So, you might be able to get by in Jordan, but have a hard time in Kuwait. As for the tones, we are very forgiving and most of the time, the context will determine the meaning of the word anyway. Here are a few general thoughts: This is the big one. Vietnamese most likely borrowed mostly from a Middle Chinese dialect in the Southern regions which is why Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations are more in line with Cantonese than Mandarin (which has undergone a drastic amount of sound changes). All are welcome, whether beginner or polyglot. I speak Spanish with a horrible accent. The manner in which one addresses another is also something that is more complex in … If the female is older than you it should usually be Chị. I continue to plod along because my fiance is Vietnamese… , I think Europeans can definitely make Vietnamess tones haha. Sawatdee jow instead of sawatdee khrup for example. @Dinh Ton: I think you make some confusion in the use of d, đ, t, and th. You say Chu Nom, but as I understand, that’s a general term for all characters that were used in Vietnamese, which includes characters made up specifically for Vietnamese. That’s why I want to make sure I learn the right “accent” for Mandarin. 发 -> phát (again, we got this from the Cantonese) 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. làm cái gì (vậy)? I have been studying Vietnamese for 6 years, and am no closer to being understood now than I was the day I arrived here. Chinese is like so easy. There were SLIGHT differences between the dialects in the north and central regions. Thus I can totally understand your frustration in learning Vietnamese. Mandarin is like a breeze. But FYI married people usually use em, the 99% of the husband in Vietnam will call their wife for em, not chị. I’ll leave you with this song, which I think has quite easy pronunciations and slow enough for a learner to catch up with all the words, I think another feature that makes Vietnamese hard is also the amount of Chinese vocabulary we have acquired. So this can baffle foreigners trying to learn our language I think you should practice with Vietnamese karaoke. There are simply more sounds to work with and especially the Northern tones are more difficult to reproduce. 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. And some Vietnamese do understand if you say words in wrong order, but if you can’t pronounce the right word then you’re pretty much screwed. Mandarin is the standard dialect, but there are many variations within that dialect, regional and otherwise. I also believe Chinese is more flexible than Vietnamese—in the former, once you learn a particular sentence pattern, you can pretty much plug anything into it, and while it might not be the way a native speaker would say it, they will often understand you. well, how about bạn & tôi? It may be fair to say that indeed, for Chinese the script is the real problem, whereas for Vietnamese it’s the actual spoken language. It doesnt matter how I say it, how many times I say it, to this day, waiters etc will be baffled when I ask for the bill…. I have worked on Vietnamese – the first year I was here with a tutor – and it has been an exercise in frustration. It’s not as easy to learn as people make it out to be. I can speak Vietnamese, Chinese, French, Spanish, and English. I grew up hearing much more Vietnamese than Mandarin, and I find Vietnamese harder and less intuitive. Vietnamese food is also generally considered much healthier with fresher ingredients, less fried foods, with lighter ingredients like rice noodles, basil leaves, mung bean sprouts, and an abundant use of fresh vegetables. Example, Other than that, they belong to different language family. As Guangning Tian said, Chinese to Vietnamese is like Latin to English. I would NOT recommend learning it if you only know English ( Beginners ). người (1) nhân, (2) thằng, (3) người 人 rén (nhân) [ Vh @ QT 人 rén < MC ɲin < OC *nin | cđ MC 臻開三平真日 | Pt 如鄰 | PNH: Hai. And I do mean “words,” not characters, which I already have something for (http://nomfoundation.org/nom-tools/Nom-Lookup-Tool/Nom-Lookup-Tool). I definitely do not want the hicks version of Mandarin. Having lived in many states in the U.S (with Kentucky being one of them), I do have a better appreciation for accents. 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. Basically no real grammar. We mostly use modern Vietnamese, which I think has changed a lot after the invention of Chữ quốc ngữ. Using this tonal mapping trick helps me get the tones right when I learn Mandarin. For example hoang is closer to mandarin Huang than cantonese wang. But if I go to Mexico they cannot. The writing system is fairly straightforward. Cookies help us deliver our Services. phong is feng (wind) phong thuỷ/ feng shui A blessing, because I can often correctly guess the meaning of words when I encounter them in a text, and a curse because that close relationship makes it harder for me to take Vietnamese on its own terms—and this language, like its people, is fiercely proud and independent. However, I agree that if you want to get those sounds right, you need to practice with a coach. That even applies even if the woman is older than the man in a relationship and marriage. Chinese also has many way to say I and you traditionally. 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. It makes me almost impossible to start even the very simple sentences. First off, in Vietnamese D(d) and Đ(đ) are two distinct letters. You’re not wrong about chị but it’s not only used for married women. 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. 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. If God created different languages after the Tower of Babel in order to punish us, he must have added tonal languages as a particularly sadistic form of torture. Besides the meaning, these cognates also share a tonal mapping system, which I’m going to describe below. 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. 保險: bao xian vs bou him vs bảo hiểm. Its flaw is that it doesn’t provide definitions or examples of usage. AFAIK there is no such thing. 知 -> tri, Of course, there’s exceptions (typically due to Vietnamese also adopting Cantonese). But look at something called the 'quasi-Sino-Vietnamese' or 'Vietnamized Chinese' it's harder since it's ancient Chinese far older, with more complete phonemes than Middle Chinese. It literally means ‘uncle’, but I could swear I’ve heard people addressing women with that too. So you can’t really fault the language but the people lol. I think Vietnamese grammar isn’t very hard, it’s similar to English in some aspects. Food is generally fried in a hot wok in both countries and eaten with chopsticks. For mandarin, ia ie becomes ya ye, ua uo becomes wa wo. đi đâu? But don’t forget modern Vietnamese are pretty much different we don’t said “Long” but we said “Rồng”. Another layer of difficulty in Vietnamese is “I” and You”. Phrase memorization is more useful than patterns, because if you don’t say it exactly like a Vietnamese does, you will usually encounter a blank expression on the face of your listener. 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. 历史 -> lịch sử Chinese has several vowels that English does not have, like the previous Vietnamese /ɯ/ and /ɤ/, the funny “vowel” sound (syllabic consonant) you get in 日, both vowels in 月 (/ɥ/ and /œ/ -although the latter is used in New Zealand English and a few other places), the French-like vowel in 女 (/y/), and nasalized vowels (ɑ̃ ə̃ ʊ̃). It seems like while I can't bank on guessing Vietnamese words based on my Mandarin, comparing the forms of words between the two will give me an easier way to remember new vocabulary. This is not as preposterous as it sounds; people who have spent some time in Japan frequently face this same problem and I’m told that it’s not unusual in Korea either, although I’ve never been there. sơn is san (mountain) The sound system is so hard to aurally comprehend. We rather use bắc (Hồ Chí Minh is a good example), there’s a slight difference between these two words. Heck if you’re not Vietnamese/don’t have Vietnamese relatives, you immediately bypass a large portion of the kinship terms. Is that also true for you guys? Sign up for the AllSet Learning Product Newsletter and find out what new Chinese learning projects John is working on. As for learning the Hanoi dialect, if OP happens to live in Saigon or amongst the Vietnamese overseas diaspora, then it’s more sensible and suitable for him/her to be learning the speech of the majority in that region. Also, learn the North Vietnamese dialect which has no accent. For me, Vietnamese is not hard because it is my native language. Vietnamese and Han Chinese are distinct ethnic groups. In short, I’ve found Chinese phonology presents much less difficulty than Vietnamese. But it’s not so clear-cut, at least in the South. Grammar: They're about on par but I find that Vietnamese has somewhat more exceptions. I know people who have been here 16 years, who speak perfectly to my ears, who still have Vietnamese people staring at them blankly when they try to converse with them. 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”). If a female is younger than you it’s em. Northern tones are like the tones you use in singing. Anyway, yes, tiếng việt rất khó : why did I have to fall in love with an Hanoian girl, for crying out loud! But to most beginners, Vietnamese is a HARD language. 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? In the interests of full disclosure, I studied Chinese for a total of five years, and have spoken it now almost 25 years. Also, while someone said that Vietnamese borrowings are from pretty old Chinese, I actually have some decent Wenyanwan up my sleeve (I've read the 4 Books in the original) that I didn't mention that could be of some help. Actually you can omit pronouns in informal situations. On a Chinese polyglot forum I see some people are saying Burmese>Khmer>Thai>Lao>Vietnamese.. Burmese being the hardest one while Vietnamese being the easiest one. 名 -> danh But in Vietnamese, you are not allowed to omit ‘you’/’I’. It's not uncommon to have several words for the same thing (look up the word "Sunday" for instance). 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. It’s used for older women, but younger than cô*. Regardless, this should serve little relevance. Never sure how to address any female older than the teachers I when... 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