3 ms·
I've been learning Vietnamese for the past few years and I have to say it's been very refreshing to realize how little of the complex grammar typical in Western
by cageface 8y ago
I've been learning Vietnamese for the past few years and I have to say it's been very refreshing to realize how little of the complex grammar typical in Western languages you really need to communicate. Vietnamese throws verb conjugation, tenses, plurals, possessives, etc out the window and is still a perfectly expressive language. I understand a lot more why people often reject the idea that Esperanto is a universal language because it brings a ton of grammatical baggage that, for example, many Asian languages don't have.
- kurtisc 8y agoI've been learning for a few months. So far my favourite parts are that the word for right (direction) is the same as a word for right (correct), that months and days are named 'Nth month/day', and that refrigerator is 'cold cabinet'.
- cageface 8y agoYeah Vietnamese is often a very literal language. The names of many Vietnamese dishes are just a description of what's in the dish and how it was prepared. "Bún thịt nướng", for example, just means noodles with grilled meat. You can handle past and future tenses with just a couple of modifier words. In a lot of ways it's a pretty elegant language and the only really hard thing about it is getting the tones down and learning all the slang people use in everyday conversation.
- realusername 8y agoThe hardest part in Vietnamese is the pronunciation by far, everything else is very easy.