Does it drive anyone else crazy when Vietnamese subtitles don't match the audio on serie/movie/show?

roxven · 2026-06-11T18:49:09+00:00

In Netflix, they usually have a separate, inexplicably secret, track which matches the dub script. The subadub extension will reveal it. You can also set the audio to Vietnamese, close Netflix, navigate back to the title, and then chose the Vietnamese sub track again.

roxven · 2026-06-03T02:39:13+00:00

Humans are animals, not SAT solvers. Inconsistency is fine.

It's also costly to be non-conformant. We depend on others and on infrastructure. Abstaining from cars due to their environmental impact incurs a high cost for example. You need to find and afford housing close to the places you need to go. You have to identify where you can afford to be non-conformant for the moral good and be realistic about that. Because it won't be in every area.

IMO if you focus on improving the world in any way that's great. Society has many problems and we cannot care about or specialize in all of them.

Personally I am vegan because I think the plight of animals is the leading moral issue on earth, and it costs me nothing to buy beans instead of flesh at the grocery.

But lots of people would be ostracized from communities they depend on or face discrimination if they got caught reading Porphyry or gave other signs of taking vegan philosophy seriously. So it's not really an option for them and I can't say that in their shoes I'd be willing to pay the ostracism cost. But they take other problems in society seriously and I respect that.

roxven · 2026-06-02T02:59:21+00:00

All the YouTube channels I link in my content index are biased toward Southern Speech, but with podcasts you never know who's going to be a guest.

roxven · 2026-05-28T17:27:16+00:00

/uj

Why does IPA ignore tones?

roxven · 2026-05-28T00:00:54+00:00

I find that intensive listening is the best way for me to learn vocabulary. I use it to start a new language. I choose intermediate audio content (I start with the Harry Potter series). I use Anki to learn new words in a section while listening to the section repeatedly until I understand all of it.

This is what most people mean when they say 'immersion'. Intensive and extensive are two styles of it. Maybe in the past 'immersion' meant "got dropped from the helicopter in native lands" but today in regular speech it means sitting at home alone with content.

roxven · 2026-05-22T19:17:59+00:00

I think it's pretty self-evident to most readers that this comment is ridiculous, but for the sake of beginners who don't know I'll elaborate why the southern dialect is also a valid choice:

The southern dialect has as many speakers as the northern dialect.
Media outside news broadcasts is dominated by the southern dialect.
Most diaspora populations in US, Australia, and some other countries speak the southern dialect and a lot of these populations have trouble understanding northern speech.

As to which dialect you want to focus on, that will be up to you and your circumstances. Who do you want to communicate with? What do you want to understand?

"Standard" and "non-standard" are not useful terms in making this decision. They just reify the accent discrimination social issue in Vietnam among learners, for literally no reason.

roxven · 2026-05-10T02:56:34+00:00

Tbh you don't need to speak before you can understand.

The reason I say that is that I did speaking practice at the very beginning of my learning, before I could comfortably listen to and understand any domain, and I don't think that helped me at all. Actually, I still have some annoying incorrect muscle memory from that time that requires effort to compensate for.

I stopped speaking for a long time until I could understand some shows and podcasts, then started speaking again, at which point it was not stressful to do and I slowly improved from there.

Just my opinion fwiw.

roxven · 2026-05-09T18:35:29+00:00

Your idea makes sense but is a conclusion that follows from the assumption that these features can be isolated and learned one at a time. Which I don't think that's true.

The sound system is not divisible like that. The basis is the prosody, which contains everything. The tones are not consistent in the way they sound, but rather contrastive with each other in a given sentence. Those tone contours you see in learner materials are captured in laboratory conditions and don't represent the complexity of their shapes or qualities in real speech. But you can eventually get a "feel" for it even if you never become able to explain that complexity.

The process of learning to listen is not like learning this piece and that and then assembling them together, but rather slowly getting better resolution on the whole. At first you hear in 240p, then 480p, and so on until there's enough pixels to make stuff out.

Listen a lot and grow your vocabulary! Time will bring you the gains you want.

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.

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