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I've been living here in Vietnam for five years now and read & write Vietnamese pretty well. Written Vietnamese may not be as elegant as Chinese but it's very p

I've been living here in Vietnam for five years now and read & write Vietnamese pretty well. Written Vietnamese may not be as elegant as Chinese but it's very practical and I think it gives the Vietnamese a huge leg up in learning Western languages and dealing with the Western world. For any Westerner, learning to read & write the language is vastly easier than Chinese, Khmer, or Thai. Which is a good thing since mastering the tones is quite difficult. In a lot of casual conversation people don't even bother to write the accents and tones out because it's a bit of a hassle on a mobile phone, which makes it look even plainer. As another commenter said, the plainness of a lot of everyday written Vietnamese has more to do with utilitarian fonts and poor typography than the language itself.

geomark 11y ago
I found writing Thai to be not so difficult to learn. It uses an alphabet, although it does have more letters than English and some tone marks. But it is very regular and pronunciation is consistent. I haven't studied Vietnamese but at first glance it seems not much easier than learning the Thai alphabet. Learning tones is difficult, as you said. I couldn't even hear them at first - the words for "news", "rice" and the color "white" all sounded the same to me. Trying to put together sentences resulted in some hilarity when I mixed up tones for words that differ only in tone like "dog", "horse" and "come here". Question: How many consonants, vowels and tone marks in Vietnamese?
- wingerlang 11y ago
  Hope I'm not too off topic, but what/where did you use to learn the alphabet? Each time I try, I am overwhelmed and I can't seem to find some good starting point.
  - geomark 11y ago
    I had a tutor I met once a week for 3 months. We studied one page, a page that listed all the letters in their tone groups plus the diacritic marks. She would give me homework of vocabulary words that I had to look up in a Thai-English dictionary which forced me to learn the alphabetical order. I would also practice writing them. We would work on pronunciation at our weekly sessions. It was the tones that were tough for me, thought I'd never get them because I just could not hear the difference.
    - wingerlang 11y ago
      Okay, thanks.
- cageface 11y ago
  Tones are the hard part, but if you get a native speaker to drill you on them every day for a month or two you can get good enough at them to make yourself understood. There are five different tones in Vietnamese, although in the southern half of the country two of them sound almost the same. They enunciate more clearly in the north.
- 13of40 11y ago
  > It uses an alphabet, although it does have more letters than English and some tone marks. Korean's even simpler than that. It looks a little like Chinese, but the "glyphs" are just groups of consonant-vowel-consonant or null-vowel-consonant, and there's basically nothing tonal, just some hard and soft versions of consonants. I literally learned how to read Korean one afternoon 20 years ago and can still do it.
- girzel 11y ago
  The brutal thing about Thai, for me, was learning the matrix of how consonant class, tone markings, and the "live" or "dead" status of the syllable all came together to determine the tone of the syllable. There's a little lookup table, which I've so far found impossible to memorize. Of course, it's totally ingrained in the ear of any native Thai speaker, and they hardly know they're doing it.
kafkaesq 11y ago
Written Vietnamese may not be as elegant as Chinese ... Would be curious as to what, specifically, you mean by this. (BTW, I have no knowledge of either language family).
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Look at the history of a Chinese character like 馬, which means horse [1]. You can see how it's a drawing of a horse, and has evolved over centuries. There's plenty of scope for emphasizing particular strokes etc. Modern Vietnamese uses the Roman alphabet, so their word for horse is "ngựa" (probably). [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Translingual https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Translingual
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
    Fascinating. Thanks.

geomark 11y ago

I found writing Thai to be not so difficult to learn. It uses an alphabet, although it does have more letters than English and some tone marks. But it is very regular and pronunciation is consistent. I haven't studied Vietnamese but at first glance it seems not much easier than learning the Thai alphabet. Learning tones is difficult, as you said. I couldn't even hear them at first - the words for "news", "rice" and the color "white" all sounded the same to me. Trying to put together sentences resulted in some hilarity when I mixed up tones for words that differ only in tone like "dog", "horse" and "come here". Question: How many consonants, vowels and tone marks in Vietnamese?

wingerlang 11y ago
Hope I'm not too off topic, but what/where did you use to learn the alphabet? Each time I try, I am overwhelmed and I can't seem to find some good starting point.
- geomark 11y ago
  I had a tutor I met once a week for 3 months. We studied one page, a page that listed all the letters in their tone groups plus the diacritic marks. She would give me homework of vocabulary words that I had to look up in a Thai-English dictionary which forced me to learn the alphabetical order. I would also practice writing them. We would work on pronunciation at our weekly sessions. It was the tones that were tough for me, thought I'd never get them because I just could not hear the difference.
  - wingerlang 11y ago
    Okay, thanks.
cageface 11y ago
Tones are the hard part, but if you get a native speaker to drill you on them every day for a month or two you can get good enough at them to make yourself understood. There are five different tones in Vietnamese, although in the southern half of the country two of them sound almost the same. They enunciate more clearly in the north.
13of40 11y ago
> It uses an alphabet, although it does have more letters than English and some tone marks. Korean's even simpler than that. It looks a little like Chinese, but the "glyphs" are just groups of consonant-vowel-consonant or null-vowel-consonant, and there's basically nothing tonal, just some hard and soft versions of consonants. I literally learned how to read Korean one afternoon 20 years ago and can still do it.
girzel 11y ago
The brutal thing about Thai, for me, was learning the matrix of how consonant class, tone markings, and the "live" or "dead" status of the syllable all came together to determine the tone of the syllable. There's a little lookup table, which I've so far found impossible to memorize. Of course, it's totally ingrained in the ear of any native Thai speaker, and they hardly know they're doing it.

kafkaesq 11y ago

Written Vietnamese may not be as elegant as Chinese ... Would be curious as to what, specifically, you mean by this. (BTW, I have no knowledge of either language family).

Symbiote 11y ago
Look at the history of a Chinese character like 馬, which means horse [1]. You can see how it's a drawing of a horse, and has evolved over centuries. There's plenty of scope for emphasizing particular strokes etc. Modern Vietnamese uses the Roman alphabet, so their word for horse is "ngựa" (probably). [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Translingual https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Translingual
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  Fascinating. Thanks.