The purpose of this study is to design an appropriate training course on Mandarin Chinese onomatopoeia for learners who are native Vietnamese speakers. A literature review on previous studies comparing and contrasting these two languages reveals that: (1) the phonological structures of Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese are similar; (2) the components onomatopoeia function as in a sentence are almost the same; (3) the phonology of Vietnamese onomatopoeia is closer to a modeled object than Mandarin Chinese onomatopoeia; and (4) only Mandarin Chinese contains onomatopoeia phrases that use different characters but have the same sound. It is thus concluded that a Mandarin Chinese onomatopoeia language course for Vietnamese native speakers needs to focus on cross-cultural experiences supplemented by training on sentence components and proper pronunciation. Based on these principles, a 100-minute (2 classes) onomatopoeia training course has been designed for sophomores from the Department of Chinese Literature in Hanoi, Vietnam.