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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6317 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 1 of 30 11 September 2009 at 4:11am | IP Logged |
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I'd do a search for a similar topic, but searching by topic title is currently out of order...
I have no idea how much of a knowledge of Vietnamese there is on these boards, but basically, I'm wondering how much transfer I'd get in going from Mandarin to Vietnamese, and whether it would swimming against the tide and ultimately less efficient to do both at the same time. I'm really interested in Vietnamese (hell, I'm interested in a lot of languages) and I'm aware something like 60% of Vietnamese vocab comes from Chinese. Purely in terms of their lexical relationship and not their grammars or phonologies, would it be kind of like learning French and Italian together? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 2 of 30 11 September 2009 at 4:54am | IP Logged |
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Consulting the book I always consult when I have a question regarding a particular
major language (Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages), I found this: "Since Vietnamese was strongly influenced by Chinese during the ten centuries of Chinese rule, the number of words of Chinese origin is inevitably very large: simple words, disyllables, as well as whole expressions make up the majority of lexical items in any written text of a technical nature. However, this invasion is limited to the large body of content words, while grammatical morphemes ('function words') retain their native identity." It would seem to be more like learning French and English at the same time, except that French and English belong to the same language family, unlike Chinese and Vietnamese. But I don't know how similar the Vietnamese loan words are to their Mandarin counterparts, nor if the number of loan words is nearly as high in everyday speech (I would guess not). EDIT: According to the German Wikipedia, most of the loan words actually come from Cantonese rather than Mandarin. Not a big surprise. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamesische_Sprache "Weiterhin sind mehrsilbige Lehnwörter aus dem Chinesischen in die vietnamesische Sprache aufgenommen worden. Sind sie zweisilbig, so erkennt man sie leicht daran, dass das Beschreibende nicht hinter dem Beschriebenen steht, sondern davor. Die Aussprache ähnelt dabei nicht dem Hochchinesischen, sondern eher südchinesischen Dialekten (kantonesisch). Beispiele sind đại học (大學, hochchinesisch dàxué, kantonesisch daih hohg; wörtl. „Große Lehre“, ein Buch des Konfuzius; moderne Bedeutung: „Universität“) oder ngữ pháp (語法 chin. yǔfǎ = wörtl. „Sprache-Gesetz“, d.h. „Grammatik“). Es gibt eine hohe Anzahl an Synonympaaren, wobei das eine Wort aus vietnamesischen Komponenten zusammengesetzt ist, während es ein Wort chinesischen Ursprunges mit gleicher Bedeutung gibt. Meist sind beide Versionen aus dem chinesischen entlehnt, wobei die als einheimisch empfundene Version einen, gelegentlich als Vietnamisierung bezeichneten Prozess durchlaufen hat. Offensichtliche Beispiele sind etwa năm und niên für Jahr, welche beide von chinesisch 年 stammen." Edited by Levi on 11 September 2009 at 5:02am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6317 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 3 of 30 14 September 2009 at 3:52am | IP Logged |
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Great answer thanks. I'm curious to know also, to anyone knowledgeable on the topic, whether Viets are generally exposed to Chinese characters during the course of their education? Particularly in the wealthier cities like Hanoi and Saigon where the educational facilities are presumably higher in quality and accessibility.
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| Palomnik Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 5549 days ago 6 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Thai | Message 4 of 30 16 September 2009 at 1:41pm | IP Logged |
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I wouldn't advise assuming that one will help the learning other that much, unless the dialect of Chinese you're learning is either Fujian or Cantonese.
It is true that a large amount of literary and technical vocabulary in Vietnamese comes from Chinese, but it is not pronounced like Mandarin at all. While Vietnamese is written in a phonetic script the resemblance with Pinyin is small enough to be virtually nonexistent. Obviously there is no resemblance with written Chinese characters. Having said all that, there is no doubt that there is a tremendous amount of vocabulary in Vietnamese that comes from Chinese, just as there is in Japanese. It's just that deciphering it becomes a study in and of itself, rather than a learning aid. As for Vietnamese learning Chinese characters, while I've never been to Vietnam (I live in Thailand) my understanding is that they normally don't. You are probably aware that there is a native Vietnamese script based on Chinese characters, but even knowledge of that is very scarce nowadays. Edited by Palomnik on 16 September 2009 at 1:43pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5364 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 5 of 30 10 April 2010 at 4:31am | IP Logged |
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I think the similarity is more like English To Latin. Few people in Vietnam speak Chinese.
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| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5754 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 30 10 April 2010 at 9:14am | IP Logged |
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A very late response indeed but just to sum things up.
The people of modern day Vietnam were once ruled by their northern neighbours - the Chinese. It actually occurred more than once but the first period of rule was the longest spanning nearly 1000 years (ending in 938 AD). During these times, the Vietnamese came into direct contact with the Chinese of that time (most probably from the southern regions of China). As a result, an enormous amount of Chinese words and ideas were imported into Vietnamese but were read using the local pronunciation known as Hán Việt. Also during this period, Vietnamese elites began to devise a system to record the native Vietnamese language, with which there was no prior system to write the language with. This script, known as Hán Nôm, utilised Chinese characters to record the native Vietnamese language. Tens of thousands of Nôm characters were created. Actually, it wasn't until early in the 20th century that both Hanzi and Nôm were abolished in favour of the Romanised Chữ Quốc Ngữ script. Nowadays, Chinese derived words (even some through Japanese) have played a lesser role in everyday life. That is not to say that they are no longer used. Chinese derived words are quite important and account for about 60% of the Vietnamese vocabulary. Newspapers, written essays, government documents etc. are composed with as much as 70-80% Chinese derived words. However in everyday speech they only account for about 20-30% of the words commonly used. As a speaker of Vietnamese and learner of Mandarin, I can say that since Mandarin has undergone a great many sound changes, at first you will see huge differences between the Mandarin and Hán Việt. For example; the word 'soccer/football' in Mandarin is (足球) zú qiú, whereas in Vietnamese it is túc cầu. At first there seems to be little resemblance, however, there are patterns to look out for. Some basic patterns include (but don't always apply): 1. If a word in Mandarin starts with z- (in pinyin), then it is usually t- in Vietnamese (using the Vietnamese script). Eg. (足) zú/túc, (最) zuì/tối, (做) zuò/tố... 2. If a word in Mandarin starts with sh-, then it is usually th- in Vietnamese. Eg. (上) shàng/thượng, (水) shuǐ/thuỷ, (手) shǒu/thủ... 3. If a word in Mandarin starts with x-, then it is usually t- in Vietnamese. Eg. (想像) xiǎng xiàng/tưởng tượng, (写) xiě/tác, (西) xī/tây... But it can also become h-: (希) xī/hy, (兄) xiōng/huynh... Edited by Qinshi on 10 April 2010 at 9:42am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| audiophile Groupie United States Joined 5117 days ago 44 posts - 81 votes Studies: French | Message 7 of 30 10 May 2011 at 8:13am | IP Logged |
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Recently I started to learn some Vietnamese out of curiosity using Assimil. It is
almost like reading classic Chinese! Toi tu hoc tieng viet o nha = 我独学言越于家 It is a lot closer to English vs French. More like the French pronounciation with a English grammar. For Cantonese speaker, it should be quite easy. I am a native Mandarin speaker. It takes me a lot of time to put the puzzle together and guess the matching Chinese words. If a proper word-relationship is established, then I can easily remember the vocabulary. But the pronunciation is very difficult even for a Mandarin speaker. So I estimate that you can have 70-80% words, 80% (classical) Chinese grammar, and 20% pronunciation to transfer if you know Chinese perfectly, or use a Vietnamese-Chinese dictionary. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 30 10 May 2011 at 9:33am | IP Logged |
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As a learner of Cantonese, I am struck by the very close phonetic similarity of Chinese-derived Viet words with their Canto counterparts. The abovementioned 足球 is túc cầu in Vietnamese and zuk1 kau4 in Cantonese. In fact, during my brief visit (half a day) to Hanoi, I found myself being able to recognize words when seeing bilingual texts in Vietnamese and English. My Cantonese was still quite weak at the time, but I would still be able to make out words. I suspect that if you know Cantonese it'll help you significantly in learning the Chinese-derived vocabulary in Vietnamese. But as Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciation differ so much, I suspect Mandarin will be of less use.
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