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Two years to learn Vietnamese | ||
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| OwlPanda Newbie United States Joined 3124 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese | Message 1 of 7 16 October 2015 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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NOTE: After previewing this post, I noticed that anything I wrote with diacritical
marks didn't show up correctly, so I went through and replaced everything with vanilla Latin characters. I hope I didn't miss anything. If I did, then assume it's not written the way I intended. Okay, maybe three years. That's how much time I'm giving myself. That's a bit of a rough start, so let's back up a bit and hear about my linguistic history. I grew up in the U.S. When I was in my last year of elementary school, we had a short introduction to German. It was only a few weeks long, but it was a good thing for my impressionable young mind. Apparently, that short introduction worked for everyone in the class, because we found it the easiest of the three we encountered in middle school. One of the required courses there was a semester designed to give us a taste of German, French, and Spanish. The German was what stuck, and so I and all of my friends enrolled in four years of German classes in high school. That was good fun. We all took it seriously, and we actually got to be fairly good at reading. I can still remember a few poems by Goethe, and I read a few short novels. Getting a German grammar lesson at school every day for four years went a long way toward improving my English grammar, which was one of the best things I got out of high school. Really, grammar wasn't ever the hard part of German class. It wasn't really that different from English, except word order was more rigid, nouns had gender, and everything had more inflections. I never really developed my listening skills, though. This was back in the pre- internet days, so I didn't have any way of practicing those. The only person I knew who was fluent in German was my teacher, and he didn't have time to give everyone extra practice after school. So, despite doing well in the classes, I didn't have a lot of confidence in my skills. That's why, when I went off to college, I was a little nervous when I tested into the second year of German. And that's why I dropped it altogether. Sure, I'll still listen to some German opera now and then, I'll pick up some German poetry (hands down my favorite Western poetry), and back when I had time for that sort of thing, I occasionally played through an RPG in German. Still, I didn't feel I was up to the challenge of starting out in a second year course with people I was certain were a lot better than I was. What next, then? My school required at least two years of a foreign language at the time. Why not French? I actually put French onto my schedule for the last year of high school, just so I'd have some experience with a Romance language. This served me well later in life, as I needed it to read some math papers for school. Alas, I can't really read anything that isn't about math, and I never really pursued French any further except for a brief revival of interest on my way to a math conference in Montreal. The biggest takeaway from that experience is that my reading and listening skills were a lot better than my speaking skills, as I couldn't remember how to order anything from Tim Horton's, but I could at least understand street signs and subway directions. If you're cheating and looking at my profile, you might guess that the next chapter of this story involves Korean. If you guessed Korean on your own, good work, I suppose, but I still think you cheated. Anyway, I signed up for Korean 101, and I immediately fell totally in love with Hangul. I took two years of classes, I took some classes on Korean history and Korean literature (taught in English), and I spent a year living in Seoul. That all sounds great, and it was, but my skills plateaued somewhere around the A2 level. Vocabulary, especially. See, at the time, I didn't know how great flashcards are for learning vocabulary words. I had some textbooks that I tried to use, and I read grammar books and watched Korean dramas on DVD. I didn't get a lot of speaking practice except for when I visited Korean restaurants, and when I was there, I ended up saying the same few things over and over again. I got to be really good at telling people that I lived in Seoul for a while and that I wanted to order such-and-such, but I never made much more progress after that. Even when I was in Seoul, I had trouble practicing, because most people just spoke English with me, and being immersed in a language you don't speak well is really exhausting, so it was easy to go along with the English conversation. By the end, I could get around the country pretty well, but I couldn't hold conversations with anyone. Fast forward a few years, and my skill level never really improved. I never got good at typing in Korean, and I had trouble finding and keeping friends who spoke the language, since my main focus was on grad school. I needed math to get a job someday, so language sat on the backburner. My plan was to finish and possibly find a job in Korea so I could go there and become fluent. That's been my dream. I wanted to become fluent in something. Since the start of college, I've very specifically wanted that something to be a non-Indo-European language, and I always figured it would be Korean. Then I got married. My wife and her entire family speak Vietnamese. She speaks English, too, but she likes Vietnamese more. Goodbye, Korean. Hello, Vietnamese. I got to start from scratch. Ooooooh, boy, this one is hard. I've never had trouble with pronunciation before. Even Korean was fairly simple, since Hangul is fairly faithful to actual pronunciation, and exceptions aren't that hard to remember once you're used to them. My Korean doesn't quite sound native, but people never have trouble understanding it. (My biggest troubles with Korean are my vocabulary and my listening ability, and I'm sure the more subtle points of grammar would have become an issue later on. So, there are lots of reasons no one would confuse me with a native speaker, but pronunciation is not the biggest.) With Vietnamese, pronunciation was a problem right from the start. Not because of the tones, though. For those who don't know, southern Vietnamese has five tones, if you count the lack of a tone as a tone. So, you have 'khong dau' (no tone), dau sac (rising tone), dau huyen (falling tone), dau hoi (questioning tone), dau nga (same as dau hoi in the southern dialect), and dau nang (heavy tone). In the north (not sure about central speech), dau hoi and dau nga are different. This sounds bad for a short time, but it isn't really. I don't find it any more difficult than having gender for nouns. The tone is just part of the word. Plus, since I practice saying the tones every day with a native speaker critiquing my pronunciation, I'm pretty sure I'm getting them right by this point, even if I probably exaggerate them a little. Much harder than that is the fact that there are just so many vowel sounds, and it's hard to tell them apart. Plus, the resources I had were not consistent. Too many of the resources out there are for the Hanoi dialect, which doesn't even sound like the same language and which can conjure up a strong negative reaction in some people from the south. That's not the worst part, but I'll get to the worst part in a bit. Hanoi speech has the extra tone, dấu ngã, which is also the hardest to say correctly. It's sort of high and broken. Fair enough. The tones are the easy part, remember. It also has different vowels and consonants. Word-initial 'gi-' in the south is pronounced like English 'y' (as in yield). In the north, it's like 'z' as in zebra. In the north, 'r' sounds like English 'z', as well. In at least one of the dialects, 'x' and 's' have different sounds, but not in the version I'm learning (which isn't quite pure Saigonese). Some final consonants are nasalized in the south, meaning mat (face) is pronounced like 'mack' (like a truck or raincoat). Final '-n' sounds like English '- ng' in the south. Apparently, in the north, '-nh' does that. I'm heard banh pronounced like 'bang' by northerners, I think. The rules aren't too hard once you puzzle them out, but figuring out what is what from conflicting sources is difficult. Then comes the hard part. All those vowels. I was hurt hard by the fact that the first book I used gave me the northern vowel pronunciations, so my wife had a lot of correcting to do. I eventually found a nice book by Thompson that covers phonology very extensively, and I got the hang of which symbols refer to rounded vowels and such. There aren't that many base vowels. Just three versions of a, three of o, two of u, two of e, and a single i. Sometimes y. The vowel clusters, however, are challenging. I still have trouble differentiating between au and ao, and it took me a while to figure out which was which of ay and ây. Throw in all the other dipthongs and tripthongs and whatnot and it gets even tougher. I figured that the only way to go was to find some basic words that illustrated minimal pairs and then get them straight in my head that way. This was, of course, hard to do before figuring out how to write. Two things saved me from declaring everything to be hopeless and giving up. First, I figured out how to use VNI to type Vietnamese letters, either from a program I run in the background every time I turn my computer on or from a browser extension. Then, I discovered Memrise and the beauty of SRS. I'd always had a lot of trouble with vocabulary, but Memrise got me past that and past a lot of my pronunciation difficulties. Specifically, doing vocabulary drills on Memrise with no option to leave out the tones was what helped. I first tried Memrise a while before, and I started on a course giving me a few hundred common words. I made it about 150 in before I stalled. I just wasn't learning much, and I couldn't really practice using anything I learned because I couldn't remember how to say it. The bits that included the correct spelling of the words (in Vietnamese, this includes the tones and the funny little hats that distinguish one vowel from another) weren't getting into my head because I just memorized Anglicized versions of the words. Remember, the Vietnamese alphabet has extra letters. You can't possibly remember how to pronounce things if you don't know with which tones they're spelled, and you can't say anything right with the tone, either. One more thing that makes it extra hard is that it seems to me that Vietnamese people use different features to tell words apart. If I'm speaking English, I can completely butcher half of my vowels and people will just think I'm from New York or England or someplace. In Vietnamese, the subtle difference between ô and u is enough to cause people to ask what the heck you just said. Meanwhile, no one has any problem with the fact that some people differentiate between 'r-' and 'gi-' and 'd-' and some people don't ('d-' is pronounced like English 'y' in the south and like English 'z' in the north). I haven't listed all of the little rules that make pronunciation a challenge at first, but just these should give some idea of how reading Vietnamese is not as straightforward as it looks. At least I get lots of time to practice. I dig out as much time as I can find to study, including Memrise during my lunch break at work. I went through Pimsleur I on my commute, but it was only somewhat helpful because of the northern dialect. For the same reason, I'm a little shy about Assimil. I'd like to say that it's more important that I get time to speak with my wife in the evenings, but I don't think that's entirely correct. Immersion would be really nice, but I'm convinced it isn't quite as immediately useful for languages without a bunch of cognates with a language that I already know. It seems that it'd be a lot easier to follow the action in a German-language film, for example, and I'd guess that I could probably improve my German listening pretty quickly just by improving my vocabulary a little bit and watching a lot of German movies. Maybe. With Vietnamese, practice conversations didn't help all that much until I started studying on my own first. That is, they didn't really help at all. I might pick up and remember one or two words per day through conversing. That's a lot of work for very little benefit. Fortunately, I think I'm doing a lot better now that I'm doing personal study on my own and then introducing words I've studied in conversation so I can internalize them better. I'll follow this up with a post on what methods I've been using. My incentive to work hard is a lot stronger than it used to be, too. A couple of years ago, starting a family was sort of vague goal that we knew we'd get to eventually. Now, it's something staring me in the face, and we're hoping to have a kid sometime in the next year or two. That means that the clock is ticking. We want our kid to speak Vietnamese full-time at home. I can teach the kid proper English when the time comes, and I'll be in charge of teaching reading in English (which won't be that hard once we get past reading in Vietnamese). I'd like to be useful before that, though. I'd like to talk in Vietnamese to my kid as soon as she or he is born, and I'd like for language not to be an issue in the home. I realize that'll be a stretch at first, but with enough work, I think I can make it a reality. At least I have a few more years before it'll really matter, since it takes a year to have a baby and another year or two for the baby to start talking. So, that's a decent summay of where I'm coming from and where I want to go. If I sort of keep a log of this stuff, maybe it'll help. In fact, it would even give me a nice reference for looking back both at my progress and at the individual lessons I've learned. (Maybe I'll learn something wrong, and I'll need to be corrected.) Wish me luck! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| OwlPanda Newbie United States Joined 3124 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese | Message 2 of 7 16 October 2015 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Okay, so here's what I've been doing.
Memrise has been my best friend so far. Before Memrise, I made almost no progress at all. None. I acquired a few books, but I had trouble getting any of the vocabulary in those books to stick, and I couldn't advance in the books without knowing the vocabulary. Now, I put textbook vocabulary into Memrise courses, and I have some other sources of words. More on that in a bit. In the meantime, I'm also doing regular conversation practice with my wife. My main motive here is to get better at listening, because right now, my speaking skills, though not great, are far behind my listening skills. Far behind. I can produce a lot of sentences with relatively little difficulty, but if I hear the same sentences at full speed and out of context, I can't understand them. I'm trying to fix this, but I haven't had much luck so far. I think the cure is going to be listening to a lot more. We'll see. Another problem is that knowing vocabulary isn't necessarily enough, obviously. I probably know about 1000 words right now, not counting words I can derive from other words (like numbers). The problem is that I can still run into sentences composed entirely of words I recognize, but the sentences will still come off as nonsense to me. This is a serious problem, and I think I'm pretty far from being able to solve it just with listening practice. My solution has been to move on to read native materials, when possible. The hard part there is finding something appropriate. Everyone seems to mention Harry Potter as one of the early "easy" books that people attempt in a target language. Well, it's not working for me so far. Maybe it gets easier after I get past the first few pages, but too much of the language early on is abstract and descriptive at the same time. Even with the English version right next to me, I have trouble understanding it. So, I've got to go with something easier, and a couple of things have stood out. First and foremost, I've been indulging in Japanese comics, since it's not that hard to find them in both English and Vietnamese. With a version in each language, I can read through, one dialogue balloon at a time, and I can get through a chapter or two per day. I still usually need to keep a translation program or a dictionary (or both) nearby in order to figure everything out, but it's doable. I still often run into things that I don't understand at all until I look at the English version, after which I find myself saying, "Hey, I should have known that. I know all of those words." That's frustrating. The other big one I'm using right now is a Vietnamese translation of Alice's Advantures in Wonderland alongside the English version. I like this one because a lot of the text is very straightforward, and the narrator spends a lot of time explaning Alice's train of thought. It's informative, even if it uses a lot of difficult words. Another benefit of it is that I'm reading a version typed out online, so it's not too hard to use the Google Translate Chrome extension to get definitions of words and phrases relatively quickly. I just started reading Alice; I'm still on chapter 2. I'm not sure if I'll be better off reading that one again and again until I find it easy or moving on to a different book. The advantage of reading it again and again is that I really like the story, and it'd feel nice if it helped me build my skills. The advantage of moving on would be that I'd see more new vocabulary and new contexts and new grammatical points, and I could go for a book that I haven't read before (like Harry Potter). I finished the first long Memrise course I took on, so together with the other words I've picked up here and there, I estimate that I know about 1000 words well. This isn't, I've noticed, enough to read anything comfortably, even kids' books, but it's a start. My next goal, though, is to expand my vocabulary as quickly as possible, and to do that, I'm trying to use two different SRS programs somewhat systematically. First, because Memrise seems to work better for me than Anki, especially since I learn tones by typing words, I'm putting individual words into more Memrise courses. I plan to do this in either two or three stages, depending on how well it works. The key is that I have two dictionaries. One is very basic. It's intended for travelers. It's hardly comprehensive, but it contains enough words that I think I'll have a decent foundation by the time I get through it. Or, at least, I'll feel like I have a better foundation than the one I have now, along with more details so I can actually talk about things other than types of fruit. (I feel as though I know more fruit names in Vietnamese than in English right now.) Once I get through that, I'll go to my long dictionary, which has an English-to- Vietnamese section and a Vietnamese-to-English section. The Vietnamese-to-English section has about 10,000 words in it. I think I can handle that in about five years, right? Maybe less. Maybe this plan is helped by the fact that I actually like dictionaries, particularly when they are full information that I feel I really need to learn. I feel as though I ought to know all of the words in the big dictionary, eventually, and I think I can get there someday relatively soon if I push myself. Let's assume there are about 10,000 words total, because the small dictionary mostly contains the most relevant words from the big dictionary. In five years, I'll have about 1750 days. That's just over five words per day, if I keep at it. I think that's very doable. Eventually, I'll find some use for Anki. I'll probably take sentences from news articles or books. For now, I'm putting it on hold, because I find that I learn a lot better from Memrise. So, my current strategy can be summarized thusly: I want to average at least five to ten new vocabulary words each day, pulled from a dictionary into my Memrise courses. I review those courses every day, and when I find particularly tough words that I just can't get right, I mention them to my wife so we can practice them. I also try to read a chapter of a Japanese comic and as much of Alice as I can manage each night in order to get more familiar with how words are put together to form sentences. Each evening, I spend as much time as I can conversing in Vietnamese with my wife, who corrects my pronunciation (less and less these days) and helps me learn to hear words well. That covers most of what I'm doing, but I'm still trying to figure out how to incorporate music into my studies. Thus far, I've found music to be problematic. Remember the difficulty I have with books? The problem is that I'll find sentences where I know every word individually but still can't understand the sentence. Well, Vietnamese music tends to magnify that problem. The good songs tend to be extremely poetic, but they're tough to comprehend even with a good dictionary nearby. At times, I'll need a professional translation even if I know every word. Another problem with them is that some of the easier songs don't always involve the tones, which I need to hear. Oh, and many songs use the northern dialect, which I'd rather avoid right now. I should add that I'd really like to use subs2srs, but I have yet to find anything with Vietnamese audio and matching Vietnamese subtitles (and the southern dialect -- though that's not as hard to find in movies as it is in music). There are a few Vietnamese films that I really enjoy, but I haven't gotten subs2srs to work for them, the subtitles are all in English, and the subtitle timing seems to be off, so the flashcards I've made that way haven't worked very well. I've love to find some Vietnamese subtitles for the Vietnamese-audio version of Detective Conan, but I've come up empty in that search. The other thing I'd like to watch (again, I'm unable to find Vietnamese subtitles for it) is Doraemon. These two shows stand out among animated fare because they have nice, professional dubs. Some other shows, like Naruto, have Vietnamese audio dubbed over the top of the Japanese audio, and that seems like it'd be tough enough to understand for a native speaker. As for actual films, I prefer things that a slow-paced with clearly-spoken dialogue, good morals, and nice characters. My favorite so far is The Owl and the Sparrow. I re-watched it last weekend and found that I was able to catch more of the dialogue than I had during previous viewings. I'm still lucky to get as much as 5%, but that's better than before. The FSI course for Vietnamese looks interesting, but I'm worried that a lot of the vocabulary is outdated. Just looking at the first page, I find that I learned completely different ways to say everything there, and I'm almost certain my way is more modern (because I learned it from more modern sources, all of which agree). For instance, in the FSI course, "How are you?" is given as, "Ong manh gioi khong?" (again, diacritical marks are omitted until I figure out how to write them correctly here). I would say the same thing as, "Ban co khoe khong?" I see 'bank' given as "nha bang" instead of "nhan hang," and I see 'post office' given as "nha giay thep" instead of "buu dien." Even a more grammatical word, such as the word that means someone is arriving somewhere, is given as "lai" instead of "toi." Mabye there's a subtle difference between what I learned and what I see in the FSI course, but it just seems to me that the language is old, and no one today seems to talk that way. One more thing I have already that I haven't really started using yet is a phrasebook that covers a bunch of technical disciplines. It looks like a good candidate for using with Anki later on, once I'm more worried about learning technical phrases and less worried about spelling and getting tones right. I'm not sure. Maybe I'll mine it for individual words and put them into Memrise. It's tough to find appropriate resources for Vietnamese, so I'm using what I have and hoping for the best. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4956 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 3 of 7 19 October 2015 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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What an inspiring log! It's great to read how you are planning your studies, trying to get hold of a diversity resources so you can have the most out of each.
On the other hand, I feel discouraged about Vietnamese now. As far as I can understand you're learning South Vietnamese which isn't the one usually covered by foreign language textbooks, but either variety seems to have quite challenging phonetics and orthography. Turns out the Portuguese didn't do as well of a job as I had thought. The Duolingo app is about to be released but I'm not sure how useful it is going to be for you at this stage. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5052 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 7 19 October 2015 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Welcome to the forum, OwlPanda. As one who advocates a multi-track approach to learning, it is good that you are adding native materials early. My advice is that you shouldn't overwhelm yourself. Try to settle into a routine morning/evening. Eventually your courses should pare down to one or two and your forays into the real world will provide good synergy with them. If you try to do too much, too quickly, the language may not have enough time to grow inside your brain. There's a "sweet spot" that can be found for most learners and the ones who find it are the ones who tend to succeed. Good luck! Edited by iguanamon on 19 October 2015 at 5:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| OwlPanda Newbie United States Joined 3124 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese | Message 5 of 7 19 October 2015 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Expugnator, at least the Portuguese managed to get something that wasn't
altered Chinese. That makes my life easier. I have no idea how useful Duolingo will be, but it might help cover holes in my grammatical knowledge, and I'll definitely appreciate that. Iguanamon, thanks! I'll read your long post over my lunch break today. What I would love to have right now is a Vietnamese English dictionary that lists the Vietnamese word, the part of speech, the definition (in English), and the corresponding measure word (if applicable), plus hints that something may be exclusive to Hanoi. Maybe hints about whether something is Sino-derived or native. I mention this because I just went over one of the early pages of the dictionary I have, and my wife complained about most of the 'ai' words because they're "too Chinese" and not really as useful as the native Vietnamese versions. Why say 'ai tinh' when you can say 'tinh yeu,' right? One solution might be to get the list of words from my paper dictionary and then look them up in an online dictionary, which can also be a source of example sentences. For now, I'm putting my words in a spreadsheet before transferring them to Memrise, and I have a column just for example sentences. I re-read chapter 2 of Alice out loud, and it went okay. I'm judging the quality of my reading by whether or not my wife can understand what I'm saying without looking at the screen, and she seems to be getting it. It put her to sleep, though. I think I'm still exaggerating the tones, but that's better than not saying them at all. I've heard different things about whether it's useful to listen to stuff you don't understand at all, but I've been putting some Paris By Night (sounds like a French show, but it's Vietnamese -- sadly, it's not consistently the right dialect) or the moral teachings of a particular monk (who seems to love YouTube) on while I work, just to see if I can occasionally catch a word or if I can at least get used to figuring out which words I'm hearing, even if I don't know most of them. When I do that, I find that I catch a couple of words per sentence. This makes for a good party trick, because I can listen to my wife while she talks to someone in her family, then I can tell her that I knew what they were talking about (careful not to say I actually understood what she was saying, because that wouldn't be true anymore), and this impresses her and makes her family happy. They all really want me to get better so they can talk to me. Slowly but surely. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| OwlPanda Newbie United States Joined 3124 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese | Message 6 of 7 10 February 2016 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I haven't posted in a while, but that's because I've been spending my free time
studying. I'm about five chapters into the first Harry Potter now. I'm enjoying it (I hadn't read it before, actually), and the language is modern and mostly easy to follow. My vocabulary is large enough now that I'm getting about 50% to 70% of the words without having to cheat, which is nice, even though it's usually not enough to get an entire sentence without help. Things have gotten a little easier now that I'm using a slightly better online dictionary to do my translation for me. If my browser extension doesn't give me anything that looks right, I can use this dictionary for a better translation than what Google Translate gives me. The problem with Google Translate is that it doesn't notice diacritic marks, which means it can't tell a lot of the letters apart, and it can't distinguish the tones. That makes most translations really bad. Listening is still my worst skill, but it's getting better. I'm getting better at understanding my wife, and I've found that she is more likely to talk in Vietnamese if I share some of the words I'm studying. She's been a bit more sympathetic lately because she decided to pick up Spanish, and so she's been having some of the same struggles I've had. Aside from having more real conversations, I've been trying to make time for some Youtube series, with my goal being to listen to a little bit of "365 Vietnamese" every day. This depends on how busy work is. I can't focus on work and listen at the same time, but when I do have time, I enjoy hearing some rare slow Vietnamese. The fast stuff is just too fast for me. Maybe I'm better off "jumping into the deep end of the pool," so to speak. That is, maybe I'm better off using fast speech instead of slow speech. I'm not sure yet. Edit: One thing that's hurting my progress is that I'm putting a little more work into Korean lately, and I'm finding that my Korean ability is rapidly coming back. Furthermore, I discovered a really good Korean Hanja course on Memrise, so I'm doing quite a bit of that every night. My Memrise routine is currently to do a new level of Vietnamese (roughly 20 to 25 words) every day or two. I have several Vietnamese courses to choose from, but the one I'm doing now has over 2000 words in it, so it'll be there for a few more months. Then I add 15 words from my "2000 Korean Words" course every two to four days, and I'll add 15 new Hanja characters as soon as I can consistently do a speed review of my current Hanja level without missing any questions. The thing here is that the Hanja part is going to help with everything else I want to do. I get the impression that Hanja (which are, for those unfamiliar, traditional Chinese characters that are sometimes used in Korean writing) are useful for every language with lots of Chinese loanwords for the same reason almost everyone in Europe benefits from knowing quite a few Latin and Greek roots. Even a lot of the pronunciations in the Hanja course are similar to what I see in Vietnamese. Edited by OwlPanda on 10 February 2016 at 9:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4455 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 7 13 February 2016 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Welcome to the forum!
You mentioned the FSI course and your worry that the vocabulary is out of date. Perhaps you could ask your wife to look at it and comment? If she looks at the first chapter and say tow or three others chosen at random, then she should be able to form a reasonable judgement.
I've done that with Japanese. I'm better now at understanding than I used to be. I don't think I ever listened to anything where I couldn't understand a single word, but I certainly listened to stuff where I could only make out a word or two every few sentences. That meant I couldn't even get the gist of what was happening, but every word I recognised was a small victory and it also meant that I got more used to the tone and rhythm of the language. It's basically a balancing act: is it better to spend 30 minutes listening to something I don't understand or to spend that time learning some more vocab or grammar or whatnot? I've found that I can't read for hours on end or (regularly) watch three drama episodes on end, so for me switching from one activity to another works best.
I think that's probably the most succinct way to express the language learner's motto :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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