Learning Vietnamese - Step 2

Most people (including the locals) will tell you that learning Vietnamese is very difficult. If you were to take a survey of the European and American foreigners living here, it would be difficult to find even a small amount of them who have learned the language. Perhaps one obstacle, the toughest, is the pronunciation of the vowels. While it's important in Spanish to pronounce each letter, and it's important in Turkish to pronounce the vowels correctly, it's absolutely imperative to pronounce the vowels at the correct tone in Vietnamese. Let me show you...

In Vietnamese, there are 12 vowels.

  

Vowels	IPA	English sounds
a	/aː/	far
ă	/a/	father (shortened a)*
â	/ə/	but *
e	/ɛ/	red
ê	/e/	may *
i, y	/i/	me
o	/ɔ/	law
ô	/o/	spoke *
ơ	/ə:/	sir
u	/u/	boo
ư	/ɨ/	uh-uh *

 

There are also 6 tones. Each vowel must always have a tone.

Tone	Name/Symbol	Tone sound
Level	no sign	normal tone
Sharp	up accent(´)	high sound
Hanging	down accent(`)	low sound
Asking	hook( ̉ )	like a question
Tumbling	tilde(~)	wavy sound (up and then down)
Heavy	dot(.)	heavy sound

So one word can have up to 6 meanings depending on the tone. To give you an example of how this works...

ma = Ghost

má = Mother

mà = Which

mả = Tomb

mã = Horse

mạ = Rice Seedling

So in summary, there are 12 vowels and 6 different sounds that each vowel can make. That makes 72 vowel sounds. And thus, this is the reason why you shouldn't complain about learning English.

Learning Vietnamese - Step 1.

When learning any language, the first thing to do is to purchase a language dictionary of your language and the language you want to learn. In this case, I need to purchase an English-Vietnamese / Vietnamese-English dictionary. In the past, I've bought German-English/English-German dictionaries. Spanish-English/English-Spanish dictionaries. Turkish-English/English-Turkish dictionaries. And so last week I entered a book store to buy a good, portable Vietnamese-English/English-Vietnamese dictionary for my time here. I found the foreign dictionary section and began scanning the books. Viet-Ahn (Vietnamese-English). Viet-Ahn. Viet-Ahn. Viet-Ahn. Near those I found Ahn-Viet. Ahn-Viet. Ahn-Viet. I kept seeing the same thing - one way dictionaries. Of all the dictionaries on display, I only came upon one Viet-Ahn/Ahn-Viet dictionary! Weird.

So I visited another book store. Viet-Ahn. Viet-Ahn. Ahn-Viet. Ahn-Viet. Only one Ahn-Viet/Viet-Ahn dictionary was on the shelf and it was the same company that I'd seen in the previous store. Where were the combined 2-way dictionaries??? So I asked. Now, if you don't know the language at all, it's a little difficult to ask, "Don't you have any Vietnamese-English/English-Vietnamese dictionaries?" And after I did to the young man working in the shop, he didn't understand. I explained it very simply: I used the left hand to describe Ahn-Viet. I used the right hand to describe Viet-Ahn. And then I slapped my hands together to describe a book with both; he still didn't understand. Luckily, an old man standing nearby understood. In the end, 3 guys searched the shelves for what I wanted, for what was in every other country in the universe, but not here. No success. There was only one big combined dictionary and thus I was left in a stupor as to how this could possibly be. It was a large bookstore - 2 floors at least. The previous bookstore had been large. The selection of dictionaries in both was large. But apparently the idea of a combined dictionary had just never occurred to the Vietnamese publishing companies.

I consulted a Vietnamese acquaintance. She's a college student who's learned English. I consulted the daughter of the guesthouse where I'm staying. I even consulted God. But no. If the Vietnamese want to learn another language, they must buy 2 dictionaries. In fact, my acquaintance had never heard of such a thing as 1 language dictionary! She thought it was an interesting concept.

And so, I too, now own two dictionaries.