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The State Bank of Vietnam, the central bank, set the dong’s official exchange rate at 16,099 per dollar Tuesday, the lowest level since January 28.
In the offshore market, the non-convertible dong eased to VND22,150 – VND23,150 per dollar on one-year term, implying the currency will be worth 39.3 percent less in a year’s time.
Although this […]
Knowing the Vietnamese alphabet isn’t just for fun. There will be times when you will be trying to communicate with somebody and have to spell out a word or have them spell it out for you without writing it down. Luckily, learning the Vietnamese alphabet isn’t difficult if you already know the English […]
A video made by some French guys about motorbikes in Saigon. All traffic signals are just for show including red lights. The horn is often used to warn people ahead that you are coming up quickly. Traffic is always crazy due to the sheer number of people on motorbikes. Very few […]
How about some light humor this weekend for those studying foreign languages. Russel Peters is an Indian Canadian comedian from Toronto who often jokes about other ethnicities. In this act Russell peters talks about Vietnamese speaking English, funny Vietnamese restaurant names, and the name of Vietnam’s national currency, the dong.
Russell Peters talking about Chinese […]
I said before how it’s useful to learn a foreign language by reading material in your mother tongue and the foreign language at the same time. It helps if the subject matter is interesting. I just learned that the Vietnamese government’s visa extension website for overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) has finally been translated […]
Some things I’ve noticed about Vietnamese vowels in the Saigon dialect:
‘u’ is like the pure vowel in European languages but can be closer to ‘o’. To me it sounds more like ‘u’ when the final sound is a stop t/c/p then when it’s an open vowel ending word so for example ngủ sounds closer to […]
Many people who learn Vietnamese will learn or will want to learn the Vietnamese of the northern dialect (Hanoi) but when they encounter people from the South there may be some confusion such as with the way some tones and vowels are pronounced. Here are some things I have noticed at least among some […]
If you’ve ever used any speech recognition software you’ll know that the state of the art in this field is still far from perfect, far from the performance of a real human being. Even with big players like IBM and Microsoft, with the latter including speech recognition in its Vista operating system, speech recognition […]
It is now the new year in Vietnam, Tết Nguyên Đán, Feast of the First Morning. It is a huge holiday celebrated for several days and much time is spent with family making it somewhat of a lonely time for foreigners in Vietnam. However, everybody, Happy New Year!
In Vietnamese they would say Chúc Mừng Năm […]
I find that I can learn a language much more rapidly once I’m able to read in that language because it allows you to subconsciously pick up grammar and contextual vocabulary and you can sometimes pick up the meaning of a word you don’t already know without having to look it up in a dictionary. […]