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Myself
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Quote Myself Replybullet Topic: Success Stories
    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) :)
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onebir
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Quote onebir Replybullet 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...)
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Myself
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Quote Myself Replybullet 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.
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Quote onebir Replybullet 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...



Edited by onebir - 16 January 2007 at 3:09am
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Quote onebir Replybullet Posted: 16 January 2007 at 8:17am
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Quote Exocrist Replybullet 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.
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Quote Myself Replybullet 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


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.
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Quote onebir Replybullet 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???'


Edited by onebir - 17 January 2007 at 8:40am
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Quote whatl2004 Replybullet 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.  
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Quote Exocrist Replybullet 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.


Edited by Exocrist - 17 January 2007 at 9:31am
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