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 ngo. It can be hard to differentiate đủ and đổ.

I mentioned before about Vietnamese vowels that â and ơ are basically long and short versions of the same vowel as some linguists have said. According to Wikipedia they are /ɜ/ vs. /əː/ and I don’t think there is anything in English exactly like them. In the Hanoi dialect â is pronounced as /ɜ/ whereas in the Saigonese dialect it’s pronounced /ɨ/ or /ɜ/, the same as đến which I mentioned before. I was told that ơ was pronounced by spreading the lips outward laterally like a smile.
Many vowels have phonetic offglides in open syllables, meaning that they changed slightly into another vowel in the end. This happens with i and e but not a so “tri” will sounds sort of like “tri-y” and “tre” will sound like “tre-uh”.

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 people in the South.

I think that in the North they pronounce ‘ô’ as more or less the pure European ‘o’ and they pronounce ‘o’ as Americans pronounce ‘aw’ as in “law”. In the South when the vowels aren’t at the end of the word the two vowels are pronounced more similarly with the ‘o’ being pronounced closer to ‘ô’.
In words that end with ‘nh’ such as “anh” it is pronounced like “ANgst” in the North and “lAWN” in the South. And in the South words like “tin” and “tinh” are both pronounced like Americans pronounce “tin” although much shorter whereas in the South the first would be pronounced “teen” and the second would be pronounced “ting”. The same happens when ‘i’ is followed by ‘t’ or ‘ch’.   And some people pronounce the vowel in ‘ic’ somewhat differently from the rest.

And sometimes in words like “tên”, “hết”, “nên”, or “trệt” the vowel is pronounced slightly differently in the South. In these situations the ê sounds closer to ơ or â.

yên: in the South I hear “een” and in the north I hear “eyen”.

There is also some difference in the way the tones are pronounced.  In the South the hỏi and the ngã tones are pronounced similarly.  I also think that the nặng tone is much less distinct from the huyền tone in the South whereas in the North the nặng tone results in much more pronounced glottal stops.  I also think that the rising and falling tones are slower to rise and fall in the North.

I’m sure I’ve left out some differences so please feel free to leave a note in the comments. Next time I will talk about Vietnamese consonants and the differences between consonant sounds in the North and South.

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 software still requires significant amounts of training by the person using it yet still makes many mistakes.

Why is this? Why do computers make such seemingly trivial mistakes that even a child wouldn’t make? Part of it is that we don’t speak as clearly as we think we do. Fortunately, given appropriate context the listener can figure out what we’re saying quite seamlessly. Homophones, words that have the same pronunciation but are spelled differently, are generally not a problem in spoken language. But computers have trouble distinguishing words and phrases that to us seem very different. Sometimes we are lazy about properly enunciating each word. And often times words run together without us noticing but computers have a hard time deciding who wear one word ends and another word begins.

What does this have to do with learning a foreign language? Well, humans have the same problem when listening to a foreign language that they don’t know. We don’t know where one word ends and one word begins. When listening to French, with its liaison connecting the often unpronounced end of one word, it’s especially difficult although there are some tricks. For example, in French words almost never begin with a ‘z’ sound and rarely have it in the middle of a word so usually when you hear that sound it is an ’s’ or ‘z’ at the end of a word.

But in general when listening to French you have to know 90% of which words are being spoken in a sentence even if you don’t know the meaning otherwise you will just hear a stream of random syllables. Many languages are like this although in monosyllabic languages like Chinese and Vietnamese (nominally) it’s less of a problem because every “word” is just a vowel (or diphthong, etc.) surrounded by optional single consonant sounds.

And in any language the more grammar you know the more you can place words in context by category and the more vocabulary you know the more complete context you will have two separate the words you don’t know. In the beginning though when you don’t know most of the words its difficulty even repeat or write down a spoken sentence because it’s just a jumble of sounds rather than a smaller number of distinct words. And this is the problem that speech recognition software has because computers mostly rely on sound and the probability that two or more words go together. Beyond that computers generally don’t “understand” a sentence in order to distinguish homophones and the similar sounding phrases. So when we as humans try to understand a foreign language we must strive to go beyond that and understand enough of what’s being said to guess the meaning of the words we don’t know.

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 Mới which glosses as “wish happy year new” or Chúc Mừng Tân Niên which means the same thing.  They may also “chúc” you to have Sức Khỏe which means good health.  Mừng tuổi is another way to wish a happy new year.  In this case tuổi means year of age and since everybody turns one year older on this lunar new year rather than their birthday they are wishing you a happy birthday.

It is now the year of the rat.

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. But I think the best way is to have all your resources right at your side by which I mean having the gloss or translation right next to the foreign-language texts you’re reading. This is what is often available in the foreign-language textbooks but in limited amounts. There aren’t enough translated sentences in a textbook to really learn much by that method alone.

Taking a leap forward you can find some dual language books that are meant for this purpose of learning a language and being able to go back and forth with the foreign-language and the translation in your native language. There are not too many dual language books at bookstores I have been able to find a book of short stories that were written in French and translated into English. But many popular English-language novels get translated into other languages. I’m talking about Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, things like that.

What you get from comparing translated stories is not only how to say the name of an object in another language but how to talk about more abstract concepts and see how popular expressions and idioms are used which wouldn’t make sense in a word by word translation. And because you’re reading a story you have a lot more context than if you ask somebody how to say something in another language or you read a description in a textbook.

One very famous book that has been translated into very many languages is The Little Prince or Le Petit Prince in French. You can read the English translation online.

Then you can look at the Vietnamese translation and compare them side by side and practice reading and understanding Vietnamese.

And if you can read French it’s even better because you can read the original in French. But many translations into other languages were made from the English translation rather than the original French.

Here are the first few lines in English and Vietnamese:

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

Hồi lên sáu, có lần tôi đã nhìn thấy một bức tranh tuyệt đẹp trong một cuốn sách nói về Rừng hoang nhan đề “Những chuyện có thật”. Nó vẽ một con trăn đang nuốt một con thú. Đây là bản sao của bức tranh đó.

In the book it said: “Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.”

Người ta nói trong sách: “Con trăn nuốt chửng cả con mồi mà không nhai. Sau đó nó không thể nhúc nhích được nữa và nó nằm ngủ sáu tháng liền trong khi chờ tiêu hoá.”

I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My Drawing Number One. It looked something like this:

Từ đó tôi hay nghĩ đến các cuộc phiêu lưu trong rừng rậm, và đến lượt tôi, với một cây bút chì màu, tôi đã vẽ được bức phác thảo đầu tiên. Bức phác thảo đầu tiền của tôi. Nó như thế này:

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them. But they answered: “Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?”

Tôi đem khoe kiệt tác của mình với những người lớn và hỏi họ rằng nó có làm họ kinh hãi không. Họ trả lời: “Sao lại phải sợ một cái mũ chứ?”

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. My Drawing Number Two looked like this:

Bức vẽ của tôi không vẽ một cái mũ. Nó vẽ một con trăn đang nằm chờ tiêu hoá một con voi. Thế là tôi phải vẽ phía trong của con trăn, để cho người lớn có thể hiểu. Người lớn lúc nào cũng cần phải có giải thích. Bức phác thảo thứ hai của tôi nó như thế này:

The grown-ups’ response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

Những người lớn bèn khuyên tôi nên gác sang một bên các bức vẽ trăn kín và trăn mở kia và nên chú tâm học địa lý, sử ký, tính toán và văn phạm. Tôi đã bỏ dở như vậy đó, vào năm lên sáu, một sự nghiệp hội hoạ tuyệt vời. Tôi bị thất vọng vì sự thất bại của bản thảo số một và số hai. Những người lớn chẳng bao giờ tự họ hiểu được cái gì cả, và thật là mệt cho trẻ con lúc nào cũng phải giải thích cho họ.

So then I chose another profession, and learned to pilot airplanes. I have flown a little over all parts of the world; and it is true that geography has been very useful to me. At a glance I can distinguish China from Arizona. If one gets lost in the night, such knowledge is valuable.

Vậy là tôi phải chọn nghề khác, và tôi học lái máy bay. Tôi đã bay khắp thế giới mỗi nơi một tí. Và môn địa lý, đúng như vậy, đã giúp tôi rất nhiều. Tôi biết làm thế nào để chỉ nhìn qua một cái là phân biệt được ngay Trung Quốc với Arizona. Cái đó thật là ích lợi nếu như người ta bay lạc đường trong đêm tối.

In the course of this life I have had a great many encounters with a great many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.

Tôi cũng đã gặp trong đời tôi cả đống những con người nghiêm chỉnh. Tôi đã sống nhiều với những người lớn. Tôi đã nhìn thấy họ rất là gần. Nhưng cái đó chẳng làm thay đổi ý kiến của tôi bao nhiêu.

Whenever I met one of them who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of showing him my Drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I would try to find out, so, if this was a person of true understanding. But, whoever it was, he, or she, would always say:

“That is a hat.”

Then I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars. I would bring myself down to his level. I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man.

Mỗi lúc gặp một người lớn có vẻ sáng sủa một tí, tôi lại thử ông ta bằng bức phác thảo số một mà tôi luôn mang theo. Nhưng luôn luôn ông ta trả lời: “Đấy là một cái mũ”. Thế là tôi chẳng thèm nói với ông ta về trăn rắn, rừng hoang hay các vì sao nữa. Tôi tự hạ mình xuống ngang tầm ông ta. Tôi nói về chơi bài, chơi gôn, chính trị và cravate. Và con người lớn kia cảm thấy hài lòng vô cùng khi được quen một con người biết điều như vậy.

More translations:
Japanese
Spanish
German
Italian
Thai
Korean
Hebrew
more languages

Another commonly translated text of course is the Bible. But I’m not sure if the Bible should actually be used for language study. There are hundreds of translations and many phrases and concepts conflict with each other between different translations.

On spelling Vietnamese there is one more language hack I wanted to mention:
since ơ and â are basically longer in shorter versions of the same vowel and so are i and y you will only find ơ and i paired together and â and y paired together. Long plus short and short plus long. Remember that y basically is a long i and makes the preceding vowel sound shorter so it wouldn’t make sense to put a ơ before y since it would sound like â. The same goes for i, it sounds different from y by having a longer sound before it. There may be exceptions. I’ve never read that this is a hard and fast rule. But there doesn’t seem to be any words in my dictionary that contradict this theory.

So if you have a word that sounds like schwa-eee then just try to figure out if it’s a long or short eee sound, i or y, and you know if it’s ơi or ây.

Another thing to remember about diphthongs in Vietnamese is that ia/ya, ưa, ua are at the end of a word but are spelled iê (also spelled yê), ươ, uô when followed by a consonant. Also remember that in diphthongs and triphthongs the vowels are not always pronounced exactly the same as if the vowels were alone.

Language hack:
Spelling Vietnamese is difficult. It’s difficult because it’s hard to understand and differentiate between vowels and it’s difficult because there are many ways to write the same consonant sound. For example, in the south of Vietnam they pronounce gi, d, and v the same — as y. There are some tricks however. There are many more words that begin with v than d or gi. But if you’re lucky the speaker will actually pronounce v’s and you will only have to figure out if they’re saying d or gi.

If the word begins with a k sound then remember French spelling rules. If followed by any form of e or i/y then the letter is k otherwise c. Likewise g changes its sound in French if followed by e or i and so an h follows the g (that’s why gi is different). In Vietnamese it’s no different if there is an n before the g so you don’t have words like ngin but rather nghin.

If you’re confusing the different a sounds then know that ă is very rare compared to a and â. Likewise if you are confusing â and ơ know that ơ is less common than â. Also, as mentioned in the Vietnamese vowels post, â is basically a shortened version of ơ and a higher version of ă.

Here’s a tip for learning foreign languages. To make classes or lessons, even when self-taught, go by much quicker and more easily you should have the vocabulary down. That way when you’re reading something you don’t get caught up trying to either figure out the meaning or look it up. Instead you can concentrate on trying to figure out the meaning of the phrase or sentence and picking up grammatical clues. You’ll also learn context for the words, slightly different meanings, and when a word is appropriate. But first, you need to know the vocabulary. That’s why I think any student of a foreign language should first just sit down and memorize the 1000 most common words. In general, this set of words will mostly be the same for any language. How you learn the words is up to you but what works for me is flashcards and mnemonics.

The University of Sheffield has an online database of 3000 common Vietnamese words and phrases divided into categories and subcategories with English as well as French counterparts and example semantic usage. You can not only use this to learn Vietnamese but you could use this to learn French as well and this is also meant to be used by Francophones for learning Vietnamese.

University of Sheffield Vietnamese Grammar Group Vietnamese Lexicon Database

My phone runs Palm OS and I find that it’s very useful for learning languages. You can find dictionaries that run on Palm OS that are much cheaper than buying an electronic dictionary device and you can also listen to audio files on the phone (Treo). For Vietnamese I can recommend First Thousand Vietnamese Words for Students from www.griessersoftware.com. It’s basically a free 1000 word Vietnamese-English dictionary to help you learn many of the basic words. The software is easy to use although Graffiti doesn’t work on Treo and you’ll have to learn how to type the different tones and diacritics. You can download the software here (you can also buy a bigger dictionary with 5000 words from them).

Beiks’s BDicty English-Vietnamese dictionary for Palm is another one that has many more words and is also available for $15.

Another promising resource on the Internet is this Vietnamese picture dictionary.

It has a number of basic categories and there is a picture for each word. This might be more useful for some people. There are other parts of the site which also might be useful although after creating an account I’ve been having technical difficulties getting the audio to work and other sections of the site to work.

Same same but different? You’ll see people wearing these T-shirts.  What does it mean?  “Same same” is Thai English for “similar” and “same same but different” means “similar but different”.  Well, you get the idea.

Anyways, this is all you need to know to land in Bangkok as a backpacker.

1.  If you are flying into the international airport you can take a bus into town by taking a free shuttle to a public transit center but if you’d rather take a taxi (recommended for first-time visitors and those arriving later) then find the official taxis which have “taxi meter” on them and get them to use the meter or negotiate a price of 350 to 400 baht which includes any other fees.  If you go to the wrong place you will be hounded by drivers and touts who will jack up the price.  They are currently extending the skytrain out to the airport as well so by the time you read this and go there it may be finished.

2.  Tell the driver to take you to Khao San Road (”Cow Sun”).  Don’t let him take you to any hotel in particular and beware that he will try to tell you that places are full and that he can take you to a good hotel.  Just get to Khao San Road.  Here you can walk around and find a cheap room no problem.

3.  You will see people selling travel books.  This means you don’t have to buy a book on Thailand before you come.  All you need are the directions I’m giving you now.  You should be able to get it pretty cheap.  Just know that they buy the books back for about three dollars.

Here are some of the places I have experience with:
Khaosan Travelers Lodge: they have dorms with A/C for 150 baht.  It’s very popular with Japanese.  It’s in the alley just north of Khao San on Chakraphong.  Even with AC it’s pretty hot.

Nat Guest House: it’s right in the middle of Khao San.  For 180 baht you get a really run down big old fan room.

Kawin Place: 86 Khao San.  For about $10 you’ll get air-conditioning and a desk in a pretty big hotel.  Free WiFi in the lobby that works on the second floor as well.

There is a place in the last alley of Khao San Rd before Th Tanao that has a small boutique guesthouse that is quite zen-like.  If you can find it you will be rewarded.  The fan room has only a few inches of space around the bed but there is WiFi for a fee.

One other place I can recommend is Soi 1 Guesthouse at 220/7 Sukhumvit Soi 1 by the Phloen Chit skytrain station.  This is far from Khao San but much more central to the city.  Very popular with Australians.

This is a continuation of learning the Vietnamese vowels system which began with a Vietnamese pronunciation guide with audio samples of the six tones. Diphthongs will be covered later.

Vietnamese is supposed to be a monosyllabic language like Chinese, where the language got a lot of influence. In practice many words are actually more than one syllable. However, it still means that each syllable needs to have maximum expressive ability. This means that there are many vowels, diphthongs, and tones for each. There are 12 basic vowels in Vietnamese and they can be categorized as being the front or back, having a high, mid, or low tongue position, lips rounded or unrounded, and either short or long.

First, the front vowels. These are all unrounded.

Most books won’t tell you this but the difference between “i” and “y” is simply that “y” is a longer a vowel in diphthongs so for example “mai” is pronounced “maaai” and “may” is pronounced “maiiiii”. The sound of “i/y” is like that in the word “singing”. The sound of “ê” is somewhere between “him” and “hem”. You may want to open your mouth a bit to make the “e” sound like in “ten”.

One other thing to note is that with “sin” compared to “sinh” the vowel in “sin” will be more like the pure “i” sounds whereas in the latter it will be more like a schwa like in “sun”. Something to look out for.

You should listen to these vowel sounds carefully. First practice the rounded vowels and keep in mind that you really have to shape your mouth, just like in French. Then when you are able to make the long, rounded vowels you can make the unrounded bells by, according to the chart, on rounding your lips, letting them relax. And then by shortening them you can make the third column vowels.

Also “a” isn’t always close to the sound in “father” as sometimes it’s more like the sound in “sang”. Anh is a good example.

If you pronounce “caught ” and “cot” differently than the Vietnamese “o” is more like the vowel in “caught”.

Language hack: a word that ends with a t/p/k sound will always have hỏi or sắc tone and will immediately be high or low, i.e. there is no raising of the tone, it is immediately high.

And in words that end with “ng” or “c” sound with a rounded vowel (u/ô/o) the lips come together making it sound like the word ends with “m” or “p” respectively.