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English has this problem too but with vowels. There are many different accents corresponding to different geographical locations. I can understand someone from
by 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 agoHaving 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.