Ngày mai tao đi làm. And for some reason, I find Vietnamese vocabulary just doesn’t “stick” as easily as Mandarin. njəŋ32, Trc naŋ12, Pk iŋ 12 $ loyŋ12, Th zjəŋ32, $ ɲiŋ32, Zyyy: ʐijən12 | Shuowen: 天地之性最貴者也。此籒文。象臂脛之形。凡人之屬皆从人。如鄰切〖注〗. I feel as though I am treading water in Vietnamese, and my facility in Chinese allows me to, just barely, keep my nostrils above the water. Thanks for the replies everybody. It’s not as easy to learn as people make it out to be. 政治 -> chính trị Also just to correct some points, Vietnamese didn’t borrow from a cantonese but from Classical Chinese. But after a 3.5 month break (to have our second child) I arrived in Hanoi and realised I could barely be understood. Guangdonghua always seems horribly daunting to me, as well, but from what you’re saying the grammar is probably still much easier than Vietnamese. Other varieties of Chinese share many characteristics with Mandarin, though have different pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. I can determine a Chinese cognate in up to 60% of the vocabulary I’ve learned to this point. Vietnamese is very easy to read. I speak Spanish with a horrible accent. I can accept that you personally found Chinese easier to pronounce, but objectively, your vowel argument does not seem to make much sense. This is an interesting perception coming from a foreigner who has tried to learn Vietnamese. But those people are often not professional people or are really living outside of Saigon (country people). The manner in which one addresses another is also something that is more complex in Vietnamese. Tenses are so simple, we only put time adverb to indicate tense without transforming the words, not like English. The consonant pair that has given me the most difficulty is t/đ (different from the ‘d’ above). If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend you use Chữ Nôm to identify Chinese cognates for Vietnamese words. Basically no real grammar. The consonants and vowels in Mandarin can be hard, but in Vietnamese, they seem even harder. Tao đi làm hôm qua. But I know we share a lot of words with Chinese. I’m a Korean and my native language Korean is very similar in such a complex ‘you’ and ‘I’, but we Korean people just ‘remove’ the tricky part and say, without explicit reference to that complex ‘you’, freeing us from the burden of wrong and rude utterance. I did a bike tour from Hanoi with a Vietnamese tour guide and bus driver.. by the time we got to Nha Trang (halfway down) he was unable to understand what the locals were saying.. this I say without any word of exaggeration. For that matter, the Vietnamese “th” and “ch” can be approximated by the English “th” and “ch” as well, (though the Vietnamese “th” is closer to the Mandarin “t”, as in your “交通/giao thông”). There are simply more sounds to work with and especially the Northern tones are more difficult to reproduce. So this can baffle foreigners trying to learn our language But there is an upside for those with a Chinese background when learning Vietnamese. The pronunciation of Vietnamese seems even harder than Mandarin (which I struggled with), both in the consonants/vowels and the tones. Grammar: They're about on par but I find that Vietnamese has somewhat more exceptions. I speak “correct” Vietnamese and pronounce everything like they’re supposed to. We call them Hán-Việt, which we got influenced by the Han dynasty during the colonial period. 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. 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. It’s “bác”, to be exact. Group 1 – Bằng (level 平) Chinese is like so easy. Some will sound drastically different like 日記: ri ji vs jat gei vs nhật ký. And yet in our system, we get 2 years for Mandarin (because of characters) and 1 for Vietnamese (although at least the in-country component has increased from my 4 weeks to 12). You just have to learn how to pronounce it. Having spoken Chinese for so many years, I plead guilty to tonal transfer, but in my own defense, tones in Vietnamese are more subtle, and for me, not nearly as intuitive. Two that give me a lot of trouble are the dấu huyền and dấu nặng tones (low-falling and low-dropping), particularly when occurring consecutively and spoken at conversational speed. Maybe because I’m Vietnamese, I find it no difficuty. To be brutally honest, I would advise you to study something else. Notice that all Vietnamese people sing in Northern Vietnamese, unless they are singing country songs or folk songs from their own region. 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). In Vietnamese a “d” with a strike through it (đ) is a hard d, while a regular d is soft, sounding like y or z, depending on which pronunciation of Vietnamese you use. Just about the only thing more difficult in Mandarin is its writing system. Vietnamese “r” theoretically should be pronounced as the rolling rr in Spanish, but no one I know does that, most pronounce it similar to the English r. In the North, people like to pronounce r as English z. The sound system is not problematic for native English speakers. We rather use bắc (Hồ Chí Minh is a good example), there’s a slight difference between these two words. There doesn’t seem to be many exceptions here. I speak like B2 Mandarin which I learned mainly for fun (I passed HSK5 easily if that's any qualification), but I recently found out about a really nice job opportunity if I get to B2 or beyond with Vietnamese within a few years (think 1-3). Everyday in China there is much discussion about chess and xiangqi that which is more complex. But I think, Vietnamese speaking is the hardest part. Maybe some Vietnamese speakers here can offer some input. Going back to China last year after 9 years, and my Chinese came flooding back – and people understood. Umm…waiter? I grew up hearing much more Vietnamese than Mandarin, and I find Vietnamese harder and less intuitive. (doing what?). Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Both awesome! Anyway, yes, tiếng việt rất khó : why did I have to fall in love with an Hanoian girl, for crying out loud! I want to konw your opinions about this,friends from all over the world.Especially the friends from Vietnam,because Vietnam maybe is the only country which has both many strong chess masters and xiangqi masters besides China.Thanks. Similar to Chinese, sentence particles are a very important grammatical component, but Vietnamese takes this to a stratospheric level of complexity. China offers few concessions to foreigners, while Vietnam works hard to accommodate them. As a native vietnamese speaker, I might be biased and think Vietnamese is easier lol. If the female is older than you it should usually be Chị. Your maternal (older) aunt’s spouse is dượng. English and Spanish, although belonging to separate families (Germanic and Romance respectively) fall under a broader family called Indo-European. @Dinh Ton: I think you make some confusion in the use of d, đ, t, and th. But I managed to pick up Dari (northern Afghanistan) quite easily, Swahili (Kenya) likewise. The standardised written form of Vietnamese is not uniquely Northern (at least the modern dialects anyway). These are obviously just approximation but they can get you pretty close. This is an old post so I’m not sure if you’re still learning Vietnamese or have already mastered it. But to most beginners, Vietnamese is a HARD language. My Vietnamese instructors tell me such a reference exists, but I didn’t find one on my recent immersion trip there in March. Stu Jay wrote a very interesting article about learning Vietnamese. That said, they are waaay more similar to each other than either is to English or other Indo-European languages. This central dialect is again different from the ones in HCMC and Hanoi. We do still have words,but moder Vietnamese don’t used much of those from Chinese anymore. Having done considerable Mandarin and a smattering of Vietnamese, I have had much the same experience. It is hard to imagine two sound systems more diametrically opposed than English and Vietnamese. As you already pointed out, there’s a lot of cognates between Vietnamese and Chinese so knowing Chinese is a great advantage when it comes to learning Vietnamese. You can learn the various ways by watching ancient drama movies. Stu Jay wrote a very interesting article about learning Vietnamese. In fact, most likely we won’t use it for authority. Finally, a great website to look up Chinese/Vietnamese cognates is http://www.hanviet.org/. The vowels and consonants are almost all different from any language I’ve studied so I’m constantly getting confused about what I hear even when I have the dialogues memorized. Not so in Vietnamese. Pretty much impossible, if you ask the Vietnamese themselves. 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. (No spam!). Mandarin is like a breeze. But if I go to Mexico they cannot. I have worked on Vietnamese – the first year I was here with a tutor – and it has been an exercise in frustration. For instance bác is generally used for your paternal uncle/aunt who’s older than your father. 2. This is a subreddit for anybody interested in the pursuit of languages. I'm not sure what you mean by Vietnamese sounds being less intuitive. I thought it would be the same, I thought I could get by without tones. Don’t forget we also have chú which is same as cô for males. We also use Chinese words when we want to be sarcastic, as euphemism or when we want to sound sophiscated lol In short, I’ve found Chinese phonology presents much less difficulty than Vietnamese. Naturally, the Vietnamese words that stick best for me are those with close Chinese equivalents: phong phú/丰富; giao thông/交通; hiện đậi/现代; phát minh/发明…words like that. Just how difficult is the Vietnamese language? Some of you may recall a seminal essay by David Moser: “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard”. Before I studied Vietnamese I thought it was “Chinese lite.” Then learned Cantonese and saw how easily that went when compared with Mandarin and I became even more arrogant. That, however, is not the focus of this article. 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). In southern Vietnamese, the dialect I am learning, people often pronounce ‘v’ as ‘y’—to add to the confusion, ‘d’ and ‘gi’ are also pronounced as a ‘y’ sound’. Vietnamese is the first foreign language I’ve encountered that has us beat in that respect. Once again, thanks for the info guys, best of luck learning your respective languages! 知 -> tri, Of course, there’s exceptions (typically due to Vietnamese also adopting Cantonese). 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. Prince Roy, yes people do use “bác” to address older women, but usually they have to be much older than you. I think Northern tones are easier to make than Southern tones. Like Chinese, Vietnamese is tonal, but the similarity ends there. (Go where?) Personally, I find grammar to be the easiest aspect of Vietnamese by far. Vietnames “th” simply does not have an equivalent in English. While the ingredients may be similar, the preparation sets them apart. One thing that might make it easier than Chinese is more European loanwords (mostly from French and English). Serge, thanks for that example; the dak6 bit6 contrast with đặc biệt confirms what I’ve suspected all along: a speaker of Cantonese would find Vietnamese much less difficult. Even if things aren't exactly the same in Vietnamese, I think this mental flexibility will make it easier for you to grasp aspects of the language that are very different from English. I agree with most of John Pasden’s initial comments above; Vietnamese pronunciation is quite difficult, and despite what IPA symbols are used, Vietnamese vowels are not really similar to those of any European language, and frequently are different from those in other Asian languages too. I know that since I am Vietnamese-Chinese. Also, the writing system in Vietnamese, although it uses roman characters, has a staggering amount of diacritical marks...so...it's easier in a sense, being phonetic, but harder in a sense too. But FYI married people usually use em, the 99% of the husband in Vietnam will call their wife for em, not chị. 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. Vietnamese “gi” is same as English z. kinh is jing (the main city) bắc kinh/ beijing. This is true; if you speak English then French is a lot more similar to your native language than Chinese is. Tao đi làm ngày mai. I don’t think the blanket statement Mandarin is harder than Vietnamese applies. When John asked me to comment on my experiences learning Vietnamese and Chinese, I was happy to oblige, because it allows me to try and wrap my head around what I’ve been through since I began studying Vietnamese last September (8 ½ months ago now). 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. Reading this makes me want to study Vietnamese. This, compounded with the tones, can easily render one’s speech unintelligible or worse. 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