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TAC 2012 - Team 龍 - petrklic - Vietnamese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4926 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes  Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 21 24 February 2012 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Oh my! Last moth has been too busy, and I only barely kept doing my Anki's. Unfortunately I don't think March will be much better either. I didn't give up, but I'm stuck at the mark of about 100 words or so. I also missed the introductory lesson of a course that I want to attend due to some traveling. Oh well. C'est la Vie.
I try to listen to Vietnamese telenovelas a couple times a week. The one that I'm working my way through is called "Lặng Lẽ Yêu Em" ("Love Me Queitly", or some such). I understand some set phrases every now and then, like "tôi xin lỗi em" (I'm sorry, "em" is feminine personal pronoun of the person you are apologizing to) and such.
I'm no expert in the field, and the following is from the top of my head, so take it with a grain of salt. Or a handful. I think they just used Chinese for several centuries. As in, there was no written Vietnamese, you just wrote Chinese. Then their scholars became all uneasy about it, and invented something called Chữ Nôm, which used some Chinese characters as well, but also new characters based on Chinese. Typically what would happen was that you took two characters, one for semantic component of the word (what the word means) and one for pronunciation component (how it sounds), and combined them into a new character. This system had its drawbacks, like you still essentially needed to know Chinese to write Vietnamese, and literacy was low, because few people could learn Chinese. When the French came to Vietnam, they started pushing the Latin alphabet, and naturally, there was an opposition to that. But eventually Vietnamese nationalists started to see the advantages of the Latin-based writing system: you would decouple Vietnamese from Chinese and gain independence, and the system was easier to learn. So they embraced it, made some amendments, and made it official. The upshot was that the literacy has soared from something like scholars only to something like 80% of people, I think within a couple generations, but I don't know for sure. I also have no idea how much of that you can account to the change of the writing system, and how much actually was a change in education or other changes, if any. The downside is that almost literally nobody can read Chữ Nôm today, and Vietnamese have lost much of their historical literature. There are foundations and researchers today, attempting to reconstruct, map and translate the works written in Chữ Nôm, but it's lost knowledge to ordinary people. There's actually a couple threads about Chữ Nôm here on HTLAL.
Yeah, as non-compulsory subject it would make sense. But you would need teachers, and there you have a chicken-egg problem. Almost nobody speaks it, almost nobody actually _wishes_ to speak it, so who would teach it and to whom?
Yeah, that's what lured me into the language. It's not even useful for anything much, as opposed to, say, German, which I don't speak either. But you don't hear much German, and you hear plenty of Vietnamese... I haven't dared to use it yet. I imagine greeting the shopkeeper with "xin chào", and him replying something like "xin chào anh, roeug oreu r uacogu ucrrc *more gibberish*", at which point I'll just stare at him, all "tôi không hiểu" (I don't understand), which in turn, will be misunderstood by _him_, and I'll have to go "um, víte, já ještě Vietnamsky vůbec neumím" (ah, you know, I don't actually speak any Vietnamese at all). And then, a month later, when I eventually make the rational decision to switch to German, I'll have to face that one shopkeeper every day with the same "xin chào" in my vocabulary. So, no, I haven't dared yet. But I'm thinking about it every time I enter that store, and one day it will happen! :) 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 18 of 21 28 April 2012 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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So, what I wrote. I barely kept doing my English and Russian Ankis (I would do them every couple days, when the backlog built up to 300 or so cards and couldn't be reasonably put off anymore). So I'm out of the game and giving up on Vietnamese, for this year at least.
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| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4708 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 19 of 21 29 April 2012 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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petrclik, sad to see you leave the team, but I guess sometimes life just gets in the way too much for language study.
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| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4769 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 20 of 21 29 April 2012 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's hard, really hard to do more than one language at a time. Come back to Vietnamese when you are able. We'll wait for ya! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4518 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 21 of 21 30 April 2012 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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What is your goal in English? Could reading Vietnamese novels in English be a valid use of your time to study English? That way you could free some time to learn Vietnamese itself, and you'd get a better look at the culture...
I say that becaucause that's what I'm considering doing to free some time in my schedule for new languages. Particularly, if I could read some Korean (South/North) novels in Mandarin, I could consider I've done my work in Mandarin while getting a better insight at Korean culture. An another advantage with this is that once you've read a novel in a language you understand already, you can later re-read it in your target language and it will be much easier (and a great pleasure to finally access to the books you've enjoyed in their original tongue..). Good luck anyway! 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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