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Vietnamese TAC 2014 Team Coconut | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4455 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes  Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 9 of 15 20 January 2014 at 2:34pm | IP Logged |
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@bakunin – Glad to see you’re interested! My goals here are very modest – to learn more about the language and explore the materials I have, and to learn to produce some basic phrases and try them out when I get the chance to visit again. I think that taking a course in-country (there is a good one in Saigon I know about) would be the way to go if I really wanted to “learn Vietnamese.” But that is not in the cards at the moment.
@js6242 – That’s really neat. Another question – I wonder if you’ve ever interacted with any Cham people? I know that they are Muslims, live in both Vietnam and Cambodia and speak their own language, which is related to Malay. It seems like whenever I have passed through the airport in Phnom Penh (I’ve been to that city twice), I’ve noticed large groups (families with numerous children) of them. I’d assume they were traveling to Thailand and Malaysia to work, although I suppose some may also go on the pilgrimage to Mecca. I’m not sure if I agree that Vietnamese and Cantonese sound similar – as Bakunin says, the tones in Vietnamese seem pretty unique (although when I listen to Vietnamese, I actually get some interference from Thai in the sense that I think I hear Thai words popping up here and there.) My point above was that just one element, the final consonants, are preserved in both V and C – I didn’t mean to imply some kind of general similarity in how they actually sound. In fact, there’s one type of unusual sound that is common to Khmer and Vietnamese, but doesn’t occur in other SEA langs or Chinese. These are the implosive stops like the b and d in ‘dombrei’. I have found them useful in trying to identify what language is being spoken. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4309 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 10 of 15 20 January 2014 at 3:41pm | IP Logged |
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I guess what leads me to say I think Vietnamese and Cantonese sound similar is not so much the sounds and tones
they share (or don't share), but rather the abruptness and high volume at which both seem to be spoken! Both seem to me to be very energetic languages, so to speak! But as I said, my knowledge is incredibly limited. What I hear as similarities and what actually are similarities, are usually too very different things hah! I have a Cham friend actually yes, or at least his dad is Cham (not sure about his mum). There is a Cham village close by to me, they all live in communities close to their mosques, and they have their own markets. There are definitely a lot of Cham living on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (I would always pass them when I took the bus there), and then of course in Kampong Cham there are tons. I don't know anything about their language to be honest. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4455 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 11 of 15 02 February 2014 at 4:35pm | IP Logged |
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@js6242 - Well, your intuition about which languages sound similar is as good as mine. I don’t think linguists have found a way to measure similarity between languages in any case.
I haven’t been doing much with Vietnamese since last posting, just listening to the songs. I’ll be busy with work until mid-February (or later). I’ve also been looking at classical Chinese a bit. I decided to finally read Pulleyblank’s ‘Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar’ from cover to cover, and I’m about halfway through now. Refreshing my memory of characters should also help with identifying the Vietnamese borrowings from Chinese. For instance, I know that the Viet word for museum is ‘bảo tàng’, which looks like it comes from Chinese, but only recently could I guess the exact characters: 寶堂 bao3tang2. Literally this means ‘hall of treasures’ – not the standard term for museum in Chinese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4455 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 12 of 15 08 February 2014 at 5:32am | IP Logged |
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Well, I was wrong about ‘bảo tàng’ – the second character should be 藏 ‘zang4’. It means warehouse or depository (as well as ‘Tibet’). It seems that pinyin t- doesn’t generally correspond to the Vietnamese t-, which actually isn’t surprising since the pinyin t- is aspirated, more like Viet. th-. The Sino-Viet pronunciation of 堂 is đường.
Lately I’ve been looking into how the tones in Sino-Vietnamese words line up with Chinese. To do this, you need to go back to Middle Chinese, so it gets complicated! Wikipedia’s page on ‘Sino-Xenic pronunciations’ is helpful for orientation here. It turns out that “Sino-Vietnamese... reflects the Chinese tones faithfully, including the Late Middle Chinese split of each tone into two registers conditioned by voicing of the initial.” Another useful Wiki page is on ‘the four tones’ – not Mandarin tones, but Middle Chinese ones, which split into two as just mentioned. This page contains a large and detailed table showing how the tone categories are reflected in various Chinese dialects. As it turns out, Cantonese also is pretty faithful to the original divisions, and there is a useful table with the details on the Wiki page for Cantonese phonology as well. Mandarin was less faithful, and words that end in a final stop in Middle Chinese (the ‘entering tone’ category) can appear with any of the 4 Mandarin tones – kind of a wild card! Anyway, using various sources I tried compiling a table of some sample characters and their pronunciation and tone class in Mandarin, Cantonese and Sino-Vietnamese. I also added the Middle Chinese pronunciation as reconstructed by the UMich linguist William Baxter. So for example, 日 is rì (TC 4) in Mandarin, yaht (TC 9/6) in Cantonese, nhật (TC 6 or nặng class) in Sino-Vietnamese, and *nhit in Middle Chinese. Just having done a handful of characters, it’s apparent that the correspondence between Cantonese and Sino-Vietnamese is pretty good – Cant tone 6 will generally be tone 6 in SV (so 日 is regular), and Cant tone 1 will be SV tone 1. Cant tone 2 corresponds to SV tone 4 and vice versa, and the same goes for tones 3 and 5. Unfortunately I don’t know Cantonese, just Mandarin. I’m going to keep enlarging the table and looking at correspondences over the next few days, time allowing, and post about Mandarin and SV sometime soon. The basic correspondence can be found in the dialect table on the Wiki ‘four tones’ page, in any case. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4455 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 13 of 15 17 February 2014 at 4:46am | IP Logged |
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Last night we booked an AirAsia flight to Saigon for mid-March. We'll stay three nights, probably just look around the city, and maybe take a day trip to the Mekong delta if it works out. This gives me something to shoot for in terms of getting my commmunicative Vietnamese up to speed!
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| baokieu Newbie Vietnam LangReviews.com Joined 4430 days ago 18 posts - 19 votes Speaks: Vietnamese* Studies: EnglishC2 | Message 14 of 15 30 May 2014 at 2:49pm | IP Logged |
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Hi, are you progressing well now?
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| chrisphillips71 Groupie United States Joined 5025 days ago 64 posts - 86 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 15 of 15 30 May 2014 at 9:23pm | IP Logged |
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Has anyone here actually learned Vietnamese to any reasonable level? I would love to,
but it seems like an insurmountable mountain to climb. -Chris 1 person has voted this message useful |
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