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TAC 2012 - Team 龍 - petrklic - Vietnamese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sundance Newbie United States Joined 4554 days ago 20 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 9 of 21 15 January 2012 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's encouraging news to me! Usually I have to work to overcome my American "r" when learning another language -- of course, with Vietnamese there will be other pronunciation issues, I'm sure. I was reading about something called "creaky voice" (according to Wikipedia: rising tone with a glottal break followed by a continuation of the rising tone). That seems like it's going to be hard to achieve : ) Are you trying to pronounce words at this stage, or trying to recognize them first? Continued good luck and I'm looking forward to reading about your classes, too, when they start. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| xees Newbie Joined 4892 days ago 28 posts - 64 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese | Message 10 of 21 16 January 2012 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Keep going! I'm sure you can reach A 1 in a year.
I'm living in Vietnam and i've reached about B 1 or B 2 in a year and a half :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4926 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 21 17 January 2012 at 2:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah, tones are definitely the more fun part of Vietnamese :) I think the creaky voice just means that you go so low with the tone that your voice becomes rough. I'm not sure how opera singers do it ;) The glottal stop is another challenging feature. The glottal stop itself is not at all hard. But in northern accent the ◌̣ tone (I believe it's called low falling) is pronounced with glottal stop, and typically the only thing after the glottal stop is a consonant. So for example một ("one") is pronounced /mo̰ʔt/. How I'm supposed to pronounce the "t" after the glottal stop is beyond me at this point. (Btw, ◌̰ is the symbol for creaky voice.)
Both, now that I have the recordings. I already noticed that I got some bad habits from the brief time that I was reading the words "for myself", with my inner voice. I had to learn that "a" and "ơ", for example, are long, while "ă" and "â" are short. Earlier I just thought they are different sounds, and wikipedia IPA maps for vietnamese really list them like that. Or "i" and "y" are presumably the same sound, but it seems to me that in words that end in "y", the terminating vowel is more pronounced. It's like, "vui" would be /vuj/, while "đây" is /dɜi/. I'm still unclear on the difference between "e" and "ê". The former sounds a bit front, or bright, the latter is close to what I'd call "normal" given my linguistic background. Similarly, Vietnamese b and d don't really sound like western at all, despite what's written everywhere. To me, they sound more pronounced, stronger, they resonate much more. As if hitting a concrete block with a rubber hammer ;) I'll need to sit one day when I have the apartment for myself, and just practice the hell out of them. I'll get it sorted out eventually. Only recently have I been able to start correcting how I say soft consonants in Russian (mainly "рь", I think my "ль" is as good as it ever will be, and "ть", "дь" and "нь" are the same in Russian as they are in Czech. But I had people repeatedly misunderstand my "тряпица"). And it's only a couple years that I finally noticed that my pronunciation of "thanks" is rather close to "tanks", and many similar near-petrified features. (But English is a linguistic stepchild of mine, I happened to kinda-sorta learn it through the life-long exposure, but never spent much time on, formally.) Which is to say that language is a life-long endeavor ;)
Thanks for encouragement. Right now I'm catching words one at a time (today's catch: "không phải là"!), and it's hard to be optimistic. I think I'll look back at about March, re-read all this, see if I'm any better, and project the actual goals for the end of the year. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4926 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 21 22 January 2012 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Vietnamese is syllable-based language. Most syllables have a meaning of their own, but of course there's not enough syllables in the language to express all concepts one would like to, and ultimately you end up constructing compound words. This has some fun repercussions, like the sentence "Học sinh học sinh vật". The initial "học sinh" means "student", then comes a verb "học", "to study", and finally "sinh vật", "biology". "Sinh" on its own means "to give birth". (This example is taken from [1].)
About a month ago, during my early research, I've taken a rather dubious Vietnamese frequency list (here, found linked from here), cleaned it up, and compared with a couple random Wikipedia articles. It turns out that top 1000 lexemes cover about 85% of the text. Top 1500 then cover about 90%, and at that point the curve flattens. With top 2500 you still have 91 or so percent. With English and Spanish [2], the numbers are 78% for top 1000, 85% for top 2000 and a bit below 90% for top 3000. So Vietnamese seems to hit the point of diminishing returns much sooner, and, I though back then, I only need about 300 words to hit ~60% coverage, at which point I'll be in the same situation as with Russian, and I already know that game can be won. But of course it doesn't work like that, because most words are compounds, and knowing the lexemes themselves just means that you end up thinking, mid-reading, what the heck is "room edge birth" supposed to mean. ("phòng vệ sinh", "bathroom"; "vệ-sinh" actually means hygiene, as vệ means not only "edge", but also "protect"). The upside is that often the compounds actually make sense. Eyeglasses are simply "eye glass" (mắt kính), greenhouse is "house glass" (nhà kính), garage is "house vehicle" (nhà xe). I've been delighted by this. It's like finding a pocket of sanity in the middle of language that makes no sense. (Yet; I'm working on it ☺) Another upside is that this enables finding new words by serendipity. I'm in Lesson 2 of my text book, and for every new word that it presents, I'm looking up meanings of the constituents, and then finding what other useful words one can derive from those constituents and my existing vocabulary. This is actually possible now that I have a dictionary. It wasn't possible with en.wiktionary alone, which has rather weak coverage of Vietnamese. vi.wiktionary doesn't seem to list those derivations either. It also doesn't work for all words. I always try to cross-check everything that the dictionary claims, in wikipedia or otherwise on the web. If I can't, I don't add that word. ¹) Vu Hai Quan et.al., Towards a Multi-Objective Corpus for Vietnamese Language ²) Mark Davies, Vocabulary Range and Text Coverage [...], 2005 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4708 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 13 of 21 28 January 2012 at 1:06am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Reading your log, Vietnamese sounds pretty interesting! I was surprised that I could recognise two words from Korean: zero (không - 공 gong) and student (Học sinh - 학생 hagsaeng).
It seems to me that it must be more difficult to learn syllables in this modified latin script than in the Korean Hangeul, which was designed especially to represent a syllable-based language. But regarding vocabulary acquisition, I'm sure you'll find that it becomes easier the more time you've spent on the language. I remember finding it really difficult to memorise these totally foreign words goverened by totally foreign principles, but once I got used to the language's inventory of sounds and syllables it got a lot easier. And as you describe in your last entry, sometimes the combination of syllables to form new words is just so neat that the other languages I have some knowledge of seem messy and arbitrary in comparison :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4926 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 21 28 January 2012 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Oh, cool! Vietnamese reportedly contains many loanwords from Chinese (as much as 60%), so perhaps it's similar with Korean.
I'm not sure. It seems to me that using Latin was not a bad decision a priori, but this particular implementation leaves a lot to wish for. So on one hand, because you don't have a letter for each sound, you describe some sounds with consonant clusters. So you write "ng" to denote "ŋ", "nh" to denote "ň" (a palatalized n), or "kh" to denote "х" (voiceless velar fricative). On the other hand, you end up inventing crazy new quasi-Latin letters đ, ơ and ư, because even with all those clusters you apparently still can't quite describe everything. It also seems to me that the system could have been made more consistent. E.g., ă is "short a", which is great, because that's what that diacritic means. Similarly you have й in Russian. So, why is the short variant of ơ written â? Couldn't it have been ơ̆? Why transcribe "f" as "ph", when you can use "f" right away? Why is "z" not "z", but "gi"? Or, does anyone know what's the difference in pronunciation between "c", "k" and "q"? (I'm explicitly not criticizing another phenomenon: that some sounds are written in a variety of ways. Thus "z" can be "d", "gi" or "r", and "s" can be "s" or "x". But the northern and southern dialects differ in the way you pronounce these, so it seems that there are solid linguistic reasons behind these choices.) The problem is that the motivation behind this was that Jesuit monks needed a way of encoding pronunciation internally, for their purposes, so they just used French and Portuguese eccentricities. They weren't inventing a writing system, but a study aid! If it wasn't designed all the way back in 17th century, I'd think that it was in order to be able to write it easily on typewriters (the đ is a d with a dash over it, ơ is o with a comma superscript, ỏ is o with a question mark above, etc.), like Soviets did when inventing new letters for cyrillization of Caucasian languages. On the other hand, I adore those flourishes of diacritic marks around each word: "hiểu", "tắm", "lỗi", and "i" with dots above and below "ị" must be the coolest letter out there.
Yes, definitely. I'm already starting to see this. It's not nearly as hard to remember new words now as it was a month ago, and I'm only about two months into the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4708 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 15 of 21 20 February 2012 at 1:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hey petrklic, how's the Vietnamese going? I really like your log and hope to read more interesting insights from you soon! :)
Fascinating that the writing was introduced by Jesuit monks... I guess lots of missionaries were responsible for more or less creative use of the Roman letters for all kind of languages. Did the Vietnamese use a different writing system before? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5189 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 16 of 21 20 February 2012 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi Petrklic
I think you're the first Czech I've heard of that is learning Vietnamese. It's so common in Czech Republic that I think it should be an optional language in Czech schools. Living here, I too am often confronted with Vietnamese and hear it probably every day. I've also seriously considered learning it, it would be in my top ten targets, but I think it would stretch my already stretched brain too far. Have you used your basic Vietnamese yet in the stores? What type of reaction do you get, if so? Your log is very interesting by the way. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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