Vietnamese Update
I haven’t posted an update on my journey to learning Vietnamese in a while.
It’s actually going pretty good. We have moved on from learning sounds/tones and are concentrating more on reading, vocabulary, and listening. Though, I’m always continuing to practice the sounds with my tutor – I’m getting much better, but still have issues with some of the sounds some of the time.
Each lesson my tutor reads me a short paragraph a few words at a time and I write them down. This is to help me learn to hear the tones – because native speakers have a VERY SUBTLE tone variation. I often don’t hear what tone is being said until my tutor purposefully exaggerates it a little bit. I’m sure as time goes on I’ll get better at picking up the tones and slight variations in letter sounds.
Vocabulary continues to be my weakest area. I am making some headway, but it is slow and frustrating at times. Particularly frustrating is knowing when a phrasal word is being used as opposed to a single word. For instance, cá mập together is shark (cá is fish), but mập on its own means fat or plump. So, put the two words together literally and you will never get the true meaning. It’s like in English, the phrasal verbs “fill up”, “got up” or “broke down” mean something different than the separate words that make them up and must be used in specific ways in sentences. Another type of phrasal word is when two different words are put together and yet the meaning is the same. Like tàu thuyền – it means a ship or boat. However, each word by itself also means boat or ship – yet you often see them used together, like in English if we were to say “cruise ship boat”. Another thing is when a word has multiple meanings and I’m not sure which is the proper one; for instance từ means “word”, “from/since”, and “to quit/renounce”.
Some ways I know I’m making progress are that sometimes I now think in Vietnamese. For instance, the other day there was a storm and it was windy outside and raining – in my mind popped the words gió and mưa, which mean wind and rain, respectively. I know it’s not a big deal, but it felt like a breakthrough of sorts; I didn’t have to concentrate and try to remember those words, they just popped into my head. Another thing that made me feel good happened the other day in the Vietnamese grocery. I was pointing to the bananas in the store saying the Vietnamese word for them (chuối) to Parker, and a man looked at me with astonishment and said, “wow, you said that in Viet, very good”. I couldn’t believe that a native speaker, who wasn’t my tutor, actually understood me, even if it was one word, especially since that triple vowel combination took me a while to get down consistently.
Parker is continuing to pick up Vietnamese words, too.
Things I need to work on:
- vocabulary
- consistently speaking and hearing the sounds ơ and â make – they are very similar, both sounding pretty much like the a in “alone”, though ơ is more drawn out and kind of pushes up against the next letter in the word
- consistently speaking and hearing the sounds ô and âu make – they both sound pretty much like the o in “hope” – but the âu is ever-so-slightly different
- consistently hearing the difference between ch and tr – they are also very similar. I have the pronunciation down, but hearing the difference from a native speaker is tough sometimes
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Hmmm, my stumbling blocks seem to be consistent with yours. Vocabulary is just going to be memorization. I’ve accepted that.
On the ch and tr sounds for Southern VN, the tongue placement seems a little different. Could it be that way for central (trung) VN?
I haven’t been as diligent as you but I still do have VN words ringing in my head. Like the word expensive that my friend taught me…mắc quá. I find myself thinking that one a lot lately.
Continued success on your study!
Lori
[Reply]