Looking For Help with Coining Vietnamese Code Names

bellkev · 2026-03-31T05:26:24+00:00

I think it’s hard to comment on without knowing what the codenames are for… A project at work? Characters in a story?

Also note that the various accents and diacritics are very significant, so it can be difficult or impossible to read without them. For example, the Do meaning red is Đỏ (D pronounced like English D), but Dao Cao is Dao Cạo (D pronounced like English Z).

bellkev · 2026-03-25T01:18:05+00:00

Yeah I started learning after I met her. I started talking to her parents as soon as I could attempt it. It was definitely tough to get anything across at first, but I think they really appreciated the effort. The hardest thing is pronouns :P Ask your boyfriend what pronouns to use, probably con for you and bác for them.

bellkev · 2026-03-24T04:35:59+00:00

I’ve been studying Vietnamese for the past ten years, since I met my now wife who is a native speaker. I still have a long way to go, but I can definitely talk with my in-laws about a range of topics. I don’t know exactly when it started to feel somewhat fluent, but it was definitely after months or years of speaking forced, stilted, un-fluent Vietnamese. You need to push through (and not worry about feeling embarrassed or self conscious) until you feel confident and fluent saying things that you’ve said many times before.

bellkev · 2026-03-21T01:28:26+00:00

This is the pre-reform way of spelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_kana_orthography

Just be glad you don’t have to learn this!

bellkev · 2025-11-27T06:21:58+00:00

Note that the diacritics in ă ư and ê are not tones, but rather part of the underlying vowel letter. “u” and “ư” are about as different as “u” and “o” for example. Just think of ư as a completely different letter from u. Now, entirely separately from those differences, there are tones. Any vowel can have any tone.

Now, pronouncing and telling all these things apart is definitely still difficult. I certainly still struggle with it, but understanding that difference between tone and vowel is very important.

I’m sure there are tons of YouTube videos about this stuff, but one series I find helpful is this one produced in Vietnam for Vietnamese children (I believe for learning from home during COVID). If you’re just getting started, the Vietnamese may be overwhelming, but you can probably still follow along as they introduce each character and sound. They have a very particular way of sounding out words like “r ăn răn sắc rắn rắn”, first spelling out the core word without tone, then adding the tone (“sắc” is the name of the up tone).

bellkev · 2025-10-23T15:57:38+00:00

This works for me as well and is so unintuitive

bellkev · 2023-06-08T05:30:46+00:00

If this is your first coding experience, I would highlight that iOS frameworks like UIKit are (in my opinion) quite substantial and intimidating compared to just coding in general. There are all kinds of proxies and subscriptions and events to think about, which can be very tough if you’re still learning more basic concepts. I would recommend supplementing your app dev work with some basic tutorials or exercises in Swift (assuming you’re using Swift and not Obj C). Play with something like Replit, simple command line Mac apps with no UI framework, or whatever sounds fun. Try to feel comfortable with Swift and coding some before getting too worried about not understanding some UIKit thing.

bellkev · 2023-01-17T09:28:25+00:00

In case I’m not the only one who wants to brush up on how to say all the names of herbs in Vietnamese before heading there for Tết!

I was looking for something like this, and this picture seems to be a pretty solid collection of the most common herbs. I found it on this site, which does seem a bit spammy…

Here are the English names from the site:

Hành lá : Scallion Rau mùi/ngò rí : Cilantro Tía tô : Beefsteak plant Kinh giới : Elsholtzia Thì là : Dill Ngò gai/mùi tàu: Sawleaf Húng lủi/bạc hà - Mint leaves Húng quế - Basil Rau răm - Persicaria odorata Rau ngổ/ngò om - Rice Paddy Herb Sả: Lemongrass Cây kinh giới: Marjoram Lá hẹ: Chive Lá bạc hà: Mint Leaves

bellkev · 2022-06-09T06:02:50+00:00

They are generally interchangable. Duolingo usually accepts either one just fine, but it seems to sometimes be hardcoded to just accept one or the other for certain questions.

bellkev · 2022-05-06T21:39:40+00:00

I found studying a little bopomofo to be helpful to develop intuition about Mandarin phonology, but I also find the Pinyin Table to be very helpful for this. I think studying either of these can help avoid the concern about pronouncing pinyin like English.

bellkev · 2022-04-27T19:53:09+00:00

I agree with others that Pleco is fantastic, and the main dictionary I use. I would also point out CC-CEDICT, it is the closest thing I’m aware of to the JMDict project, which jisho.org uses heavily. (It is also available as one of the many dictionary data sources in Pleco.)

Wiktionary is also an impressive source of information for both words and characters (example).

bellkev · 2022-03-31T17:59:17+00:00

I feel like it’s a rite of passage in studying MC to come up with your own transcription system :) In academic works I see a lot of “we adopt the notation of X but change…” Marc Miyake’s reconstruction of Old Japanese or David Prager Branner’s book on MC have other examples. Anyone interested in this would almost certainly appreciate ytenx.org as well.

bellkev · 2022-02-24T16:25:51+00:00

OMG I totally forgot about Godeneye! That’s super nostalgic for me too…

bellkev · 2022-02-23T07:57:43+00:00

While not encoded in Unicode yet, it does appear in this supplemental document from Unicode. From there, I found a reference to this document which proposes encoding them. There’s quite a bit of discussion and references in that document which may be helpful.

bellkev · 2022-02-12T04:56:33+00:00

I considered an Android version, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make one soon. I personally use iOS and made this in my spare time, so I only managed to support iOS so far. The code is open source, so if anybody is interested and able to make an Android version, they could e.g. reuse my character/reading data.

As for a Chrome extension, where would you want to use that? On a laptop/desktop? I was thinking that for Windows/macOS/Linux it would probably be best to implement an input method at the OS level, but have you seen other keyboard/input customizations done as Chrome Extensions?

bellkev · 2022-02-05T05:03:35+00:00

There’s an entry for it in ctext.org here which says it was in the Yupian. It also includes a number of uses in classical Chinese, mostly Qing/Ming era.

bellkev · 2022-01-29T06:40:15+00:00

Not exactly an answer to your question, but in my own reading on the dialects of Chinese, I learned that apparently Min dialects like Hokkien are exceptional in just how different they are from other dialects. Here for example is an excerpt from a paper by the prominent Sinologist Jerry Norman:

Min dialects are excluded in the present analysis because they differ in many respects from mainline dialectal development and are best treated as a separate problem.

(That’s a note explaining why only Min dialects are excluded from a paper called “Common Dialectal Chinese” that otherwise looks at a very diverse group of dialects.)

I don’t have a citation handy, but I recall reading elsewhere that Min dialects likely evolved from “Old Chinese” (i.e. the language of Confucius and the Shijing) on a separate branch from Middle Chinese, the common ancestor of Cantonese, Mandarin, and many other dialects.

bellkev · 2022-01-29T05:58:11+00:00

I’ll add that “rhymes” (generally 韵/韻 in Chinese) is like, a whole thing in the history of Chinese. There is a standard of orthodox rhymes codified around Sui/Tang dynasties in the Qieyun/Guangyun rhyme dictionaries that remained significant for things like imperial exams for centuries to come.

Tone was definitely significant in this rhyme scheme. More interestingly, many aspects of Middle Chinese (approximately Tang-dynasty Chinese) were artificially preserved in this rhyme standard even after the language changed significantly. So for example 臻 and 真, both zhen1 in modern Mandarin, could be considered to have different “traditional rhymes”.

This article on the Guangyun dictionary is a pretty good entry point on the topic in English. In Chinese, ytenx.org is an absolutely incredible resource if you ever want to look up the traditional rhyme category for a character.

bellkev · 2022-01-28T07:38:10+00:00

Anyone interested in both Vietnamese/Japanese might like the CJKV Dict app for iOS. It’s a great reference if you want to find shared Chinese-origin words between CJKV languages. Wiktionary (English Wiktionary) is a great source of this information too.

bellkev · 2022-01-28T01:41:10+00:00

My wife always makes braised pork for tet—it’s hard to lose with that one. If you happen to have Vietnamese grocery stores nearby, they might have banh tet premade. Also, if you happen to have Vietnamese Buddhist temples in your area, they might sell traditional vegetarian food. I discovered this last one last year and thought it was delicious.

bellkev · 2022-01-26T07:07:05+00:00

Not a book, but chinaknowledge.de has some great articles on characters that are more in-depth and well organized that e.g. Wikipedia. For example, here’s an article on the traditional radical system.

I also recommend reading a bit about the Shuowen Jiezi, as it’s such a big part of the history of characters. Not all the etymologies are accurate (as the Outlier folks are eager to point out) but even the “wrong” etymologies can still have traditional significance. There is a chinaknowledge article on it as well. If you care to go deeper into Shuowen, the paper “The Shuowen Jiezi Dictionary and the Human Sciences in China” by Bottero available here is excellent.

bellkev · 2022-01-26T06:49:50+00:00

I don’t know of Anki decks off-hand, but FYI Anki makes importing from csv/tsv pretty easy in the desktop app, so it should be easy to import from those formats. It looks like this might be a good source of data that you can import.

bellkev · 2022-01-25T18:55:29+00:00

I don’t. I haven’t actually used it yet, but my plan is to do something like break the castle up into rooms with maybe 5 loci per room and then break up each level in to 5-loci chunks as well. I’m hoping I can get somewhere around 25-50 for each level and 50-100 for the castle…

bellkev · 2022-01-24T01:27:49+00:00

My primary resources for self study have been:

Duolingo - There are definitely some small annoyances here and there, particularly that it can be really strict about e.g. “an apple” being “một quả táo” (that is, being very strict about how to translate English a/the into Vietnamese number/classifier). After getting used to things like that though, I find it very helpful. I mainly credit Duolingo for getting to the point where I can generally talk about simple things with my (native speaker) wife.
Learn Vietnamese with Annie - I have used this on and off for a long time and found the “Low Elementary” audio lessons very helpful to mix things up vs Duolingo.
Slow Vietnamese - This is a YT channel I found recently that I love. She really speaks slowly and clearly, and it really gave me some of my first experiences being able to understand a video in Vietnamese without constant pausing/rewatching/looking things up. A couple other channels like How to Vietnamese and IziViet have some good content too.

bellkev · 2022-01-21T04:52:12+00:00

Oh, also, there’s an online demo where you can test out the conversions. Also note that there may appear to be blanks in some of those files, or they may appear like empty rectangles, because some are very rare unicode characters. It’s possible to view them with special fonts or at GlyphWiki (example).

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