I think you’re simply talking about creating a LingQ and yes of course this works in Vietnamese. But to restate the 2 separate issues:
- Because the unit of meaning in Vietnamese is often a combination of 2 (or 3) words rather than a single space-delimited word, LingQ does not proactively suggest the word combination as a LingQ rather than the 2 component words.
To reiterate the example from above. Việt Nam (ie 2 separate ‘words’) is the name of the country, whereas Việt and Nam as individual words have other meanings. If the LingQ reader sees the word combination Việt Nam in some text then it is a high probability that the country is being referred to rather than trying to interpret the individual component words. So it is the word-pair ‘Việt Nam’ that should be offered as the LingQ rather than the individual component words.
- If a word-pair LiingQ is created manually (eg for Việt Nam) then this LingQ should have full priority over any LingQs for the component words. So only the priority LingQ should be shown as coloured in the text AND the component words should not appear as separate entries in the vocabulary sidebar. (Given the prevalence of word-pairs in Vietnamese, the sidebar can become 2 or 3 times longer than necessary (and hence quite confusing) if the word-pair AND the component words are all shown separately in sentence or page view.)