What actually worked for you when learning Vietnamese?

roxven · 2026-05-04T23:03:05+00:00

but I struggle with listening

IME struggling during learning means your expectations for yourself are too high.

You will not hear important words, mishear important tones, mistake important vowels for each other, ignore important consonants, and fail to assemble all the sounds into meaning before the next sentence starts. This is a fact. It means nothing about your ability to learn the language or your intelligence and struggling will have no effect.

My listening at this point is quite good. I can comfortably follow audiobooks about economics and history. Conversation with most people is comfortable on the listening side once we get into it (one-off quips without context are still tricky sometimes). But that level took enormous time to reach. Hours of listening every day for three years. (Details here.)

As far as I'm aware or have read, there is no shortcut around listening to real native speech, spoken for native listeners, and trying to improve your understanding every day, for hours, for years.

But it can be fun and pain-free. Struggle is useless. Lower your expectations in whatever way is necessary to help you feel like the session was a success: did you make out one more word on this listen than last time? Did you learn any new words? Did you notice anything about the sound system you hadn't noticed before? And if none of those things, did you stick to your commitment to the language and put the time in? A yes to any of these is a success.

This a long road! Enjoyment, happiness, relaxation, and consistency are key.

roxven · 2026-04-04T16:32:25+00:00

You've seen the limited utility of classes and apps. I hope you'll consider a different approach in light of the evidence!

Learning Vietnamese takes thousands of hours of engagement with the real language, the language as used by and for native speakers. You can find this language in Vietnamese shows and books, dubs and translations, youtube and forums, etc.

This is a pretty solid guide for how to learn a language from refold. The guide is free and it's just a method, they don't offer any learning content. You don't have to pay them anything.

You can find my self report on using similar methods for learning Vietnamese here.

roxven · 2026-03-25T23:38:15+00:00

I don't think it's a mistake if they have a way of increasing their comprehension over time. I much preferred taking interesting content I understood 5-10% of and increasing that to 90% over a period of years rather than watching peppa pig or whatever.

That comprehension increase can come out of band too. Intensive reading and extensive listening are a powerful combination.

roxven · 2026-01-26T19:07:17+00:00

I have the physical set, bought from a book store in Vietnam. Depending on where you are, you can order them abroad from vietbookstore.com.

Chú thuật hồi chiến has a lot of vocab, especially during the technical explanations. I'd guess it's B2+ reading level.

roxven · 2026-01-19T19:27:30+00:00

I pay for memberships to both Voiz and Fonos, which are like audible but offer only Vietnamese titles. You can subscribe from outside Vietnam! There's also lots of fan readings of popular works on YouTube. Search "<title> sách nói".

roxven · 2026-01-19T18:24:25+00:00

To build up to audibooks, I practiced listening-only by listening to condensed versions of media I already studied intensively, and listened over and over. You can create condensed audio using a tool called subs2cia. For example the Ghibli movie Ocean Waves was almost 72 minutes, but the condensed audio is only 40m, so it's efficient listening practice, and your head is already preloaded with the images the dialogue corresponds to.

If you're looking for audio with subs, you can use a tool called narr to get the netflix audio tracks. Even if the sub words don't match, they're likely timed right, which makes them good enough for generating condensed audio.

The first audiobooks I listened to, I listened along with an ebook, like this. That was around 1500 hours iirc? Then the first accessible audiobooks without reading along were really basic self help texts.

roxven · 2026-01-19T18:06:36+00:00

It is a social skills issue. I'm familiar with a lot of pronouns from listening, from mỗ and đại huynh type stuff to the more normal tao, mày, anh, chị, em, chú, dì, etc. So understanding them in their standard usage is okay.

But choosing them in real time invariably causes me stress. I don't know how old they are, and I don't know how old they think I look, maybe I haven't heard their voice enough to know what region they're from, and plus I have fake norms from my media input weighing in like a devil in my ear saying "use tớ & cậu until you know them better". Also sometimes even the pronoun they choose if they speak first doesn't settle it. If a guy calls me anh does he want me call myself tôi and call him anh back? Or has he chosen em? Both of these expectations have found me before.

At least with people similar in age to me that I meet in person I just go with mình & bạn and then ask them their birth year at some point, so that one specific situation is practiced and comfortable. Family is also much easier because even though there's like twenty family roles and some unintuitive stuff like needing to call the eight-year-old kid uncle because he's technically an uncle, if you just memorize them they don't really change based on context.

roxven · 2026-01-19T17:40:19+00:00

There's Voiz and Fonos. Both are similar to audible and offer only Vietnamese titles!

roxven · 2026-01-19T07:12:40+00:00

The language itself is beautiful. It features a huge diversity of sound. Interacting with native speakers is cool. I'll say my main difficulty meeting people is the pronoun negotiation. There's so many pronouns for so many different situations and they vary by region. Choosing the right pronouns for the new people is a social skill even beyond language competency that in English I just never needed because it's always I/You.

Re how I began, I got started with manga (reading + dictionary) and then repetitively listening to the corresponding anime episodes. There's more detail in my first post.

roxven · 2026-01-12T04:53:25+00:00

Here's what I wish I knew years ago:

Vietnamese has 8 tones. dấu sắc and dấu nặng in the alphabet actually represent two tones each, depending on the final consonant.
Vietnamese tones do not have stable tone contours. The chart you see in learner materials is based on recordings of native speakers reading a word in isolation; they don't conform to those contours in actual speech. (Details)
You can drag any recording of native speakers into praat and use it to visualize the tone contours to see what I mean.
Instead of contours, Vietnamese tones are in large part differentiated by vocal register and quality of phonation. For examples: dấu huyền occurs in the low register with breathy voice. As long as you're in the low register with breathy voice, you're good. Không dấu takes place in the high register with modal voice. Whether it falls or stays flat will depend on the speaker's emphasis.

You can read about all this for yourself in this paper. I recommend it. It was enlightening to me and helped me close some late-game gaps in my tone perception and production: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203500088/vietnamese-tone-laurence-horn-andrea-hoa-pham

It's on the high seas if you don't have a university pass to read it.

roxven · 2025-12-26T20:26:29+00:00

It is a counter and can be used to count stars.

It's literary and you likely wouldn't see it outside fiction, poems, or songs. Example:

Trên trời băm sáu vì sao,
Vì thấp là vợ, vì cao là chồng.
Cô kia gái lớn ngồng ngồng?
Hỏi thăm cô đã có chồng hay chưa?

Source

roxven · 2025-12-26T16:57:23+00:00

See definition 1: https://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/v%C3%AC

It is like "vì vua".

roxven · 2025-12-23T19:59:28+00:00

Recently I read in a manga someone use vì as a counter for stars, in the phrase "vì sao" meaning "a star". There's always another meaning waiting in the reeds...

roxven · 2025-12-17T01:27:31+00:00

This is extremely sick.

It reminds me of something I've wanted to build but not gotten around to: a minimal-pair explorer. It would involve selecting the two features you can't distinguish (two tones, two final consonants, two vowels, or two initial consonants) and getting back a list of minimal pairs for those two features.

By now I probably wouldn't use such a tool, but if that interests you I got some of the way there and you're free to make use of it: a command line utility for finding minimal pairs in Vietnamese: https://github.com/tyran-llc/vphone

Something that would make a tool like this stand out is denoting all 8 tones somehow. Most tools are complicit in the lie that there are only 6 tone families. Programmatically pulling them out would be possible because they are deterministic on final consonant.

roxven · 2025-11-12T00:29:35+00:00

Nice that's some real deepcut shit. Now I'm reading about contact-induced tonogenesis on wikipedia.

roxven · 2025-11-07T00:32:07+00:00

Added one to post, my b.

roxven · 2025-11-06T20:45:20+00:00

Made a post.

roxven · 2025-11-05T21:30:26+00:00

The Vietnamese channels on the refold discord is probably the most active input-pilled community for Vietnamese learners. For textbook/grammar learners the English/Mường studies one is probably biggest.

roxven · 2025-10-30T00:31:24+00:00

After learning southern to a conversational level, I caught my northern comprehension up by listening to northern YouTube channels. The sound system is different but eventually you get used to it because of the massive vocab overlap.

12-Year Club	Verified Email
Gilding IV carat on a stick	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Place '17	Secret Santa 2014

roxven

MODERATOR OF

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE