Learning the Language

For beginners there is a great set of videos on YouTube, enter "learn Vietnamese Annie" and you'll find them.  I learned a few things I hadn't run into before. 

The hardest adaptation for westerners is of course the tones.  It takes a long time to distinguish them and longer to hear them foremost.  Next hardest is the slight differences between consonant sounds ... like the way -ng sounds like ng and m at the same time or tốt sounds almost like tốp.  That last one I can't hear at all.  Some people just can't do ng- or ngh- or ươ no matter how much they practice.

I used to get confused with sao(why) and sau(after). Or pronouncing sua with ~(milk) and sua with ?(repair). If you don't pronounce those correctly how ever slight the difference is they will not understand what you want.

ChrisFox wrote:

For beginners there is a great set of videos on YouTube, enter "learn Vietnamese Annie" and you'll find them.

Wow this is a great resource. Annie is funny and makes it interesting to understand.

Thanks

You can distinguish by the word goes after/before "sao" & "sau":
- Tại sao - why; sao thế - what's wrong; ngôi sao - star...
- Sau đó - after, sau này, từ đó về sau - from then on...
- Sữa - milk; sữa + N -> sữa bột/mẹ/bò...
- Sửa - repair: sửa chửa, sửa sang, sửa soạn ( prepare).
Wow, now i realized Vietnamese is so hard. All in all, just base on the content of your conversation & context. In southern area, I or most of people speak " sửa" - " sữa"; "sao" - "sau" in the same way.

Well, when I asked about these, the reply I got boiled down to "context."  Far as I can tell the diphthongs are indistinguishable.  But sao is almost always as vì sao or tại sao, so that's a giveawa.

Sửa and sữa are another matter.  In the northern dialect they're trivially distinguishable and if you try to get a southerner to explain the difference don't be surprised if you suddenly hear a little glottal stop on the  sữa.  The old joke: sửa Hon Da ---> Honda Milk.  Down here the two tones both sounds like the  dấu hỏi.   I speak in the northern tones anyway

Amy_Duong wrote:

- Sửa - repair: sửa chửa

sửa chữa, no?

I've always wondered why Vietnamese doubles up words like this.  I call them fix-fix pairs.  To lớn is another.  Two words that mean basically the same thing glommed together in a compound word.

Good_Man wrote:

ChrisFox wrote:

For beginners there is a great set of videos on YouTube, enter "learn Vietnamese Annie" and you'll find them.

Wow this is a great resource. Annie is funny and makes it interesting to understand.

Thanks

NP.  She's great, the explanations are very clear and the videos are brief, you can watch them several times without getting bored.  #24 told me about the có phải construction which I had never run across.

For those like me who learn best from books, this is far and away the best one I have ever run across:  http://www.amazon.com/Chung-Noi-Convers … ietnamese, "Chung Ta Noi" in case the moderators wipe it out. 

My hearing is not good, I'm not at hearing-aid level but I miss a lot of distinctions, like I can't tell t- from th- to save my life.  The Annie video with a piece of paper made it clear.

Yeah, you're right; " sửa chữa"
Eventhough, some words have the same meaning but they create different feeling - expression.
Fix-fix pairs are good for writting & usually, i dont use too many of them in daily talk, just too " sến" lol
To lớn, i guess still have a similar fix - fix pairs: " lớn lao".

Amy_Duong wrote:

Yeah, you're right; " sửa chữa"
Eventhough, some words have the same meaning but they create different feeling - expression.
Fix-fix pairs are good for writting & usually, i dont use too many of them in daily talk, just too " sến" lol
To lớn, i guess still have a similar fix - fix pairs: " lớn lao".

I think it's actually pretty cool.  I've learned several languages (forgotten most of them but oh well) and every language seems to slice up the world in slightly different ways.  What's really strange is having learned one new language to then look back at your own and see things you have never noticed before, like how very odd the superfluous "did" is in English ("Did you eat yet?"), or that "can" has no infinitive.  Russian and German sharpened up my English because I became so conscious of verb conjugation.  Vietnamese has me thinking about who I am talking to .. of course we have only "you" but German has du / Sie / ihr, and Vietnamese has .. Jesus .. con, em, cô, anh, chị, cậu, bạn ... bả and ông!  How do you know which to use?  I have a really hard time calling someone only a few months younger than me "em."

Hm, it's kind of complication. In your position - a man, if you meet a woman, you can call them "bà" ( she must be very old, white hair, wrinkles, > 60 years old), " bác" ( not that old, little younger), " cô" ( maybe under 40), " em" ( young girl, under 35). Well, i just said based on my feeling, it's not exactly scale.
Ah i forgot, with children u can call them " con" (often be used by southern people) or " cháu"

ChrisFox wrote:

I know two kinds of expats here: those who make no effort to learn the language and those to whom not learning it would never cross their minds.  Most seem to be in the first group though I know one man who abruptly decided to take the plunge and is now actively studying. 

I started before moving here, continued here, then got discouraged and dropped out for about a year.  Now I'm back into it.  On the one hand I forgot a lot of words, on the other hand my comprehension is picking up fast and I can read anything but a newspaper, and when talking with someone I know it no longer sounds like gibberish, though there are still a lot of words go by too fast.

You really need to practice.  Weekly lessons aren't enough.  Making lists of translations isn't enough. 

Problem in Cần Thơ is that people come from everywhere and sound so different from each other.  With my neighbor I can talk about abstractions; with the guy who does our house repairs, I can barely tell he's speaking Vietnamese. 

Friends and I meet a few nights a week at Trung Nguyên at Big C, anyone interested in forming a group?  Both Vietnamese and westerners.

Yes, the secret to learning any new language is Immersion.  If I was in Cần Thơ, I'd love to join you.

Vincent and I are planning to back CT this month.

cang_nduc wrote:

Vincent and I are planning to back CT this month.

Cool.

You guys can stay at the house and save the hotel fees.

http://namlongcantho.com/file_upload/ga … case/8.jpg

How you refer to someone gets more complicated when your fiance is the niece of your cousin in-law. So now in her presence I refer her uncle as cau bay but not in her presence I refer to him as anh and my cousin who I used to call chi Thuy is now called mo bay. And the list goes on for the rest in the family all having different name references based on my fiance's presence or not.

khanh44 wrote:

How you refer to someone gets more complicated when your fiance is the niece of your cousin in-law. So now in her presence I refer her uncle as cau bay but not in her presence I refer to him as anh and my cousin who I used to call chi Thuy is now called mo bay. And the list goes on for the rest in the family all having different name references based on my fiance's presence or not.

When in doubt, use the more/higher respected term. 

I think it's an interesting phenomenon that the Southern Vietnamese use their order of birth as a "name" to call each other.  People rarely use their legal given names. 

So like....

"Hey Two, what's up?"
"No much Three, I'm just chilling.  You hear from Five yet?"
"Yah, he went fishing with Six and Eight"

Almost sounds like a baseball team.

Yeah we had a distant relative as a người giúp việc, people referred to her as em ba.  Her sister is at the house every time my partner's mom is here, she's em hai.  When she talks it's like every single vowel is ươ.

Language breakthrough.  Closing the lips on terminal consonants.  I don't hear the difference, not even inside my own skull, but everyone else does. I say tốt just like always, but close lips, making it labial but not plosive, and I'm better understood.

Anyone in or near Cần Thơ interested in meeting regularly to practice Vietnamese?  I'm at intermediate level and have friends also learning.

I will be in Can Tho shortly.  I speak fluent English and Vietnamese.  CAN I run with your pack?

Wild_1 wrote:

I will be in Can Tho shortly.  I speak fluent English and Vietnamese.  CAN I run with your pack?

when? i'll save u a beer )

Hi Cang,

Right now, I am shooting for the beginning of next month.  If not, it will be right after Christmas.  Must wait to see how my rehab goes.  But, that will be it.  No more postponement! 

You and Quyen better save me 2.

Wild_1 wrote:

I will be in Can Tho shortly.  I speak fluent English and Vietnamese.  CAN I run with your pack?

We don't have a pack, we have a herd.  Or maybe a pride, a leap, a pandemonium, a gaggle, a congress, a smack, a deceit, or, my personal favorite, a murder. 

I think pandemonium (parrots) is the best fit.

A pandemonium?  Whew, that is going to be kind of rowdy...  But, nothing I can't handle.  I used to have a couple of lorikeets.

Does anywhere in Can Tho offer language courses in spoken Khmer? I'm not looking for a full blown Khmer course, as my Vietnamese still needs much work, But I would like to learn some basic spoken Khmer.

Language breakthrough.  Closing the lips on terminal consonants.  I don't hear the difference, not even inside my own skull, but everyone else does. I say tốt just like always, but close lips, making it labial but not plosive, and I'm better understood.

Chris, that's a damned good tip. Thanks for that.