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> And though it's phonetically spelled I've never tried to learn Hungarian but as a casual traveller there I deeply appreciated the phonetic spelling. The Hung

> And though it's phonetically spelled I've never tried to learn Hungarian but as a casual traveller there I deeply appreciated the phonetic spelling. The Hungarian alphabet can be memorized in an hour or two and then you can immediately pronounce any written Hungarian word and be understood (terrible accent I'm sure but the locals will get it). By comparison, I've lived in Vietnam for several years now. The grammar is very simple. Every word is one syllable. A lot of common words are made from compounds of basic words (long horn animal = rhino type thing) so you can make educated guesses once you've learned a few words. The problem? Nobody, including even my close friends, partner, and coworkers, can understand anything that I say in Vietnamese. Anything more complicated than "thank you", "hello", and a handful of numbers. And I cannot understand them either. If I pronounce a word as written but get the tone very very slightly wrong, it seems 100% impossible for Vietnamese people to infer the word I meant to say. It's incredibly frustrating and I've started and given up learning Vietnamese many times. I've learned some basic grammar, I've learned enough words to string a few sentences together. But what use is that when I go into a market and order something basic like "ice" ("nuoc da" , or just "da") and nobody has a clue what I'm saying? Every conversation where I try to learn a new word in Vietnamese turns into ten minutes of "no, you're still not saying it right, the tone rises and falls at the end", "no, too much rise, say it like this" over and over until I give up. And that's not even mentioning the accents, differences in tone, and entirely different words used for basic things between the north and south of the country. Or the fact that locals are not in any way interested in trying to help a foreigner speak their language. Learning Vietnamese is the most frustrating thing I've ever attempted in my life. I'm good at learning things. I'm sure I could sit down for a few days and memorize a hundred irregular verb conjugations. But I can't overcome this problem. How can you learn a language that you can't pronounce or hear?

akhong 4y ago
I think Stuart Jay Raj has the best content on tones and making yourself understood in these tonal languages. Check out his Youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@StuartJayRaj https://youtube.com/@StuartJayRaj
zarzavat 4y ago
English has this problem too but with vowels. There are many different accents corresponding to different geographical locations. I can understand someone from Newcastle, or Birmingham, or Australia, or Texas, even though these accents have very different vowels and even numbers of vowels and vowel length, etc. Northern England and New Zealand English share the same vowels but mapped to different words[1]. But when a non-native person speaks English it can be difficult if their accent does not map to an existing named set of vowels. If they have learned a specific accent e.g. “International American” accent it makes life much easier. In many cases with minimal pairs, knowing what accent someone is speaking is crucial to comprehending what they are saying. I suspect that something similar is happening in Vietnamese. It seems unlikely that everybody in Vietnam uses the exactly same set of tones, given the history of the country. Instead of learning Vietnamese tones maybe you need to learn the tones of a particular city and ignore speakers from outside that city? [1]: https://youtu.be/3TfbtouLm14 https://youtu.be/3TfbtouLm14
- yosito 4y ago
  Having traveled for many years, I've developed the ability to understand 95% of what people say in English even if their pronunciation is off. A funny thing about English is that actually the vowels aren't super important, except for in cases of ambiguity. Try it sometime. Yi cin riplic ill thi viwils in i sintinc with i singl viwil ind still indirstind. The problem is that most English speakers' ears aren't trained to expect unusual pronunciations, and it throws people off. This happens to me often when I speak Hungarian. Hungarians are not used to people learning Hungarian, so unnatural pronunciation can be really hard for them to follow.

akhong 4y ago

I think Stuart Jay Raj has the best content on tones and making yourself understood in these tonal languages. Check out his Youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@StuartJayRaj https://youtube.com/@StuartJayRaj

zarzavat 4y ago

English has this problem too but with vowels. There are many different accents corresponding to different geographical locations. I can understand someone from Newcastle, or Birmingham, or Australia, or Texas, even though these accents have very different vowels and even numbers of vowels and vowel length, etc. Northern England and New Zealand English share the same vowels but mapped to different words[1]. But when a non-native person speaks English it can be difficult if their accent does not map to an existing named set of vowels. If they have learned a specific accent e.g. “International American” accent it makes life much easier. In many cases with minimal pairs, knowing what accent someone is speaking is crucial to comprehending what they are saying. I suspect that something similar is happening in Vietnamese. It seems unlikely that everybody in Vietnam uses the exactly same set of tones, given the history of the country. Instead of learning Vietnamese tones maybe you need to learn the tones of a particular city and ignore speakers from outside that city? [1]: https://youtu.be/3TfbtouLm14 https://youtu.be/3TfbtouLm14

yosito 4y ago
Having traveled for many years, I've developed the ability to understand 95% of what people say in English even if their pronunciation is off. A funny thing about English is that actually the vowels aren't super important, except for in cases of ambiguity. Try it sometime. Yi cin riplic ill thi viwils in i sintinc with i singl viwil ind still indirstind. The problem is that most English speakers' ears aren't trained to expect unusual pronunciations, and it throws people off. This happens to me often when I speak Hungarian. Hungarians are not used to people learning Hungarian, so unnatural pronunciation can be really hard for them to follow.