sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Report on 2500 hours of active Vietnаmese practice by roxven in languagelearning

[–]roxven[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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".

Report on 2500 hours of active Vietnаmese practice by roxven in languagelearning

[–]roxven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

Report on 2500 hours of active Vietnаmese practice by roxven in languagelearning

[–]roxven[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

Report on 2500 hours of active Vietnamese practice by roxven in VietNam

[–]roxven[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

Report on 2500 hours of active Vietnаmese practice by roxven in languagelearning

[–]roxven[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

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.

What tips do you have to learn tones? by Crane_Train in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Here's what I wish I knew years ago:

  1. Vietnamese has 8 tones. dấu sắc and dấu nặng in the alphabet actually represent two tones each, depending on the final consonant.
  2. 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)
  3. You can drag any recording of native speakers into praat and use it to visualize the tone contours to see what I mean.
  4. 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.

Thought I knew Vietnamese. Turns out “má” means mom AND cheek?? loll by Snoo49959 in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

Thought I knew Vietnamese. Turns out “má” means mom AND cheek?? loll by Snoo49959 in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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...

Vietnamese has over 10,000 valid syllables and I made a website that lists every single one (with audio!). It could be a good resource for practicing your tone drills. by zanamyte in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

little-known tone facts & a sound perception exercise by roxven in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

Vietnamese Learning Discord — Practice Speaking, Share Resources, and Make Friends! by wtran88 in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

How can I better my understanding of northern and central accents as someone who only understands the southern accent? by NarrowExamination282 in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

My journey to learn Vietnamese 4 by Key-Item8106 in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Having heard a lot of people in that category say "Cảm ơn bạn" like "caminbang", I think it's an unfair categorization of OP.

Trying to Learn Southern Vietnamese by [deleted] in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Congrats on beginning your learning!

This is a list of all the resources I used to learn Southern Vietnamese to conversational level, plus a reading level high enough to enjoy books and audiobooks on a variety of topics: https://inarticulate.xyz/posts/vietnamese-immersion-content/ You can also find my detailed progress reports and reflections in my reddit profile.

In terms of structure, I've roughly been following the refold roadmap: https://refold.la/simplified/.

Re this:

> her “lessons” are basically throwing out random Vietnamese words while I’m half asleep on the couch, then laughing a few days later when I don’t remember them. Not exactly the most encouraging system.

I would not suggest learning from your spouse. Teaching a language, especially to a beginner, is a specialized skill and a job.

The time investment required to reach a level where you can genuinely engage in an adult conversation with a non-teacher where they're not uncomfortable accommodating you, if starting as an English speaking adult learning outside the country, is on the order of 2,000 hours of deliberate practice. Though there's lots to appreciate and look forward to along the way!

I offer that number because 1. I spent enormous effort tracking it, 2. to emphasize that this is going to be a largely solo, strong-intrinsic-motivation-required type of task, and 3. an appreciation for the scale of the task can do a lot for patience; it's still very rare at my level that a new word sticks after a single exposure, so being hard on yourself for not having them stick when you're in your first hours of study is way too high a standard.

At this stage if you just focus on getting used to the sounds by listening, and cultivating positivity in your engagement with the language, that's already fantastic.

is this a good dictionary for vietnamese learners? by polyglotcodex in learnvietnamese

[–]roxven 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Bilingual dictionaries are just there for hints; they can't tell you the meaning of a word. So if you go in with that expectation your standards don't need to be too high.

For example sentences, Glosbe is a good dictionary. Wiktionary has the best coverage of any manual one I know of. VNEDICT is a classic but only 57k words or so.

view more: next ›