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Tiếng Việt

Learn · Part One — Learning to smell · Lesson 2 of 9

Smell reference points already in your kitchen

You don’t need to buy anything to start. Most of this dictionary is in your kitchen cupboard and at the market down the street.

Learning to smell has a barrier that learning to see does not: you cannot smell through a screen. Every description on this site is useless until you hold the real thing in your hand.

The good news is that you need to buy almost nothing.

Seven things you have right now

Open the kitchen cupboard and the medicine cabinet and you will have at least seven reference points.

A lime gives you Vietnamese lime peel — the zero mark of the whole citrus family. A bottle of medicated balm gives you the standard for the medicinal family. A spoonful of sugar and a pan give you caramel, and this is the best exercise in the whole dictionary. A knob of ginger gives you three layers of smell in one slice.

And more: peppercorns in a mortar, a stick of cinnamon in the spice box, and a pot of sticky rice if your household has glutinous rice.

Six things from the market for next to nothing

Galangal and turmeric to complete the trio of rhizomes. A bunch of Vietnamese coriander and a bunch of perilla to practise the most important contrasting pair in the green family. Kaffir lime leaves, which sit right beside the herbs at every vegetable stall. And a little fermented shrimp paste — the most unpleasant entry but also the one that teaches most about concentration.

The total cost is under fifty thousand dong for thirteen reference points.

Three things you have to wait for

Not every entry can be bought. First rain makes you wait for the weather. Cut grass exists only for five minutes after the cut. Areca blossom gives off its scent only early in the morning, and only in the flowering season.

This is not an inconvenience but part of the learning. Some smells are tied to a moment, and knowing how to wait for the right one is a skill too.

How to arrange a smelling session

Don’t smell many things in a row. The nose saturates very quickly — after about four or five samples, sensitivity drops clearly and everything starts to sound the same.

Three samples per session is reasonable. Smell each sample in three short sniffs rather than one long one. Between two samples, smell the crook of your own elbow for a few seconds — that is how sensory evaluation panels reset the nose, and it works much better than smelling coffee beans, as many people still believe.

Write it down at once. Three words, by hand, uncorrected. The first note is always rough and you will want to rewrite it nicely — don’t. That roughness is data.

Further reading for this part

A shared list for the whole of Part One — Learning to smell, not a note for every sentence. We state what each source was used for.

  1. Asifa Majid and Niclas Burenhult, 2014. Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right one A study of the Jahai of the Malay Peninsula, a group with an abstract smell vocabulary. It underpins the central argument of Part One: the gap lies in vocabulary, not in the nose.
  2. Caroline Bushdid et al., 2014. Humans can discriminate more than 1 trillion olfactory stimuli The trillion figure is widely quoted. We cite it together with its critique, because Meister (2015) and Gerkin and Castro (2015) showed problems with how it was extrapolated. It is our example of how an attractive number can spread without anyone checking it.
  3. Những cây thuốc và vị thuốc Việt Nam A Vietnamese-language source for the species names, parts used and sensory descriptions of most of the medicinal plants in the dictionary. Where it and other literature disagree — as with garden mint — we give both.

One thing must be said plainly. We have not read every work above in the original; most of the knowledge comes through secondary literature and reviews. We say so rather than let the list suggest a depth of research we have not reached.

Last updated: September 2026