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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 4890 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes  Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 21 26 December 2011 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I decided to take a more serious look at Vietnamese. Where I live, Vietnamese are often shopkeepers of small grocery stores and takeout restaurants. In fact, I do most of my day-to-day shopping in their stores.
Vietnamese are, I believe, the third largest immigrant group, after Slovaks and Ukrainians. (Russians are fourth.) I have the first two covered, because Slovak and Czech are mutually intelligible (though reportedly less so lately as Slovak ceased to be heard on the TV), and Ukrainians very often speak Russian. What's left is Vietnamese. My motivation is to be able to understand the last big immigrant group. That's not anything mandatory. Most of local Vietnamese have a rudimentary knowledge of Czech, and that's usually enough to get what you want. But it would be much nicer to be able to communicate with them without those barriers. That's certainly a challenge. I've been peeking under the cover for more than a month now, and, frankly, it's a mess. The tones, the inventory of no less than eleven vowel sounds, the grammar that relies on exact order of words instead of inflection and conjugation, the several accents (or dialects), the sheer foreignness of the language... My goal for 2012 is to get from zero to about A1. I'm using Vietnamese For Beginners by Jake Catlett (I bought the CD, too). For a dictionary, I bought NTC's Vietnamese-English dictionary. I've been using it a couple days now, and it seems decent enough. Other than that I plan to enroll some sort of course. I've been preferring group courses lately, but for Vietnamese this will have to be a 1:1. As a source of audio, I found that forvo.com has a pronunciation of many elementary words. They are usually rather low quality, and the accent is all over the place, but it will have to do for now. Somewhere on this forum, I found a link to a Vietnamese course in Japanese. I don't speak Japanese at all and the google translation is pretty much useless, but there's a fair deal of audio games, like "figure out which of these sounds ends in 'ng' and which in 'n'". These are all great. Additionally, with a bit of scripting, the audio files can be scraped and downloaded, and it's all high-quality, well pronounced, as far as I can tell anyway. I expect this will eventually progress towards full sentences and grammar games, and those should be useful as well. Besides, I found this blog about Vietnamese language that I'm now going through. I'm using Anki to catalog all this knowledge and have it somehow penetrate my long-term memory. Edited by petrklic on 30 December 2011 at 12:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4890 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 21 26 December 2011 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Google translate behaves in a very interesting manner with Vietnamese. The reason seem to be (a lack of) Unicode normalization.
What follows is one word in Vietnamese composed in five different ways: bận bận bận bận bận. The difference is in how I enter the diacritic. I can decompose the letter ậ into three parts: the letter a, the circumflex, and the dot below. Each of those is a separate character in Unicode. Besides, "a with circumflex" and "a with dot below" are also separate Unicode characters, as is "a with circumflex and dot below". In Unicode, the following are all valid ways of composing the final character ậ: "a, circumflex, dot below", "a, dot below, circumflex", "a with circumflex, dot below", etc. In general, these are all different character sequences. Presumably the translation algorithm hasn't seen all of these equally often (or at all), and the upshot is that you get different results for different encoding of the same: "busy", "engaged", or "you". I think the last one is a blunder, "bạn" is a personal pronoun, not "bận". It looks as if it's improvising and it hasn't seen this particular encoding of "bận". Native Vietnamese keyboard, as far as I know, has precomposed basic letters, and then you add a tone as a separate key stroke. So "bận" would be written "b, â, dot below, n". So I would expect that that's what Google Translate was trained on. But this is not the case. Instead, Google gives best results for fully composed characters. Maybe they normalized their sample texts before feeding them into the engine, who knows (it would certainly make sense). In any case, as a result, I get the following two translations for different composes of the same characters: Vâng, tôi bận lắm. — Well, I you do. Vâng, tôi bận lắm. — Yes, I'm very busy. When going through that Japanese web course, I was getting a lot of the former. I had to look up the Japanese translation to understand what the Vietnamese was supposed to mean. But when I incorporate the tone marks into the letters, all gets magically better and Google is able to make sense of it once more. I'll have to take a look if there's a Firefox plugin that would be able to normalize selected text, or some such. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4890 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 21 07 January 2012 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I wonder what to write about. Vietnamese is so alien to me at this point that the progress that I make, if any, is hard to measure. And it should be easier to see progress now than later ;)
Youtube has a lot of videos of what's apparently news, 15 to about 30, 40 minutes in length. I listen to that a lot. It's much better than ordinary TV, mostly because it actually works. Where I sit, it's hard to get solid connection that doesn't fail every five minutes of so, presumably because the connection to Vietnam is not all that good. The U.S. stations tend to be better, and youtube of course works pretty well (though it freezes every once in a while anyway). Right now I'm listening to get some background noise, the way as I used to do with Russian. They say brain can pick the speech patterns this way, so I'm letting it do its thing. Right now it's all pretty opaque to me. Occasionally I catch something trivial, like tôi tên là (my name is), and I _think_ that I hear basic words like là, và and others, but it's hard to be sure. I sucked badly like that with Russian, too, but of course Russian is much more similar to Czech. Anyway, towards the end of the year, it should be a bit better. One interesting thing that I noticed, with Russian as well as with Vietnamese: before I learn the word, it's hard for me to hear it is speech. Even in my advanced stages, I wouldn't easily pick words from speech alone. I'd have to find it written, add to Anki, and then I would start recognizing it, and all of a sudden the word would be popping up seemingly everywhere. Well, with Vietnamese it's even more pronounced [;)], because all the words are syllables, and I can't tell head from tail. But I swear that after I learned hôm nay (today), it suddenly popped up in the stuff that I listened to. Besides audio input I'm following "Vietnamese for beginners" by Catlett. I'm still plowing through the first lesson, diligently looking up all the words that I meet. Well, not all, let's say, many. I decided I don't need to know how to say "watches". I'm doing something similar with the seahorseviet blog. For every sentence, I decide which words make sense to me and add them separately. When I'm confident enough, I add the whole sentence as a separate card, either cloze, or simply a two-way card, if I think I should be able to reproduce this, too. Another fun activity of mine is opening a random page on Vietnamese wikipedia, and finding words that I know. Sometimes I can figure out at least the structure of the sentence, from the function words, even though I don't know the meaningful words themselves. Mostly it's just a variant of hide-and-seek. Often it's hard to realize that I know the word even if I could reproduce both directions, if Anki asked. For example, today I was looking for word thế, and found that it means "like this, this way, thus", and that it's a synonym for vậy. Vậy didn't really catch my attention at all, even though I learned it last week. I even invented a weird mnemonic based on translation "this way", where there's a dusty path with a house nearby. It's a path, or a way, which helps me remember that the spelling is vay (it could conceivably be vai), and there's a house, so the "a" will really be "â", and the path is full of dust, and so we put the one symbolic dust particle on the ground: vậy. Which shows that the words are not obvious to me, and that means it's hard to recognize them casually. Which brings me to my final topic. When I started with Vietnamese about two months ago, I was _afraid_ to open my deck. It was a struggle, every day, to go in and have myself measured and tested. Remembering the words was hard (and it still is), and I couldn't believe, in the beginning, that I would be able to recall anything at all. Well, my success rate is about 80%, which is not that bad, given how alien Vietnamese is to me. Opening the Vietnamese deck is still a bit like jumping into cold water, but I know it's doable. I may not be able to produce a meaningful sentence in Vietnamese, but I know I can remember this stuff, if I work hard enough (and add heaps of mnemonics all over the place). I hope this technique scales into hundreds and thousands of words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sundance Newbie United States Joined 4518 days ago 20 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 21 08 January 2012 at 2:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm enjoying your detailed posts, petrklic! As your fellow teammate who also has Vietnamese on my list this year, I have gained an important lesson: that it is important to focus on the Vietnamese sounds before jumping more hard-core into the grammar. I'm finding the same thing with Japanese as you are with Vietnamese vocabulary. For example, I am hearing kinship terms in every Japanese movie I watch since I learned them.
Thanks as well for posting the link to the Japanese course for Vietnamese! At some point my Japanese will be strong enough to use my L2 to learn L3, and you've provided a great resource. I'm trying to wait until I have a better grasp of Japanese (sound system and writing) before starting Vietnamese, but when I do, I plan on starting with the Saigon dialect. I heard that's what Catlett's book uses. Is that true? Are you also trying for the Saigon dialect? Continued luck with Vietnamese! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4890 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 21 08 January 2012 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's interesting, isn't it? I wonder how kids learn their mother tongue! They may be the linguistic geniuses that they are taken for after all!
That makes sense in my opinion. One alien language at a time! ;)
It seems so. In the phrase rất vui được gặp bạn (nice to meet you), the initial "r" tends to what the speaker claims is southern way of pronouncing, which is similar to American "r". The northern way should tend more towards "z". Most "Czech" Vietnamese are from rural areas in the north, so I'm not sure what I will end up speaking. It may end up being one of those funny accents where they don't distinguish between l and r (if my memory isn't failing me) ;) My course should start soon (though I don't know when exactly), so I'll be able to tell more then. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4733 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 6 of 21 12 January 2012 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi petrklic!
How are your studies going? Do you really think it will take you a year to reach A1 in Vietnamese? Vietnamese is not a language I want to learn right now, but it's interesting to see how much Cantonese has influenced Vietnamese over the years. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4890 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 21 14 January 2012 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Today's topic was numbers! They are still lesson 1 material, and I finally exhausted my existing cards, and added them all. I already learned numbers 0-10, it was one of the first things that I learned. That because the strings of numbers recited in ads are easy to distinguish. But I got to composition rules only now.
Numbers are interesting. You have words for numbers 0-10, 100, 1000, and so on. Then you do a straightforward base-ten composition, so 125 is said like 1 100 2 10 5. So it seems easy enough on the surface, but there are interesting twists. For example, the word for 10 is mười (the ◌̀ stands for the falling tone). 2 is hai, and 5 is lăm. 12 is therefore simply mười hai. But 20 is not hai mười, it's hai mươi: the tone in mười becomes flat. Similarly, 15 is not mười năm, but mười lăm: 5 behaves differently when it's used in numbers above 20. Words for 1 (một) and 4 (bốn) play similar games, and become mốt and tư. The text book in fact doesn't mention "tư". I don't understand why, there are numbers all the way up to 100M, but you don't get to know that bốn has an exception in the context of tens. You _do_ get to know the exceptions for 1, 5 and 10 though, and that there's a special southern word for tens. Weird. Might be an omission. It works similarly in the context of hundreds. The word for 100 is trăm (mnemonic: a tram number 100!). 200 is hai trăm. But 102 is not một trăm hai, that is actually a way of saying 120. (I found this in a dictionary, the text book teaches một trăm hai mươi and doesn't mention this "shortcut".) You have to say the zeros in between. Zero is ordinarily "không", which helpfully also means "no", "none", etc., but here you say it like lẻ (◌̀̉ is the dipping tone): một trăm lẻ hai. Yet another thing that the text book doesn't mention is the word vạn, 10000, which I again found by serendipity in a dictionary. So it's all quite interesting, and I created about a hundred cards with all sorts of numbers and sounds. Regarding sounds, I finally got around to grabbing the contents of the CDs that came with the text book, and went through the first couple tracks, and cut out all words and sentences that are there. I use them as separate cards: a sound is played, and you are required to type in what was said. The quality is much much higher than what's available on forvo, although the pronunciation seems a bit too artificial. For example, in the words for 35, "ba mươi lăm", the speaker actually pronounces each of these words separately. In real speech this sounds something like "ba m lăm", the mươi sound gets much reduced. I presume it will get more real later on. Oh, and I one amusing word: đồng hồ, which mean "watch". I was curious what the components are, so I cracked open the dictionary and found that "đồng" is a word for copper (and money, it's even the name of the Vietnamese currency) and "hồ" is a vase. The entry for "hồ" also mentioned that đồng hồ means watch, and that it originally meant "water clock". Of course, water clock would really be simply a copper vase! The question is how to say "copper vase". As far as I know, Vietnamese puts modified noun first, so maybe it would simply be hồ đồng? I don't know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 4890 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 21 14 January 2012 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Short answer: right now I think it will take at least a year. Long answer: I should be able to get through the text book well before the end of the year. But per my current word acquisition performance, I would know only about 800 words by that time. Numbers listed for French, Greek and English imply that A1 tops at about 1000-1500 words¹. If this is relevant for Vietnamese, I'll still be deep in A1 by the end of the year. But of course the acquisition performance might improve during the year, as I get more comfortable with Vietnamese, and invent new hooks to hang words on. With Russian, I could learn 5 words a day. So I'll have to re-evaluate later. (It's not all about words, of course, but that happens to be the easy metric.) ¹) James Milton: Measuring Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition, 2009
Yes, Vietnamese wiktionary often lists Cantonese cognates and the characters it used to be written in. It is interesting. I think this might drive me to Chu Nom if I keep up with Vietnamese long enough. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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