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Vietnamese; My next 6W Challenge!! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| chrisphillips71 Groupie United States Joined 5228 days ago 64 posts - 86 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 25 22 August 2012 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Great update. I am curios. Putting aside the time it takes to translate from French to
English, how much time do you spend on each Assimil lesson? Is it the standard 30 minutes? I imagine that it would take me much more than that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6221 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 10 of 25 23 August 2012 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm probably spending 30 a day but I'm breaking it up. At night I'm spending 10-15 minutes learning the next day's lesson then the following day I'm spending 10-15 in the morning then 10-15 in the afternoon on my commute. I will probably need to step it up a bit when the dialogues get tougher though! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4658 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 11 of 25 24 August 2012 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In your introduction, you make a few remarks comparing Vietnamese to some neighboring languages. Just thought I’d comment briefly on this.
I think many of the Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese aren’t that difficult to identify. Here are some I found over 2 dictionary pages, and you could easily find many more. Viet Chin gia 家 jiā family giả 假 jiǎ fake gia 加 jiā add giác 角 jiǎo horn giải 解 jiě untie, explain giá 價 jià price, value Cognates between Vietnamese and Khmer are harder to come up with. Vietnamese underwent some radical changes, such as tonogenesis – I think your Vietnamese friend is engaging in a bit of wishful thinking about their mutual intelligibility. Here are two cognates anyway: Viet. năm ‘year’ = Khmer ch’nam Viet. ngày ‘day’ = Khmer t’ngai As an aside, in my view Khmer is more similar to Thai than to Vietnamese. Of course Thai and Khmer are not mutually intelligible like Thai and Lao are, but Thai borrowed a lot of Khmer words, and they share most borrowings from Pali/Sanskrit, use a similar writing system, etc. This just goes to show that a ‘genetic’ relationship (Viet. and Khmer are in the same ‘family’) doesn’t necessarily trump a strong contact relationship, especially for languages without a lot of morphology. Anyway, best of luck with Vietnamese. I think it’s harder than it looks, even if you know Mandarin. The Latin letters can be false friends, and one thing Vietnamese does share with Khmer is tricky vowel distinctions. Edited by viedums on 24 August 2012 at 6:45pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6221 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 12 of 25 26 August 2012 at 5:31am | IP Logged | |||||
True! I am finding many more as I am getting a better understanding of Vietnamese script and vocabulary. It is almost like a fun (although somewhat dorky) detective game; "Find the Chinese Loanword"
Yeah, the more Vietnamese I am learning, the more I think he was exaggerating a bit! I don't see the link between the two at all! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6221 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 13 of 25 01 September 2012 at 7:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have been butchering... er, ahem, LEARNING Vietnamese for a little over two weeks now. I won’t belabor the facts
about how difficult Vietnamese is. (Did I mention the 6 tones?) Rather, I am quite pleased with how much I feel I have accomplished in such little time! Not that my abilities in Vietnamese are much better at this point than a Vietnamese one year old, but I’m am nonetheless pleased. I’d like to give most of the credit for this to the Assimil method. I'm sure most of you on this forum are WELL familiar with Assimil, but for those who aren't... Assimil is a French company founded by Alphonse Chérel in 1929. The courses he created carried titles along the lines of “With Ease” ,” Without Toil”, “Sans Peine”, “Senza Sforzo”, “Sin Esfuerzo” etc. His goal was to make language learning just that, “without toil”! The Assimil courses contain anywhere from 60-120 lessons in a course (sadly, Vietnamese has only 63...) The native language is printed on the even pages and the the target language is printed on the odd. This makes it easy to cover up one side and translate back and forth without peeking. Each lesson consists of 10 line, brief, recorded conversations which teach the language in context (not lists of isolated vocabulary words). There are also some scant exercises and fill-in-the blank drills at the conclusion of each unit. I am told the conversations are intentionally composed such that they are authentic and colloquial. A woman who completed the French course told me that in France people were quite surprised with the authenticity of her French. She said several people commented “ Wow! You actually speak French like we do!” ...and we all know how liberally the French compliment foreigners attempting to speak their language! Here is the real beauty of the Assimil approach. Each unit should take only 20-30 minutes a day to complete. The following day, one simply moves on to the next unit. Alphonse Chérel called this the PASSIVE phase of learning. “With ease”, one just listens and repeats. The brain gradually begins to ASSIMILATE the language so it becomes automatic (Get it? Assimil - ate?). Later, after 50 units or so, the student is encouraged to go back to the first unit and begin to translate the dialogues from the native language back to the target language. This is the ACTIVE phase and is said to cement the dialogues back in one’s mind after several weeks away from them. I had never done a full Assimil course before so I figured I had nothing to lose trying the course for Vietnamese. After about 10 lessons, I felt totally lost. “Shouldn’t I be doing something more? Shouldn’t I be making vocabulary lists and translating sentences every night? What if I forget today’s vocabulary? How on earth can I move on to the next unit tomorrow if I haven’t totally mastered today’s yet?!?” I reached out with my concerns to several Assimil veterans on the HTLAL forum and they essentially told me to just chill out. They said it isn’t called “Without Toil” for nothing and to just keep doing my daily regimen. emk suggested that if I was so worried, I should go back to the previous week’s units and go through them all. He said I would be amazed with how easy they would be; he was right! What seemed near impossible a week ago was pretty easy on review. Maybe there is something to the method and its existence (nearly unchanged) for almost 90 years! The only issue for me is that Assimil’s Le Vietnamien Sans Peine is only available in French. I have never actually studied French so I’m learning a language I don’t know, through a language that I don’t know. Luckily, written French is close enough to languages I DO know (Spanish, Portuguese and Italian) that I can figure out about 98% of what is written in French. For the remaining 2%, hellloooooo Google Translate! I may have more problems as the conversations get more complex, but for now I’m making it work. An unintentional, extra bonus is that my French is getting a heck of a lot better! Here is a great NPR story about Assimil: I love the line, “...then presto! You will be talking like, roughly, an unusually cosmopolitan three-year-old.” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5021582 & Assimil’s website: http://www.assimil.com/ & Video from Professor Alexander Arguelles (speaker of 50 or so languages well known to this forum) singing Assimil’s praises and taking the viewer through a few courses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLvTEqXqlsI Assimil wiki: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Assimil These are my conversations that I learned this week... translated from Vietnamese... and French into English … Bai Thu Tam Are you still hungry? Not any more. I’m not hungry any more. Me, I’m really hungry! Let’s go and eat! OK, but where? Nearby, at a Vietnamese restaurant. You have eaten there before? Yeah before, many times before. Well then, lets go. Bai Thu Chin This is my new house. How Beautiful! Your house, how many meters (big) is it? My house, it is 100 meters (big). How big! In this house, how many rooms (are there)? My house has seven rooms. 1 dining room, 2 salons (“meeting rooms”), and 4 bedrooms. Your family, how many people are there? My family has 3 people. Me, my wife and my son. Bai Thu Muoi Excuse me sir, this square, what is it called? It is Da Kao square. We are looking for Tan Dinh market. Please sir, will you show us the way? (show the road for us) It’s easy! You two arrive at the crossroad... afterwards, you two turn right. Tan Dinh market...from the crossroad, is it far? No, Tan Dinh market, can’t be more, from the crossroad... about 500m. … it is in front of the church. Thank you very much! Bai Thu Muoi Mot Is your work nearby? No, I work in the outskirts. How far from here? Well, from here, the outskirts are 30 km. That’s far! Then, how do you get to work? Well, by bike! I can’t believe that! Are you telling the truth? It’s the truth! I go by bike to arrive at the station... then, I take the train (in order to) go to work! Bai Thu Muoi Hai It’s beautiful weather today. Let’s go out! OK, but where to? Would you like to go to the zoo? A zoo? What is that? It has plants, animals, people... Are there a lot of people? Today is Sunday, the zoo is crowded! Well then, I’m not going … I’m very afraid of crowds! On to next week and 7 more lessons! Edited by liddytime on 01 September 2012 at 7:07am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5254 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 14 of 25 01 September 2012 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm enjoying your log, @liddytime. Your enthusiasm is infectious. I love how you wholeheartedly embrace the zen approach with "the mind of a beginner"! That's half the battle. With the proper tools and the right mindset, that's a brilliant recipe for success. Boa sorte com a língua vietnamita, estarei seguindo o seu progreso.
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6221 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 15 of 25 01 September 2012 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
Obrigado pelos comentários! Eu me divertindo com a linguagem! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 16 of 25 01 September 2012 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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liddytime, just so you think there's nothing in common between Vietnamese and Georgian:
When I type Georgian at Google Translator, it keeps switching from the phonetic keyboard to the normal keyboard. So, when I try to type Georgian with the wrong keyboard, I get a random set of characters and Google often "detects" it as being Vietnamese =D 1 person has voted this message useful |
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