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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5673 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 1 of 12 08 February 2009 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mon, Feb 9th – Materials and organization.
OK, so I decided yesterday to dump the Thai, and leave that language to my girlfriend to have so as not to overtake her in a ridiculous way and dissuade her from language learning. In 3 months we plan to take an 8-week trip to South East Asia ... Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia en route to migrating back to Montreal. It will basically be 3 weeks in Thailand, 3 weeks in Vietnam, and a week each in Cambodia and Laos, although we are flexible depending on what we are enjoying. We both know the region well. So she will continue to learn Thai (and she is about 6 months in), and I will learn Vietnamese. Perfect. What fun to start a brand new language! I had been holding myself back with Thai so as not to race ahead of my girlfriend, and consciously not seeking out a broad range of materials so that she can learn at her own speed without competition from me. It is nice to remove the harness! This language is additionally written in the Roman alphabet, meaning that I should be able to get to literature fairly quickly. Melbourne has a very important Vietnamese community, by far the largest in Australia. The census shows that Melbourne has 230,000 who speak Vietnamese in the home. On Victoria St there is a “Little Saigon” full of grocery stores, bookstores and restaurants. In Springvale there is another shopping district of ramshackle laneways and crowds that looks and smells and sounds and feels like you are actually in Asia with hawkers pressuring you into buying their live crabs and octopi and men sitting around playing Chinese checkers. There you struggle to get served in English. There are other Vietnamese neighborhoods on the other side of town, but I have all I need with these 2. In other words, and especially since we cook Asian food (mostly Thai) and thus go to these districts to buy our galangals, young ginger, fermented shrimp paste, kaffir lime leaves, Asian vegetables, etc. anyway, there is plenty of opportunity to try out what I learn immediately. There are also shops selling Vietnamese books, and illegally pirated Vietnamese films for peanuts. Montreal has about 30,000 Vietnamese, which despite being not a patch on Melbourne’s community is still big enough that I will be able to use it once we are living there. The Vietnamese move to Montreal because of the French language of their former collonial masters that they learned at school. So I spent a couple of hours yesterday doing some research on materials, and then went to the local community library. I got myself the following out: Pimsleur Vietnamese 10 lessons. (Audio Only) Teach Yourself Vietnamese (with Audio) Colloquial Vietnamese (with Audio) Speak Vietnamese (1966, no Audio) I have also downloaded FSI Vietnamese 1 & 2. I left behind on the library shelf a bunch of books including Language 30 spoken phrase book, and some inferior little books without Audio. Unfortunately, I have no easy way to get my hands on the Assimil in French, although I will be able to buy that easily at a later stage in either Vietnam or once I return to Montreal. I am going to leave aside the FSI for the moment, and the 1966 text is old-fashioned, without audio, is meant to be used as a manual for teaching a classroom by someone who already speaks it, but has excellent material on grammar and classifying words. I skim read this, and realize that Vietnamese is all about classifiers, and that, along with the pronunciation will be the challenge of learning this language. What fun! Last night I listened to the first 2 lessons of Pimsleur ... this language is not intimidating at all having just come off Thai. I did not need to re-listen to the first lesson before moving onto the second. The lack of written script to read along with annoys me however, having got used to Assimil. I also browsed the material that I borrowed. I have decided that I am going to use the Colloquial and TYS books as my primary teaching tools for the next couple of weeks. The Colloquial Vietnamese that I borrowed comes with tapes rather than CD’s, and I ripped the first side of the first tape to .mp3 and split it up into tracks so that I can load it onto an mp3 player navigate it. Listen to the introductory tone drills if I want, or listen to dialogues if I want. While doing that I listened to it, reading along in parts, concentrating on other things in other parts. The Amazon.com reviews of both TYS Vietnamese and Colloquial Vietnamese are scathing. "Too hard, the audio is bad quality, they speak to fast, too hard, the audio does not match the book, too hard, this is not up to the usual TYS / Colloquial standard, the books are unusable, I want my money back, etc". From first glances at the books, I feel this is unfair. The books are challenging, with the serious language student in mind, I feel the reviewers may be looking for more phrase-book style courses, or something that moves really slowly (like Pimsleur). These books move fast, and expect you to work to master the lesson. But which serious language student would want to do anything different? From listening to the first side of the Colloquial Vietnamese course, I understand their frustration that the tapes do not entirely match the book. Of course the dialogues are there, and spoken in rapid pace by natives (rather than beginners pace), but before a dialogue on greetings and introductions for example, the audio goes into a spiel about “reviewing greeting vocabulary”, and that spiel and the vocabulary it refers to is not written down as its own little section in the book (although it is all there in the dialogues). I am happy with native pace, and would not want anything else. Both books have English translations of the dialogues (although not as conveniently located as Assimil ... the TYS translations are in a appendix in the back). The Colloquial book has a 30 page Grammar summary as an appendix which I will read tonight. But the way that I see this is that the tapes and the book are kind of 2 separate things. Given my experience with Audio-only methods, such as Pimsleur, and closely integrated audio – written methods like Assimil, I see this as a bit in between. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. The Audio lessons are based on the book, but do not align 100% with the book, and have their own FSI style drills that are different from the grammar drills in the book. Given that I have to return the materials to the library in 3 weeks (although I could extend it), I see myself racing through the TYS and Colloquial books, making scriptorium copies of the dialogues, and keeping a copy of the audio and my transcripts for further study. This means that I go through the chapters one-by-one quickly, doing the exercises, learning the vocab and grammar points, not worrying too much about getting the tones right in pronunciation (although spelling the words including tonal markers will be important) without needing to get it perfect, leaving me with the audio to work with and improve my pronunciation once they are returned. Ideal! Colloquial has 17 lessons, and TYS has 18. It means that if I do 1 per day of each, I will be able to get through them in 17 days. Both of them have an introductory alphabet / tones chapter at the beginning that makes up “Lesson 1” that I will give a listen to today, and work out the schema for the spelling of tones, then do lesson 2 of both ... the first dialogues ... for both books that first dialogue is “Greetings and Introductions”. I will need to learn the vocab, do the exercises, and understand the grammar points introduced. I figure an hour on each, one reinforcing the other. The plan will be to do the same tomorrow, although I could easily see myself doing a couple of chapters of each. I will try to keep this journal updated with my progress. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jaydoublem Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5587 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: French, English, German Studies: Vietnamese | Message 2 of 12 08 February 2009 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey,
I am also studying Vietnamese with TYS. Another excellent resource is the Spoken Vietnamese for Beginners book, which is entirely online at seasite. (www.seasite.niu.edu). I do like the TYS book, but I totally understand that some people can be frustrated by it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5673 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 3 of 12 08 February 2009 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
I sent you a private message ... good to have you on board. I just listened to the introduction and first lesson of TYS. This audio is going to take a lot of editing. There is a remarkable amount of English on it. Really unnessesary. There are parts where they are just reading out the English that is written in the book like the entire section on Tones that is entirely written (and spoken) in English ... what is the point of that? The introductory chapter on alphabet and sounds should be an appendix at the end, at the beginning it is rather daunting. Additionally, I have seen better ways of teaching this in French .... but that is another conversation. I will be editing it down at some stage over the next couple of weeks getting rid of all the English and long winded introductions leaving just the dialogues. My immediate feeling is that the audio on Colloquial is far better. Edited by SlickAs on 08 February 2009 at 10:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jaydoublem Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5587 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: French, English, German Studies: Vietnamese | Message 4 of 12 08 February 2009 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I do edit mine to. If you just jot down when they speak English on your first time listening, you can edit everything
out in less than a minute time per lesson. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5673 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 5 of 12 09 February 2009 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I did lesson 2 of both books last night.
I also edited down the audio of TYS on Audacity removing the English and “filler” (that is of the style “Now you have listened to the dialogue, answer the following questions: What does Liên do for a living? Etc.” which clearly you already know from having learned the text). It edits down to 26 minutes! That is all the recorded dialogues in the book. I have left some fat in it too for orientation while listening on a mp3 player “Welcome to Lesson 12”, and some drills that I will further remove once I have learned them (like the numbers, days of the week, etc that I know I learned slowly in my other languages because they don’t come up in context much). I figure there is another 4 or 5 minutes in there that I can remove. But even if it is 5 minutes, over the course of 20 listenings, that only costs me an hour. I am now going to use the TYS like an Assimil, and assimilate the entire 18 lessons, the whole book, in one chunk. That means that I am going to listen to it in passive mode, and read along with the English, then read along with the Vientamese, then go through and pull out the meaning of each word, with increasing layers of understanding and be able to listen to it without the book and follow along, all the while completing the chapters one by one and doing the exercises until the book is finished. Then I can start shadowing from it (I have never shadowed before). 26 minutes of conversation is not much and it should be easy to learn it like the words of a song. Reading along with the Vietnamese while listening to the audio should give me a good intuition for how tones are indicated in spelling. From having done lesson 2 of both (and both have 2 dialogues per chapter), I feel that the Colloquial is the much better package. Essentially, with the TYS, I am taking an ordinary package, and turbo-charging it into 26 minutes of usefulness. Colloquial is much better than that. Whilst the TYS has the dialogue and the vocab below it (the translation of the entire text in the appendix), the way it is set up is to encourage you to read each word, look for the translation of that word below (and it is not always in order, so it leaves you reading up and down the list of vocab), and putting together the meaning one word at a time whilst coming to recognize quickly the words that are repeated. Then there are some exercises that are not particularly hard, but encourage you to write in Vietnamese. When I then turned to the Colloquial, having already done the first lesson of the TYS, the Colloquial dialogue was easy, and the translation directly below the text. The vocab list was not every word in the dialogue, so they leave you to have a question mark over what some words mean. It then went into some grammar points pointing out explicitly some of the stuff that that was not in the vocab list. This “explaining the language” is much more my style. The exercises are then more about the grammar using the vocab, than the memorization path of the TYS. So I think I have a reasonably good system to go now. The TYS, despite being 268 pages in length is only 26 minutes worth. An Assimil is 4 hours worth. So I feel I can burn through this TYS book, using it as a one eighth of an Assimil (only with boring dialogue) in short order. The Colloquial audio is much better. There is 2 hours of it. For each chapter, there is a vocab review (that is not written down), there is the dialogue, there is “tone practice” where the sounds are introduced gradually and progressively harder, and there is the second dialogue (with vocab review). The Audio is a companion to the book rather than a recording of the book a-la Assimil. I feel that I will do the Colloquial audio in its original form for a few listens through, but will eventually edit that down to the skin and bones of the dialogues to shadow too. So today I am going to listen to the 26 minute TYS audio from beginning to end while reading along twice, once while reading the English, once while reading the Vietnamese. Then I will do lesson 3 of both books. That should be about 3 hours work. I will see how I feel after that, but may listen to the audio of the TYS again while driving or walking or washing the dishes or whatever. I am about to take it to the point where listening to the TYS dialogue is not work, but just what you do while doing something else. It is fun to start a new language! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5677 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 12 09 February 2009 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dude, you're an animal. Seriously informative posts and disciplined approach to just take this language by the nuts, impressive.
We had a vietnamese couple for clients this last summer, she spoke broken English and he didn't speak any English. So she's at the shop weekly checking the progress of her stuff and one day while we're going over something a Mexican comes up and asks me something, we start speaking in Spanish and her eyes light up, like "how you speak their language". Was awesome. Anyway, I get her to teach me "what's up" in Vietnamese. Was fun. Sometimes I think about learning another language, but I really want my Spanish to be native level and with so many opportunities to speak it here in Boise, I can't stop yet. Will be interesting following your progress here no doubt. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5673 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 7 of 12 10 February 2009 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, hypersport. I am glad someone is reading!
Last night I did a unit each of the TYS and Colloquial. I am finding the language challenging. It is hard to get the words sticking in my mind. I also listened to my 26-minute audio of TYS, 2 times while reading along, and then perhaps another 4 or 5 times only half concentrating while doing other things. First some complaints about the TYS. I am talking here about the artistic choices the authors made when they put this thing together now. First, incredibly, on the audio, the audio engineer has come in and put in a layer of background noise to “increase authenticity”. So you might hear the sounds of a children’s playground in the background because the dialogue is going on there for example. Now, it is clear that this was recorded in a studio, and that noise has been put there intentionally, because when the dialogue is not supposed to be taking place outside, there is complete background silence, and the microphone is so good and so close to the voice actors mouths that you can hear them swallowing, and almost hear the spit moving around in their mouths. As if that were not bad enough, the background noise is in stereo! So a dialogue will be taking place in a market place, and in the background you will hear a the ubiquitous Asian sound of the horn of a motor scooter blasting away in your left ear, and then the sound of a far off hammer banging in a nail at a construction site in your right ear. Or the dialogue in the Airport, they have put the sounds of footsteps behind you so you can hear people rushing around to get their plane, and as you hear someone pass, you will hear them coming from the left and the sound transfers across you as they pass and hear them disappearing to your right. How distracting. And the telephone dialogue! They have engineered the voices so that they have a “bad connection”. In order to do that, he has taken a clean voice signal and stripped out the quality, truncated the peaks and valleys of the sound and made it only partially inteligable. In fact the connection in the story is so bad, that as part of the dialogue you are learning there is a dropped call! “Hello Nam? Hello, Nam? You there?” So they give you only 26 minutes to learn the pronunciation of this language and then engineer the quality of it downwards! And while we are at it, they have obviously hired 4 voice actors: 2 males and 2 females. One of the males has a distinctive voice. So this guy will be playing an Englishman named Peter in one dialogue, and then in the very next be a native of Hanoi named Dung. Like "How come Peter is now saying he is from Hanoi? Oh sh*t! They just use the same guy in every dialogue" It is kind of off-putting at first. If they knew they were going to use the same voice actors all the way through, why did they not just create 4 characters and concentrate on them with a through story we can follow. Assimil does this so much better. Because the dialogues in TYS are so “ordinary conversation”, unmemorable and boring, I find it quite hard to remember how the dialogue goes. With Assimil and all their jokes you remember the conversation because the joke is being set up, and you remember how that goes, then there is the punch line. Even if that is only mildly funny the first time you read it and understand it, it makes the conversation memorable as you are following along in subsequent listenings. All that said, once you have listened to the dialogue 2 or 3 times you are over those problems, used to it, and can concentrate on the dialogue without worrying about the distractions to annoy you in the first couple of listens. So, anyway, the language. It is weird to me to be learning this language that is completely unrelated to any of the languages I speak in this way (in one chunk). I find it hard to orient myself with what is going on. In beginner Swedish and Spanish I had similarities with English that I could look for, and for French there is a lot of shared vocab with Spanish, so I could come in and partially understand a newspaper article for example before I even learned my first word. It is not like that with Vietnamese. This dialogue is going to take a lot of work to orient myself with it. In truth, I have only studied formally like this from Assimil Advanced French (although I have ripped plenty of colloquial DVD Audio and edited it into something concise that I can listen to over and over again). When I started on the Assimil Advanced French, I had maybe a 50% understanding of the language coming into it. Here I have none. And I really find the words don’t stick in my head very well. Even going back to what I learned yesterday, half of it was gone. As much as I hate to do this, I really think there is nothing for it here but to get some flash cards going. I am also going to photocopy the English translations of dialogues from the appendix at the back so that I have easy translations to save me jumping around back and forward, and to save the frustration of trying to look words up in the “dictionary” at the back and it not being there. Today I will buy an English – Vietnamese dictionary too. As far as listening to the audio, that is going well. The sound is clear without blurry liaisons, and it is not a particularly quickly spoken language (as opposed to Spanish). You can hear where one word stops and the next begins. Each has a clear pronunciation with a distinct tone. It is refreshing that unlike French there does not seem to be a bunch of pronunciation rules clouding things like l’enchainement vocalique, enchainement consonantique, egalite syllabique, groupes rythmiques with intonation, syllable stress and desaccentuation superimposed over the top of all that blurring the words with complications. This is very clear. And the more you listen to it, the less it sounds like an “Asian language” of like the sound of a tin can falling down stairs “Ting, tang, tonk, bip, clang” and the more you say “that sounds like German”, and as you listen to it for the words you understand (like “I”, “to be”, “thank-you”, “excuse me”, “Vietnam”, etc) the more you start to hear phantom words from French, Spanish and Swedish, even though you know it is not right. It has started to cease sounding foreign in the same way. I am sure this will continue. It is nice to listen to it, and know what they are saying (from the translation of dialogue, not because I can understand), and kind of immerse yourself into it. The language feels very comfortable. Anyway, I will work on it a little more tonight. Edited by SlickAs on 10 February 2009 at 5:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5673 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 8 of 12 12 February 2009 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am struggling a little, and find the language hard to keep the words sticking in your head. Especially when I don't, as yet, have a clear map in my head for how things are pronounced given how they are written. There are many odd characters, with vowel pairs that I don’t have a mental map for how to pronounce. Even the consonants are not necessarily spoken as they are written (for example a D is pronounced like an English Y. If you want a hard D like the English it is Ð).
I have also started on the FSI. This is so much better than the TYS, Colloquial, or Pimsleur that it is kind of scary how good it is. This thing will get my pronunciation working, including the tones, if there was ever anything. The FSI programme is Southern Vietnamese dialect (i.e. Saigon) that makes sense given it was produced in the 60’s, and the Southern Vietnamese were US allies, the Northern Vietnamese, the enemy. They say in Thailand that “A language is a dialect with an army”, and given the Northern Vietnamese won and made Hanoi their capital (despite the fact that it is not even a fraction of the size of Saigon), means that Northern Vietnamese is now “the language”, and Southern Vietnamese “a dialect” and that therefore TYS, Colloquial, Pimsleur, etc. teach the northern variety. But the fact is that nearly all the Vietnamese immigrants to Australia are Southern Vietnamese (and the USA / Canada will be the same). They fled on rickety boats in the 80’s because the Northern communists were torturing them. In fact, a couple of years ago, our national multi-cultural TV broadcaster decided that they were going to put on news in Vietnamese live from Vietnam (the same as they put on the France2/TV5 News in French, etc.). The Vietnamese community rallied against the TV station because the news out of Vietnam comes out of Hanoi, and is communist news. They did not come all the way to Australia to get away from the communists just to have their propaganda screened on Australian TV, they claimed. They would rather have no Vietnamese news. They won, and the news was removed. So anyway, it is the Southern Vietnamese dialect that I want to learn anyway. I like Saigon. And I don’t particularly like communists. So FSI is the authority on pronunciation for me anyway. And ultimately, lets face it, until I am at advanced level, no-one is going to be able to hear which accent I am using anyway. The accent I will have will be a foreigner accent. Same as if you are learning French, at beginner / intermediate, Parisian French accents as models will not affect anything in Montreal since the only discernable accent you have is Anglophone anyway. At the end of the day, I have bitten off far more than I can chew with the entire 26-minute TYS audio, trying to learn it all at once. I have decided to continue with the method on the side, but reduce it to the first 7 lessons … 10 minutes of Audio to learn. It is still quite a bit, but a lot more manageable, and in a few days I will have completed all of the first 7 lessons that make up this amount. I can then go back over them with increasing understanding of the grammar until that 10 minutes is mastered. I still cannot understand every word of the first lesson when I listen, however. I feel like I am hitting my head against a brick-wall with this language a little bit. Hopefully if I throw another 10 hours or so at it, I will have some sort of minor breakthrough where I can make basic sentences. I was in Melbourne’s Little Saigon the day before yesterday, picking up some sea-food from a fish-monger there. The woman who served me had very basic English. It would have been so easy for me to say in Vietnamese “what do you call these in Vietnamese?” and I am sure a little conversation would have ensued about why I speak Vietnamese, etc. I just need a little more ability and I will have opportunities everywhere to speak it. Little Saigon is about 3km (2 miles) from where I live. I am sure that I can find a little coffee shop there somewhere with a waitress who is prepared to speak to me in Vietnamese a little, and I can go there a few times per week. I just have to get my Vietnamese to a level where it is not only greetings. Just get it from zero to extremely-broken, and I will be able to start using it a little. Edited by SlickAs on 12 February 2009 at 6:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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