that it’s pronounced “fuh”, short u sound. Rhymes with bun*, oddly enough.
- another Vietnamese dish, like a salad with rice noodles and bean sprouts
Yep. Everything I’ve heard suggests its pronounced “Fuh.” No hardcore sources, just a bunch of friends that eat it a lot.
It’s “fuh” with kind of a dip and then a raise in your voice halfway through the “uh” sound.
My sister and I have been sitting here repeating “pho” to figure this out for you. 
Oh btw, pho and bun don’t really rhyme. The second word is kind of like “boong” with a raise in your voice.
I feel really silly now.
I worked with several Vietnamese, and I was never able to pronounce pho. (Actually, there’s an accent on the o. IIRC, it’s kind of like a little question mark.) It sort of sounded like “fuh” with a rising tone at the end. Sometimes it sounded as if it were two syllables. As I said, I could never get the hang of saying it. One of my (Vietnamese) friends at work used to just say “foe” (like the number fo’) to be funny.
“Bun” always sounded like “boom” to me. Mmmmm… Bun bo Hue!
My wife is Vietnamese. I will humbly submit I can pronouce it damn near perfectly, but I’m no linguist and it’s hard to get it across in text.
Basically, if you say “fur” as a Commonwealth country (except Canada) English speaker would say it (no big, rolling, North American ‘r’ - furrrr), you’ll get by. That’s the sound. Americans, pretend you’re making fun of an Australian’s pronunciation of ‘beer’ (y’know the drill: ‘beeah’), and apply the same principle to the word ‘fur’. No final ‘r’.
Now, once you’ve got the sound worked out, you’ll need to get the tone right. Starting from a mid-level, drop it low, then kick right back up to a point somewhere higher than where you started.
F[sub]u[/sub][sup]ah[/sup] - kinda.
Sorry if this sounds complicated. It’s not a difficult word, just that it’s hard to explain with a keyboard.
Aah look, wherever you’re from - if unsure, just say “fur”. You’ll probably be understood.
Our local pho shop has a menu with a “how to” pronunciation guide.
It is pronounced “fuh” with a rising questioning inflection. I’ve been told that my Vietnamese menu-speak is quite good for a whitey Seattleite.
Heaven is found in a Pho Tai Chin Nam washed down with a glistening Cafe Sua Da.
Though there’s a Vietnamese restaurant less than a block from my house, I once naively pronounced it ‘foe’. A friend of mine, at least as white-bread as I am, looked at me incredulously: “Did you say ‘foe’?” Blush, willing correction to ‘fuh’.
If you look closely at the word you’ll usually see a diacritical that resembles a question mark over the O. As GargoyleWB says, just say ‘fuh’ as though it were a question (‘fuh?’) and you should be fine. This has led to many ‘what the fuh?’ jokes at work.
By the way, the waitstaff at the restaurant don’t seem to care how I pronounce it. They just bring it. It’s always good.
You’ve really gotta drop the tone first, otherwise it won’t be understood (well, if you’re in a pho restaurant, it probably will). It’s only a fraction of a second, but it does lower. Then, granted, the majority of the word is on a rising questioning inflection.
Thanks! I’ll give it a try!
So is Vietnamese tonal? I had no idea!
Here’s a guide to how the little accents above and below vowels in Vietnamese. I looked around a bit to see if I could find any audio files, but I haven’t stumbled upon them yet.
For what it’s worth though, most of the non-Vietnamese customers of pho places pronounce it like “foe,” so it doesn’t matter what you call it as long as they understand. Pho has been getting more and more mainstream where I live the past few years. Most places will do chicken instead of beef in the soup if you want. Most of them will also it without meat. Recently I went to a pho place that’s not run by Vietnamese. It’s run by Salvadoreans (who also run most of the non-chain Mexican restaurants in the D.C. area).
At Pho An (my local one), their slogan is So Pho So Good 
If you are really unsure, there’s absolutely no shame at all in asking the waiter for “beef noodle soup”. I’ve seen plenty of whitebread Aussies do just that. They still get their pho, and the restaurant still gets its money.
An etymology note: I recall reading that pho is a corruption of the French word feu, which is “fire”. Anybody else know if this is so?
Vietnamese-American checking in. Vietnamese is indeed a tonal language, and TheLoadedDog’s explanation is about as good as I’ve seen it represented textually. If you start low and end a bit higher, you can’t go wrong (well, you can, but it’ll be entertaining for us native-speakers anyway ).
As a side note, bun is pronounced more like “boon” with the exact same low-to-not-so-low-questioning inflection, and the “n” is mostly unvoiced. That is, you end the “oo” vowel with your tongue on the upper teeth. Think of it as the first half of an “n.” Avoid, at all costs, ending it with a “nuh” sound, or else risk much merriment at your expense!
Someday I’m gonna open a Vietnamese restaurant and call it: What the Pho?