You can learn the various ways by watching ancient drama movies. It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a first or second language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam. Vietnames “th” simply does not have an equivalent in English. And unless you can get to grips with them, nearly everything else falls by the wayside. Most of them can be grasped after some exposure and practising. Similar to Chinese, sentence particles are a very important grammatical component, but Vietnamese takes this to a stratospheric level of complexity. I can speak Vietnamese, Chinese, French, Spanish, and English. Now the Vietnamese “d” (without a slash like the đ) is pronounce similar to German j and English y. Vietnamese people in the North tend to pronounce the d similar to English z. Vietnamese “ch”, “tr” are to be pronounced as English ch and tr (as in channel and truck). To be fair Mandarin was hard, too, back in the dark ages, but I have had so many more resources for learning Vietnamese in the Internet age and after having Cantonese come smoothly I was sure I’d do better at Vietnamese. We mostly use modern Vietnamese, which I think has changed a lot after the invention of Chữ quốc ngữ. Also just to correct some points, Vietnamese didn’t borrow from a cantonese but from Classical Chinese. Languages are sooooo fun. John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning. I go work tomorrow. Hôm qua tao đi làm. Theoretically: Em if they’re a lot younger or for a spouse/gf; Cô, for a woman < 40; Chị for a married woman > 35; and Bà for an elderly woman or a woman in authority. *For older people, they can still use chị and cô as well but same thing applies, it depends on the age range. 历史 -> lịch sử Will my Mandarin help me at all if I decide to take up Vietnamese, like are there loanwords or will I learn the tones more easily or whatever? I studied both languages in a very intensive environment, but when I recall my (much greater) proficiency in Chinese after the equivalent period spent learning Vietnamese, I can only cringe in shame at my Viet inadequacy. Ive only heard one foreigner speak like a local, and that was some 60 year old American missionary who has been here since the 1980’s. English and German are of the same linguistic family. Not sure if that description really fits in. In addition, Vietnamese people are not capable of guessing what it is you want. Here are a few general thoughts: This is the big one. Because in China most people don’t speak Mandarin correctly, and people have gotten used to people from different provinces (where Mandarin is not their mother tongue) speaking it. I have the information I was looking for now. I think English pronunciation is difficult for foreigners because of our large variety of subtly different vowel sounds. The Southern Vietnamese pronunciation is more straightforward. I learned to partially speak many languages, I was never able to be totally fluent since once an emergency ended I returned home. I think knowing Mandarin will help you a lot though, in multiple ways: Being aware of tones. Most people are correct Vietnamese had borrowed a lots from Chinese especially Cantonese. The pronunciation of Vietnamese seems even harder than Mandarin (which I struggled with), both in the consonants/vowels and the tones. I realized I cannot remember 40-60 new words a unit a day, cannot learn both traditional and simplified chinese , English definition for Chinese does not help my studies (I use pleco dictionary).I searched Internet and I find Hackingchinese site and this site. This is a subreddit for anybody interested in the pursuit of languages. (Go where?) Sawatdee jow instead of sawatdee khrup for example. We call them Hán-Việt, which we got influenced by the Han dynasty during the colonial period. What’s more, the differences between the vowel sounds can be quite subtle. You can stick to things like anh, chi, em, toi, ban, ong, ba, chu, co… no need for things like thim, mo, duong, co/coc, noi, ngoai…. 知 -> tri, Of course, there’s exceptions (typically due to Vietnamese also adopting Cantonese). I’ll add it to that list of languages I want to learn someday but never probably will unless I end up living there. I was born and grew up in Vietnam, I finished high school there but honestly I don’t know a lot of Hán Việt, not many Vietnamese are good at Hán Việt either. It’s “bác”, to be exact. But few words in Hà Nội still pronounced different like letter “L” can become “N”,Nokia will turn into Lokia. For example, “special” in Vietnamese is “đặc biệt”. This is an old post so I’m not sure if you’re still learning Vietnamese or have already mastered it. The grammar is totally different. That’s why I want to make sure I learn the right “accent” for Mandarin. Due to the roughly 1000-year period that Vietnam was a colony of China, Chinese had an enormous influence on the Vietnamese language. I think this happens more in the North than the South. But they’re less patient when it’s a foreigner doing the criticizing. Not only words but we have borrowed entire idioms and proverbs. Press J to jump to the feed. I would NOT recommend learning it if you only know English ( Beginners ). The northern (Hanoi) dialect has 6 tones; the southern (Saigon) has 5. 名 -> danh Thanks for the replies everybody. Learning to read and write Japanese is probably harder than Chinese because most Japanese characters (kanji) have two or more pronunciations, whereas the vast majority of Chinese characters (hanzi) only have one. But in Vietnamese, you are not allowed to omit ‘you’/’I’. I feel like we shorten the sentences a lot. If your age is 25 and she’s 30, it should chị. Mợ is your maternal uncle’s spouse while thím is your paternal uncle’s spouse. All rights reserved. They will understand you at least 90% of the time, mostly due to context, and also because the Lao have such an easy-going nature–they really want to talk with you. Those people who learned both languages would attest that Chinese is far easier than the Vietnamese language in almost all aspects, but reading. If you lived in an area like Kentucky, the people there often do not speak “correct” English and do not sound like the people you hear on TV. But I managed to pick up Dari (northern Afghanistan) quite easily, Swahili (Kenya) likewise. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Tao đi làm hôm qua. 发 -> phát (again, we got this from the Cantonese) If you analyse it carefully, it actually does a great job at encompassing the two major regional speeches. In the interests of full disclosure, I studied Chinese for a total of five years, and have spoken it now almost 25 years. Integrated Chinese (Levels 1, 2): A View From the Trenches, http://nomfoundation.org/nom-tools/Nom-Lookup-Tool/Nom-Lookup-Tool, http://www.viethoc.org/hannom/tdtc_intro.php, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ620nh_S0, Catholic Mass in Shanghai in the Time of COVID (2020). Prince Roy, yes people do use “bác” to address older women, but usually they have to be much older than you. However I think Southern tones are easier for Chinese people to make. (doing what?). I can read signs, pick up a bit in conversations, speak basiclaly and I do a party trick of starting and finishing speeches in Vietnamese. I think you should practice with Vietnamese karaoke. Is that also true for you guys? Maybe some Vietnamese speakers here can offer some input. Language variation - Chinese has several dialects and is spoken over a huge area by more than a billion people. Here’s a real-life example of why this is so critical: a very common dish in Vietnam is phở bò tái—rare beef pho. Of course, there are also things that make learning Chinese harder than you think (or perhaps as hard), sometimes even the same things from different angles or on different proficiency levels. Vietnamese is Austro-Asiatic while Chinese languages are Sino-Tibetan. There is a multitude of nasal and glottal sounds that don’t exist in English or Mandarin. It is the listener. It makes their achievement all the more amazing. Thai took a while, but after one year, I managed to speak like a 6 year old, ”me like me no like’count to ten, tell time etc, I was able to be understood quite easily with my pigeon Thai / English as I traveled around doing development projects. I’m a Northern Vietnamese. Shutterstock/VPales . Just how difficult is the Vietnamese language? Many words from Cantonese pretty much Vietnamese people can understand few words like “Long” Dragon both can understand that words. Both awesome! Sure they are trying but the tones never comes naturally when having conversation. I have a couple of Vietnamese friends (natives / international students) who admit that if they’re around various Asians and are not paying attention or didn’t hear well, they can’t be sure if they heard someone speak Vietnamese or Cantonese. All are welcome, whether beginner or polyglot. Other than that, they belong to different language family. For the purpose of this article đồng has been anglicized to dong. Chinese also has many way to say I and you traditionally. Mandarin has a lot of things that behave fundamentally different from how they do in English...if you've gotten far enough in Mandarin that you've started to get exposed to some of these ideas, it'll make your mind flexible. And I think you may find it harder because even though you’re learning the easy dialect (saigon), you are still bound to use the official writing system which belongs to North. I did find a pretty cool dictionary, however: Từ Điển Thành Ngữ-Tục Ngữ Việt-Hán, 越汉成语俗语词典, by publisher Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Hoá Sài Gòn. The diacritics are not that big of a deal and add to the clarity, not the other way around. We also use Chinese words when we want to be sarcastic, as euphemism or when we want to sound sophiscated lol As a person who was born, raised in, and had lived in Vietnam for 11 years before immigrating to the U.S. , I can tell from my own experiences that out of all the regional dialects, the Central (Trung/Hue) dialect is the most difficult to comprehend. China offers few concessions to foreigners, while Vietnam works hard to accommodate them. (No spam!). I can’t recall one off the top of my head (and that’s a good thing). ); ɲin12, Ôc zaŋ12, Ts ʐjən12, Shuangfeng in12, Nx lan31, Hm ʐin12, $ laŋ12, Hai. The Vietnamese “t” is the SAME exact sound as the Spanish t which is quite differ to English t. I requalified to a high level of proficiency twice (including while 37 weeks pregnant) and then 5 years later started Vietnamese. This article focuses on the easy things and is meant to encourage you. My undergraduate degree was in Chinese, and I learned Thai quite well when I lived there. Besides the meaning, these cognates also share a tonal mapping system, which I’m going to describe below. I was never a brilliant linguist and I struggled with tones but I could be understood. Angela, I’ve argued (in vain up to now), for a re-designation of Vietnamese to a ‘super-hard’ rather than just ‘hard’. English and Spanish, although belonging to separate families (Germanic and Romance respectively) fall under a broader family called Indo-European. Serge, as a learner / speaker of Mandarin myself, I do also want to know what words are the same in Chinese rather than attempt to recognize them or guess when I encounter then. 十 -> thập (we got this from the Cantonese sap6) And for some reason, I find Vietnamese vocabulary just doesn’t “stick” as easily as Mandarin. If you live in Saigon, most do pronounce it correctly. It's not uncommon to have several words for the same thing (look up the word "Sunday" for instance). I definitely do not want the hicks version of Mandarin. When I started learning Mandarin, the 2nd and 4th tones used to trip me up like they did to you. In the North, people pronounce both ch and tr as “ch”. In Vietnam they are not forgiving about you speaking it incorrectly. Since he has a background in Chinese and linguistics, he goes into detail about how he used his knowledge of Chinese and other Asian languages to pick up Vietnamese quickly. If you don’t believe me, at least consider this. My teacher was kind on me in Australia and I tested well. The Southern Vietnamese often don’t pronounce “v” and “r” correctly. 1. I'm not sure what you mean by Vietnamese sounds being less intuitive. If a female is younger than you it’s em. I thought it would be the same, I thought I could get by without tones. Chinese is much simpler than Japanese when it comes to grammar, syntax and matching your speech patterns to the relationship between the speakers (levels of politeness and so on). Tao đi làm ngày mai. It’s going to be hard to find someone that can comment on all 4 languages! I don’t think the blanket statement Mandarin is harder than Vietnamese applies. For Southern like Sài Gòn you will hear people miss pronounced this letter “R” will turn into “G,Gh” and “V” will turn into “D,Gi. To be honest, I am regretting that I have spend so much time trying to learn this language, I could have been fluent in TWO other languages by now (French and Russian) with the amount of time and effort I have spent on Vietnamese. For example, when you ask for the bill in a restaurant, and ask for the bill (even you make the verbal sign of writing the cheque)… they will call the manager and ask what it is you want… they think you are asking for a bucket of cow urine… !!! You also use “bác” for women in the family that hold the rank “bác” in particular, but you won’t get to use it anyway so I won’t go deeper. However, I agree that if you want to get those sounds right, you need to practice with a coach. But I know we share a lot of words with Chinese. I’m putting together a table / database of how characters / syllables in various Asian languages are related, so it’s nice I got to add these. These loanwords are also a bit more transparent than such loanwords in Mandarin, I think (probably because Vietnamese allows a lot more syllable-final consonants, like Cantonese). But it has probably been simplified for foreigners learning Mandarin. It’s not as easy to learn as people make it out to be. I could have written this post! By using our Services or clicking I agree, you agree to our use of cookies. Not impossible though but tones are everything. The one that sounded like second tone was clearly not so, but the difference was too subtle for me to detect. 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