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Vietnamese: how hard is it? | ||
Tags: Vietnamese | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4033 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 9 of 31 04 June 2014 at 1:25am | IP Logged | |||||
A general lack of derivational methods. That's what you're saying? And very weak if nonexistant boundaries between word classes. There are technically no prepositions. Adverbs and adjectives don't exist either. It's all verb stacking, or it used to be. Thank the lord grammaticalization has been happening in East Asia. And with the exception of some Sinitic languages, Vietnamese has been one of the most progressive in pulling its act together from the monosyllabilization disaster. Edited by Stolan on 04 June 2014 at 6:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4950 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 10 of 31 05 June 2014 at 5:24am | IP Logged | |||||
If the tones are so much more complex, what is it that makes the language slightly easier than Mandarin? Is it the Romanization?
What do you mean by "grammaticalization in East Asia"? And why would "monosyllabilization" [sic??] be a disaster? The language seems to work fine for the Vietnamese to function as a human society, and that's all that matters no? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 11 of 31 05 June 2014 at 10:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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Stolan thinks all languages need to comply with some arbitrary Stolan standard of
grammar. He doesn't understand that the Vietnamese, who have simply been talking all this time, don't really seem to think so. Furthermore he also doesn't realise that Vietnamese is grammaticalized, because it has a grammar! The only problem is the grammar is the one that describes Vietnamese, the Vietnamese are not the ones describing grammar. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4033 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 12 of 31 05 June 2014 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There are more growing boundaries in the language. Prepositions are evolving from motion verbs, meaning
adverbial phrases are a possibility. In Thai, one would say "I go store 3 hour". For three hours?, In three hours? How does one say "I hit the tree with a hammer"? "I take hammer and hit hit tree" "I hit tree, but before I take hammer because I want hit tree" Huh? Cantonese and Vietnamese are also evolving devices similar to articles via measure words. It isn't the lack of inflection but the very small levels of elaboration. They are all mostly wh-in-situ with no word order restrictions despite being uninflecting, Isan has word order so free with so little marking that intonation and context are important!, but pragmatic word order is a step many are taking. Monosyllabic words only get one so far unless a method of derivation involves consonants being attached or vowels mutating without adding another syllable onto the word. How does one say "blindness"? "Not-able-see-problem" Derivation is almost nothing leaving phrasing as the only indicator of many things. Transitivity? Direct vs indirect objects? Nope. The mandatory usage of aspect particles? Does someone say "I go yesterday" instead of "I went" because the adverb makes it apparent? No, because the usage of tense is grammaticalized. Cantonese has far greater mandatory usage of aspect particles for example. Mind you all, I dislike the other extreme end of useless redundancy and horrific irregular even more. I am not too fond of overly regular "plain" languages like Hungarian, Turkish, and some Native American languages like Cree or Cherokee with tiny phonological inventories and mechanical affixation as well. Edited by Stolan on 05 June 2014 at 2:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 13 of 31 05 June 2014 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ja und?
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4033 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 14 of 31 05 June 2014 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You don't find anything unusual about a language like this?:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_grammar And you don't find the small vocabulary methods where "France man/language/country" is proper? and the absence of adpositions strange? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 15 of 31 05 June 2014 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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No, not really. Strangeness is just dependent on what you define as strange. Edited by tarvos on 05 June 2014 at 6:13pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5229 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 16 of 31 05 June 2014 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Tarvos is, I believe, piqued because you referred to the monosyllabic "disaster," which makes it seems like something is wrong with the language. Wrongness is different than strangeness--a language could be plenty weird and still function as well as any other language. Strangeness is also rather subjective--Laotians don't find their language strange.
You seem to conflate the two concepts. If you mean the language is different than what you're used to, fine, you're correct. No one's going to argue. If you mean the language is somehow worse than other languages--either in ease of comprehension, ease of learning, ease of writing system, amount of concepts which can be expressed, then specify what metric you're referring to and how the particular language fails in that respect. Then a discussion can be had as to whether or not it's true. It's rather as if you were trying to argue what the best animal was. Obviously the whale, right? I mean, look at humans compared to the whale--they're so weird! They live in air, have no tails, have four--FOUR!--limbs (quite excessive), don't eat krill, like at all, and can only hold their breath for like two minutes. Ergo, whales are best. 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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