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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 25 of 31 07 June 2014 at 2:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've had experience with Thai, I have a book on it on the shelf near me. Vietnamese is obviously similar, but I have
also said it is moving away from what it used to be due to innovations. You may assume that an isolating languages like Vietnamese is (or will have been) like a piano to a violin (a language with inflections). Instead of a few strings, it compensates by having extra keys elsewhere so it can compete with a violin. No, it is a piano with 3 keys only, the violin's equivalent clearly is more complex in syntax and semantics. You have Indonesian on your list Henry, can you say with a straight face that it can even be compared with anything else you are studying? Vietnamese (and the rest) are pretty much tonal versions of Indonesian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 26 of 31 07 June 2014 at 3:39am | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you for confirming my suspicion. So that's a No.
I'm at the very beginning stages of learning Indonesian. I would not presume to compare it with any other language. Since you've not studied Vietnamese, you probably shouldn't try to compare it with any other language either. In any case, it has nothing to do with the original poster's question. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 07 June 2014 at 3:39am 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 5094 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 27 of 31 17 June 2014 at 4:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Vietnamese has little resemblance to any of it's neighbouring countries. Also keep in
mind that it is not monosyllabic. For example the word for train (freight train etc.) is xe lua. The space is between syllables. It just looks that way on paper. 3 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 28 of 31 17 June 2014 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I can imagine more words will fossilize as derivational suffixes in the near future. Edited by Stolan on 17 June 2014 at 6:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| audiophile Groupie United States Joined 5117 days ago 44 posts - 81 votes Studies: French | Message 29 of 31 24 June 2014 at 6:49am | IP Logged | |||||
That's not true. I happen to learn some basic Vietnamese from　Assimil, and can map at least 60% of the vocabulary to Chinese, such as a lot of political and cultural terms. The grammar is also quite similar. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 30 of 31 24 June 2014 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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But Vietnamese grammar and basic vocabulary is more similar to Khmer than to Chinese.
It's not extended vocabulary and loanwords what defines a language (otherwise English would be a Romance language). 2 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 31 of 31 24 June 2014 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
To add, none of those components trigger any sound change in the respective parts aside from reduplication, and all syllables are stressed equally as Vietnamese is tonal, so no word stress at all, the amount of pausing may be the only indicator of where the spaces are between words in a sentence so the definition may be thin. So by polysyllabic, most mean words including derivational parts that cannot stand alone and assimilation to the word. Morphemes are possibly 100% transparent for every word in Vietnamese, if not for all the languages near it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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