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I've been living in Vietnam for the last four years and there's a huge difference in dialects from southern, central and northern Vietnam. People from the cente

I've been living in Vietnam for the last four years and there's a huge difference in dialects from southern, central and northern Vietnam. People from the center in particular are often unintelligible even to other Vietnamese. It's a treacherous enough language already since getting a tone wrong can mean you're unintentionally saying something quite vulgar. Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a pass for making these kinds of mistakes and they're happy that you're even make an effort to learn their language.

chinhodado 11y ago
> Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a pass for making these kinds of mistakes and they're happy that you're even make an effort to learn their language. This is correct. It is always expected that foreigners will speak broken Vietnamese, and given that it is already rare in the first place to hear a foreigner speak Vietnamese, most will be delighted to see you do it, no matter how broken it is.
- apendleton 11y ago
  An American friend who lives in Vietnam has told me he finds that while Vietnamese people aren't bothered by foreigners speaking broken Vietnamese, they also don't have an especially practiced facility for guessing what someone might have meant when they butcher something. He theorizes that because there's almost no non-native speaker population, Vietnamese people just don't get much experience having to do that the way Americans do with non-native English speakers. The impression I got was that if you messed up tones, you might get a delighted, but also perplexed, response.
  - 616c 11y ago
    Well, after my time in China, I sucked it up and tried to learn Chinese and communicate in broken Chinese with my students. When other kids complained about our old Taiwanese teacher's English accent, I asked them simply: "let's say hypothetically we inverted the situation and found an exact parallel of your Chinese accent to her spoken English when Chinese comes out of your mouth, and you understand the accent is native. How hard will you laugh?"
  - cageface 11y ago
    I've found that, ironically, Vietnamese that already speak English are also more likely to understand my amateur Vietnamese. Maybe that's because they're more familiar with the sounds of English and can make more educated guesses about what I'm trying to say. I suppose this is true of all tonal languages but Vietnamese is very unforgiving. Even when people really butcher the pronunciation and grammar of English I can still usually guess what they're trying to say. If you don't really nail the pronunciation and tones of Vietnamese people won't understand you at all. I've seen a lot of foreigners give up in frustration even after years of living here. If you really want to learn to speak tiếng Việt you have to find a real teacher and drill the basics of tones and pronunciation. If you try to pick it up a phrase at a time chatting with people you'll never get it.
    - carelesslisper 11y ago
      That makes sense. As a non-native English speaker I find it easier to understand people from my country speaking English than other accents. I also found out that after starting studying Chinese it is easier to me to understand Chinese people speaking Portuguese (my native language) because I understand a bit of the Chinese grammar and phrasal structures.
616c 11y ago
No surprise here. I majored in Arabic in college. I have looked into Chinese, Farsi, Hindi/Urdi, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese, in order of effort, with a year of Chinese at college level (in the US that is bullshit, but while doing grad level Arabic, caused people to laugh in conversation at my masochism). The ASEAN languages, so Thai and Indonesian and Vietnamese, seemed so so much harder than Chinese. Not even sure why. Mandarin was hard, with 4 tones. I think standard Vietnamese has ... five? God help me if I ever learned Cantonese Chinese! I actually knew people from the south, and eight/nine tones made me wonder how they fuck people stop learning the language and move onto anything else. Me: 200 characters of Mandarian Southern Chinese Dude w/ College Degree: Spoken Cantonense with 9 tones and 20,000 chacters in Mandarin Chinese Fuck my life.

chinhodado 11y ago

> Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a pass for making these kinds of mistakes and they're happy that you're even make an effort to learn their language. This is correct. It is always expected that foreigners will speak broken Vietnamese, and given that it is already rare in the first place to hear a foreigner speak Vietnamese, most will be delighted to see you do it, no matter how broken it is.

apendleton 11y ago
An American friend who lives in Vietnam has told me he finds that while Vietnamese people aren't bothered by foreigners speaking broken Vietnamese, they also don't have an especially practiced facility for guessing what someone might have meant when they butcher something. He theorizes that because there's almost no non-native speaker population, Vietnamese people just don't get much experience having to do that the way Americans do with non-native English speakers. The impression I got was that if you messed up tones, you might get a delighted, but also perplexed, response.
- 616c 11y ago
  Well, after my time in China, I sucked it up and tried to learn Chinese and communicate in broken Chinese with my students. When other kids complained about our old Taiwanese teacher's English accent, I asked them simply: "let's say hypothetically we inverted the situation and found an exact parallel of your Chinese accent to her spoken English when Chinese comes out of your mouth, and you understand the accent is native. How hard will you laugh?"
- cageface 11y ago
  I've found that, ironically, Vietnamese that already speak English are also more likely to understand my amateur Vietnamese. Maybe that's because they're more familiar with the sounds of English and can make more educated guesses about what I'm trying to say. I suppose this is true of all tonal languages but Vietnamese is very unforgiving. Even when people really butcher the pronunciation and grammar of English I can still usually guess what they're trying to say. If you don't really nail the pronunciation and tones of Vietnamese people won't understand you at all. I've seen a lot of foreigners give up in frustration even after years of living here. If you really want to learn to speak tiếng Việt you have to find a real teacher and drill the basics of tones and pronunciation. If you try to pick it up a phrase at a time chatting with people you'll never get it.
  - carelesslisper 11y ago
    That makes sense. As a non-native English speaker I find it easier to understand people from my country speaking English than other accents. I also found out that after starting studying Chinese it is easier to me to understand Chinese people speaking Portuguese (my native language) because I understand a bit of the Chinese grammar and phrasal structures.

616c 11y ago

No surprise here. I majored in Arabic in college. I have looked into Chinese, Farsi, Hindi/Urdi, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese, in order of effort, with a year of Chinese at college level (in the US that is bullshit, but while doing grad level Arabic, caused people to laugh in conversation at my masochism). The ASEAN languages, so Thai and Indonesian and Vietnamese, seemed so so much harder than Chinese. Not even sure why. Mandarin was hard, with 4 tones. I think standard Vietnamese has ... five? God help me if I ever learned Cantonese Chinese! I actually knew people from the south, and eight/nine tones made me wonder how they fuck people stop learning the language and move onto anything else. Me: 200 characters of Mandarian Southern Chinese Dude w/ College Degree: Spoken Cantonense with 9 tones and 20,000 chacters in Mandarin Chinese Fuck my life.