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Success Stories

Printed From: FSI Language Courses
Category: Learning Languages
Forum Name: General Discussion
Forum Discription: Discussion about studying languages using the FSI courses. If you would like to see a specific language forum not listed below, just let us know.
URL: http://fsi-language-courses.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=272
Printed Date: 16 January 2009 at 3:22am


Topic: Success Stories
Posted By: Myself
Subject: Success Stories
Date Posted: 12 January 2007 at 8:01pm
I am trying to learn Vietnamese as a second language and am finding the tones very confusing. English is not a tonal language so this is a new concept for me.

As a morale booster, can anyone share some success stories? Study tips? Etc?

Cám ơn (Thank  you) :)



Replies:
Posted By: onebir
Date Posted: 14 January 2007 at 11:49am
Quite a lot of westerners learn Mandarin Thai & other tonal languages to reasonable fluency. It just takes longer (2-3 times perhaps) than it does to learn most European languages.  Stick at it, and little by little, they should get easier to distinguish, which will make responding correctly to the FSI drills easier.

If you can't produce Vietnamese sounds very well, it might be worth taking time concentrating on listening.  How can you produce a sound properly if you can't hear it well enough to distinguish it from the other similar sounds in the language?  (I'm just going through this with a few syllables in French, believe it or not...)


Posted By: Myself
Date Posted: 16 January 2007 at 12:49am
Originally posted by onebir

If you can't produce Vietnamese sounds very well, it might be worth taking time concentrating on listening.


Any tips on how to do this? Just keep replaying the audio?

Thanks for the encouragement.


Posted By: onebir
Date Posted: 16 January 2007 at 3:04am
Originally posted by Myself

Originally posted by onebir

If you can't produce Vietnamese sounds very well, it might be worth taking time concentrating on listening.


Any tips on how to do this? Just keep replaying the audio?

Thanks for the encouragement.


Working at the pronounciation exercises in the FSI programme could be the way to go.  The problem with that is FSI courses were designed for use with native speaker instructors, & you presumably don't have one around to correct you...

So replaying the audio many times without responding is an option.  But it's easy to drift off, so if you can find something that requires some kind of response dependent on you identifying a sound correctly, that's even better.  I imagine many of the FSI drills involve this - they do for French, where I initially had great trouble picking out 'le' vs 'les' and got many responses wrong as a result.

The problems is that's a compound activity - recognition + production of an appropriate sound in response.  Maybe it's a bit early for that.  Something that lets you click on a response, rather than speaking might be better.  It's better than just listening, because you have to click the right answer, but it wouldn't force you to produce sounds you can't quite hear that yet.  There are probably Vietnamese CDroms that include games like this. And because the writing system for Vietnamese is standardized (unlike Thai romanisations) it'll be easy to match up the sounds with those in the FSI course when you come back to it to start working on producing them...



Posted By: onebir
Date Posted: 16 January 2007 at 8:17am
The material here might help:
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/vietnamese/VNLanguage/SupportNS/tableofcontent.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/vietnamese/VNLanguage/SupportNS/tableofcontent.htm


Posted By: Exocrist
Date Posted: 16 January 2007 at 11:36am
Maybe get a hold of some Vietnamese movies?  If nothing else, it'll be some more exciting practice for your ear, and you might get more accustomed to hearing the tones.


Posted By: Myself
Date Posted: 17 January 2007 at 5:00am
I'll try everything and let you all know.

Should I keep working on the pronunciation tapes until I master them or can I start on the lessons?

I feel that people will laugh if I can't even pronounce right, so I want to get it as best as I can before I go too deep and "lock in" any bad pronunciation habits.

How many times should I go through a tape until I move to the next? Only when I'm very confident, or can I go on after a few times and (hope) to come back to it later?

Originally posted by onebir

The material here might help:
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/vietnamese/VNLanguage/SupportNS/tableofcontent.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/vietnamese/VNLanguage/SupportNS/tableofcontent.htm


That looks like a nice page but they use the north pronunciation and the fsi uses the south. I think it might confuse me even more :(

Thank you everyone.


Posted By: onebir
Date Posted: 17 January 2007 at 8:36am
Originally posted by Myself

I feel that people will laugh if I can't even pronounce right, so I want to get it as best as I can before I go too deep and "lock in" any bad pronunciation habits.

How many times should I go through a tape until I move to the next? Only when I'm very confident, or can I go on after a few times and (hope) to come back to it later?


I think para 1 answers para 2's question...  If you're worried about people laughing at you*, you probably need to work hard on pronounciation to get your confidence up.  On the other hand, if you spend too long working just on pronounciation, you risk damaging your motivation.  So work on pronounciation until you're happy with it, but haven't driven yourself crazy, then move on, and come back to it
- when you just feel like working on it or
- where the later drills are showing up weaknesses (either inability to get the responses out, or inability to distinguish between the sounds that determine the way you need to respond.)

*Going by my experience with other languages, 99.9% of people won't laugh at you.  If your pronounciation isn't close enough they won't understand - not deliberately, but just because they can't catch what your trying to say.  If it is close enough, once they realise you're speaking Vietnamese, they'll probably go 'wow - this person's speaking Vietnamese! Where'd he/she learn that???'


Posted By: whatl2004
Date Posted: 17 January 2007 at 8:46am
The FSI tapes were produced during the Viet Nam war when the dialect of choice was the Saigon one.  For the last 20 years most material produced has been in the northern dialect - for obvious reasons.  If you're in US there are thousands of native Vietnamese that speak the southern dialect .  Find somebody, even if it's to just say hello. Listen to the pronuciation tapes a few times but don't expect to master them.   Move on to the lessons as soon as possible and strive to master them, one phrase at a time if need be.  

-------------
whatl2004


Posted By: Exocrist
Date Posted: 17 January 2007 at 9:29am
I've also noticed that with learning languages, you probably wont master the accent right away.  If you're at all worried about losing motivation by just drilling on pronunciation, I'd suggest working on pronunciation until you're understandable, don't work on having a perfect accent before you can say anything. I've noticed (not just with myself, but with others, too), that as you learn more of the language, the accent will work itself out if you pay a little bit of attention to it. 

None of my experience is with Vietnamese, so maybe take that into consideration when reading my suggestion.


Posted By: longday
Date Posted: 23 January 2007 at 8:31pm
All language learners may wish to locate some web resources that allow them to practice listening and getting feedback on their ability to produce language sounds. 
 
Anyone can obtain freeware from SIL that has a feature called IPA Help.  Using this little program you can listen to many different sounds from the world's languages, including what they call suprasegmentals like TONE.  Typically tones are presented using a particular vowel sound with the various tones riding on top of that vowel (instead of within words).   The audio isn't great but it's good.  The voice is that of the great British linguist Peter Ladefoged who died last year.  The program will also let you record for comparison your own attempt to reproduce what you hear and then play back the original followed by your imitation.   Here's the link:
http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software.asp?id=59 - http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software.asp?id=59
 
The University of Victoria site is also a nice resource. Open this link and scroll down to the bottom right corner:
http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm - http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm
 
The UCLA site is also useful.  Open this link and scroll down to Chapter 10 for Chinese and Thai tones:
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/contents.html - http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/contents.html
Open this UCLA link for general resources:
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/ - http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/
 
There are plenty of other resources on the web, but I suspect this is enough to explore.  It's so easy to allow these technical toys to distract us from serious studying. Best to you.
http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm -  


Posted By: Naruemon
Date Posted: 08 February 2007 at 1:39am
Hi somewhat relevant perhaps, I am studying Thai which has 5 tones and my experiences of that is first of all people dont laugh at you, they just dont understand you if the tone of the word is incorrect, allthough if the word is put in a concept and the tone is wrong they might somehow comprehend it anyway. Asians are very polite so the chances are that you are never been told that you didnt get the tone right since that would make you loose face and they dont want you to loose face. So anyway when I study Thai I never care about what the tone should be in a single word, what I do instead is that I try to mimic the sentence said on a tape in full and believe it or not doing that will make you get the tones right even that you could never tell what type of tone a specific word should have, you just know that i sounds right... And doing just that will also get the tone right even if its used in a completely different sentence, at least thats the case for me.Also using a taperecorder and comparing with the original is real plus !!! Yes that is highly recomended... And repetition repetition repetition :-)

Good Luck!


Posted By: onebir
Date Posted: 08 February 2007 at 3:35am
Originally posted by Naruemon

...I try to mimic the sentence said on a tape in full and believe it or not doing that will make you get the tones right even that you could never tell what type of tone a specific word should have


When you ask Chinese people what tone a word is, they almost always have to think about it (& often say it) so I think there's a lot to be said for this approach. After all, if you don't have an instinctive grasp of words' tones, you just won't be able to put sentences together fast enough...



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