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Cantonese<-->vietnamese | ||
Tags: Vietnamese | Cantonese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| solidsnake Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6850 days ago 469 posts - 488 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 1 of 8 14 October 2007 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Anyone here have the stats or personal insights on the similarities and overall mutual intelligibility between these two languages?
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 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6718 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 8 15 October 2007 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Stuart Jay Raj (famous for several Youtube clips) has a blog post about "Vietnamese - Learning a New Language from Scratch (Kinda)" ( http://stujay.blogspot.com/2007/09/part-1-vietnamese-learnin g-new-language.html) in which he mentions some of the similarities he has encountered.
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| ElfoEscuro Diglot Senior Member United States cyworld.com/brahmapu Joined 6098 days ago 408 posts - 423 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 8 17 October 2007 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Cantonese and Vietnamese are nowhere near mutually intelligible. The two languages are in completely different language families (Cantonese being a Sino-Tibetan language and Vietnamese being an Austro-Asiatic language.). The similarities are mainly due to the fact that Vietnamese has borrowed a large portion of its vocabulary from Chinese (like Korean and Japanese). The borrowed words came from the southern varieties of Chinese which explains the resemblance to modern Cantonese as opposed to Mandarin. Other similarities include monosyllabic phonology and similar tone systems. Vietnamese grammar is a bit different. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| audiophile Groupie United States Joined 4925 days ago 44 posts - 81 votes Studies: French | Message 4 of 8 10 May 2011 at 8:59am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been reading the Assmil Vietnamien book for a few days now, can understand most of
its grammars and can recall many words by just one reading. It almost looks like classical Chinese grammar! It is much closer to Chinese than Tibetan is (which I can't see any similarity to Chinese and can't remember any words). Many people are saying that Vietnamese is belonging to Austro Asiatic. Being a native Chinese speaker, I really don't think so. For some reason (maybe politcal?), everyone (Chinese, Vietnamese) wants to put them in different families. If anyone can present me with a few Vietnamese sentences, I can match it for its Chinese equivalent, in almost 1 word for 1 word order. That tells me they must be in the same family. Closer than the relationship between French and English, I would say. Edited by audiophile on 10 May 2011 at 9:05am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5505 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 5 of 8 11 May 2011 at 1:53am | IP Logged | ||
Language family relationships are based on lineage not current similarity. There is no evidence that it and the Sinitic languages shared a common ancestor. Obviously Vietnamese has had a great deal of Chinese influence on it, which may account for some of the similarity, but also note that SVO is a very common word order in the region, e.g. Thai, Khmer. I'll let someone more knowledgeable comment on the specifics, but let me just say I think you're conflating two things: even if we agreed that they are closer than French and English, that fact doesn't mean that they're genetically related. Some genetically related languages may have diverged a lot, and some unrelated languages may have grown similar. It's all dependent on what historical evidence we have at hand. If we have no evidence of a connection we simply say so. Similarity thousands of years later is simply not sufficient. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6103 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 6 of 8 11 May 2011 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
I'd just like to be able to learn both of these languages. Don't really care if they are in the same language family or not as long as I get a discount on the second one of the pair. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| audiophile Groupie United States Joined 4925 days ago 44 posts - 81 votes Studies: French | Message 7 of 8 11 May 2011 at 6:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Maybe I should not talk in terms of the language "family", that is an academic
terminology which I do not really understand. I just want to point out that I was truly amazed that Vietnamese is so close to Chinese. Maybe many thousand years ago, the natives in Vietnam spoke a different language. But China had a strong influence in Vietnam for about 2000 years, and Vietnam was directly ruled under China for about 1000 years. So from language learning perspective, I think this could be the easiest foreign language for a Chinese/Cantonese to learn. Grammar wise, it is very similar to classic Chinese. Once I correlate those word structures to the classical Chinese equivalent, I can almost understand everything without any further grammar learning effort. For example, Assmil uses several pages to explain those movement position words and how to combine it with another verb. They become easy to remember once the equivalent Chinese are found (some word connection may not be 100% correct but it helps with memory): len (升 sheng）xuong（降 jiang) qua(过 guo） vao（入ru） den（达da） ve（归gui） ra （出chu） di （走zou） So the "discount" will be huge: about 70-80% of active GRAMMAR and passive vocabulary understanding. If I learn Tibetan, if I don't know a word, I will be stuck. But in Vietnamese, at least I can try to mimic the Chinese word in a Vientnamese tone. The catch is, the pronunciation is very difficult. So this will still be a difficult language to communicate those complicated topics. But as basic grammar is so simple, I can already construct some simple sentences like "I will go restaurant tomorrow" "I want orange juice" "She went to cinema yesterday" etc. In contrast, I still cant speak any correct French or German sentences after years of (on and off) study! For anyone who has an advanced knowledge of Chinese and basic knowledge of Cantonese, please spend a few days on Vietnamese and verify it yourself. Of course, being able to read and understand simple written sentences does not equal to communication, but it is so fun to learn a few Vietnamese sentences. I keep on smiling all the time while listening to the Assimil recording. This is definitely my "on sale" language. I plan to quickly go through the Assimil book in 40 hrs (2 weeks), then listen to the recording once a while to review the phonetics. Edited by audiophile on 11 May 2011 at 8:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jsun Groupie Joined 4894 days ago 62 posts - 129 votes | Message 8 of 8 27 May 2011 at 7:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Cantonese has a bit of non-Sinitic trace in its grammar - sometimes you can see adjective after
noun, which is like AA language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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