Lazy Sailing, Breakthroughs, and the Benefits of Knowing Chinese.
Last year, I wrote a post for my previous, aborted blog to celebrate the milestone of learning my first 1,000 Vietnamese words (rough estimate). Depending on how you measure it, I reached that milestone either slightly faster, or significantly slower than I did when learning Chinese. I would post the original here but it was a badly written draft and is hugely outdated now, so, instead, here's a brand new post about my trials and tribulations trying to learn a third language thus far.
Committing to the Long Slog: Doing it all Again
I can be fairly excitable. I have a tendency to get ahead of myself by making elaborate, ambitious plans when I should just knuckle down and focus on the task at hand. This usually results in an immediate spurt of busy enthusiasm that rapidly dies out, leading nowhere. One example has been my approach to language.
From before I could converse comfortably in Chinese, I was already eyeing up prospective third languages to learn. Vietnamese was the earliest, after I visited the country for the first time way back when in 2010/2011. Khmer was the next, following my trip to Cambodia six months later. You'll notice there's a pattern here.
Unsurprisingly, like a kid in a toy shop who sees something and wants it, these fleeting fancies never took root, and were soon replaced by other, fresher impulses. It was the same with free trials I took up for other languages available on the flashcard website I used to learn Chinese. I decided to give Korean a go while in Sichuan (there was a large Korean contingent at the university where I was studying) and managed to keep it up for a commendable two weeks or so before I capitulated in the face of all those sentence particles and an inability to pronounce even a single word well.
While in Quanzhou I bought a set of Japanese textbooks, and even a pocket phrasebook for the Southern Min dialect, though I never really planned to learn the latter well, but in the end I came back full circle and settled on Vietnamese. This time it was no knee-jerk fancy from an ambitious if capricious mind. In the end it all came down to something much more mysterious and hard to pin down: love.
This time I have solid reasons driving me forward. Not so much a need to communicate more effectively with my wife, not that that isn't a fantastic reason to learn, it is, but we already do just fine on that front, and in a neutral language that doesn't leave either of us feeling guilty that the we get to speak our own mother tongue while the other has to make a lopsided concession by not using theirs.
My main impetus for learning now is three-fold. One, I want to be able to talk to my new relatives directly, not just through my wife, and in a language they all feel comfortable with. I'm certainly not entitled enough to expect that they'd all learn English. This might come off as a crude oversimplification, but by marrying Nhung I chose to become one of the family, not the other way around. Why should they have to make the effort?
Two, I don't want my wife to feel ashamed of having a husband who can't communicate with her family and friends; I don't want her to worry that people will see me as the useless, idiot foreigner who can't even speak the language. Not through my own sense of pride, but because I don't want to be the one to make her have to feel that way.
And thirdly, I want to learn it for me, because even if she and her (our) family don't feel that way, I still do.
Looking for Structure: Lessons from Learning Chinese.
I got lucky when I started learning Chinese. I hopped on Google, made a few generic searches, and very quickly lighted upon a flashcard website that, although I couldn't confidently assess this at the time, suited my learning style almost perfectly. Back then it was called chinese-course.com (now called Learn With Oliver) and I found it so useful that I stuck with it, using it as my primary, if not sole, language learning tool for the next 5 years.
Even then, it took me a while to get the most out of the system. I started off by adding whatever words I thought would be useful to my deck whenever I thought of them in English (one, single deck), and then supplemented these with new words I encountered while talking to people I'd met in my daily life. The result was a mish-mash of words that didn't really compliment each other and weren't always that useful or common in everyday Chinese. In the end I probably learnt fewer than 1,000 new words in my first year, despite putting in a great deal of time.
It wasn't until I discovered the vocabulary lists for the HSK (Chinese proficiency test) online that I began to develop some structure to my learning. Having a list of common words to work from, I could set myself goals for how many new words to add to my flashcard decks each week while working up through the difficulty levels in order. This was a numerical, methodical approach that I found easy to stick to and I kept it up, more or less unchanged, through all 6 levels of the HSK and beyond.
I was hoping to adapt this method to learning Vietnamese, but alas, Chinese is a language with a far broader user base and appeal as a foreign language and there just doesn't seem to be the same variety and abundance of educational tools out there for its less influential southern neighbour.
Tools of the Trade: Slowly Finding my Groove.
At first I thought I'd struck lucky again. I quickly discovered a website that seemed for all the world like a Vietnamese clone of the Learn With Oliver one I'd used for Chinese (unfortunately Vietnamese isn't one of the languages they offer, otherwise I wouldn't have looked elsewhere at all). As I started to use it, however, I discovered that it lacked a lot of the functionality of the former site, and, not long into my half-year subscription I quickly learned that it didn't have a very broad word base, nor the option to build custom decks by adding my own words. It wasn't a terrible service by any means, but it was bare bones and wasn't going to get me far.
As for finding vocabulary to work my way through, I fared even worse. I've been unable to find any serviceable word lists to feed into my flashcard decks and so, at first, I fell back into the trap of just randomly adding words as and when I thought of them.
Clearly, I wasn't going to be able to learn Vietnamese using the same method as I had for Chinese, so something had to change. I transferred from the flashcard website I'd found, with it's limited word bank, and started using Quizlet, a site and app that, while offering only basic functionality and no pre-existing words or sentences, is designed to allow users to add their own vocabulary. I also bought a series of four textbooks and am now methodically working my way through them lesson text by lesson text, using the new vocabulary to fuel my learning.
The textbooks I bought are in Chinese. This was due to local availability, but seems to have worked out for the best, as there are greater similarities between Vietnamese and Chinese in terms of vocabulary and grammar than there are between Vietnamese and English, and using Chinese textbooks has probably helped me to pick up the language a lot faster.
I have one other wonderful tool to help me on the path to (hopefully) eventual fluency, one that money can't buy and would probably beat me with a rather large stick if she were to read this and catch me referring to her as a tool at all, and that's my wife. Just as she has someone to run her English by and help answer any questions she may have (although not necessarily to a satisfactory level), I can call on her to help me out whenever the finer points of Vietnamese are causing my brain, or my tongue, to hurt (and at my level the coarser points as well).
Transferable Skills: A Slight Head Start
Beyond the tedious but necessary task of force feeding oneself vocabulary, learning a language requires particular attention to be paid to specific elements it sports which differ from those of the languages you already know. For a native speaker of English, the elements of Vietnamese that require special attention include tones, phonetics, sentence particles, measure words, syntax, and almost certainly a whole bunch of other things that I'm not far enough in to really understand.
Luckily, many of the Vietnamese linguistic concepts that are alien to, or at least rarer in, English also appear in Chinese. One of the most prominent features shared by both languages, but which doesn't occur in English, is tonality. Every syllable has a specific tone, in Chinese there are four of these plus a neutral one, whereas in Vietnamese there are six. For a speaker of a non-tonal language, tones are a huge pain in the backside, but at least with Vietnamese they are displayed clearly with markers in the writing (e.g. a, á, ả, à, ã, and ạ), whereas with Chinese you simply have to remember them all.
Another example is sentence particles. Common in East Asian languages, these are essentially meaningless words that exist solely to serve a grammatical function. Examples from Chinese include 的, a possessive particle, which is used to denote ownership, and 吧, a sentence-final particle which is added to the end of a statement to form a suggestion and solicit agreement. These correspond roughly to của and nhé in Vietnamese.
Then there are measure words. While these exist in English they tend to be restricted to uncountable nouns, things like a bottle of water, or two head of cattle, whereas in many East Asian languages, they are required in the majority of cases and include a generic case, in Chinese 个, and in Vietnamese cái.
Basically, instead of simply saying I read a book, you have to say I read a (measure word for books) book. This can take some getting used to and there are, at least in Chinese, quite an array of different measure words to memorise (although you can still get away with using 个 for things like walls, computers and boats rather than 堵, 台, and 艘 if you're feeling lazy).
Besides grammatical features that would otherwise have taken some getting used to, a decent grasp of Chinese has also saved me time when it comes to memorising vocabulary. For historical reasons, Vietnamese includes a significant number of loan words taken from Chinese (think English with either French or German) meaning that there's a fair amount of vocabulary that sticks in my head a lot more easily than it would if I only had English to go on. One example is cao, meaning tall, which sounds identical to its Chinese counterpart, 高, and therefore doesn't require any effort to memorise.
It Hasn't all been Easy: Some of the Things Holding me Back
Any Mandarin speakers can probably deduce from that last example that the Vietnamese initial c is pronounced like an English g, which leads me nicely into the next segment, which is all the things that haven't proven so easy. The two main issues I've faced here are the related issues of pronunciation and reading/spelling. Let's start with reading.
This might sound weird at first, considering that Vietnamese uses an alphabetic script, but I actually think, at the beginner level, that the way in which Vietnamese is written has caused me way more problems than Chinese. Sure, Chinese uses a character-based system that takes some getting used to and isn't entirely phonetic, but it also has, in the form of pinyin, a system of Romanisation that is consistent and above all intuitive for English speakers. Beginner students tend to use pinyin in their studies without focusing too much on the characters themselves.
Vietnamese, on the other hand, well. Th is pronounced like an English t, while t itself is pronounced like a d, which in turn is pronounced like a z, as is gi (and r for that matter by a significant number of people); c and k are both pronounced like an English g, whereas the Vietnamese g is pronounced with an open throat (that's an issue for below); kh is similar to h; q is followed by u but sounds like a g (with the u that's a gw); x is an s, and s is sh.
Throw in the diacritics on the vowels that leave ă sounding a lot like a but completely different to â, and the result is, when reading Vietnamese (as an English speaker), you're seeing what are, or at least look like, very familiar letters, but you're having to fight all your natural instincts and pronounce them in very unfamiliar ways. And that's before we even get to the nuances of the pronunciation itself.
As I hinted at above, if we ignore whole syllables and simply look at consonant and vowel sounds, there aren't that many of them in Chinese (in standard Mandarin at least) that don't also exist in English. The retroflex sounds are exceptions, but they have equivalents which, with a little curl of the tongue, are easy to adapt and comprehend.
Even regional accents don't necessarily make things that difficult. For example, if you want to perfect the Beijing twang you only have to speak Chinese like a West Country pirate who's had a root canal and still can't move the muscles in their mouth fully (sorry, I really couldn't resist).
Vietnamese is different, there are a whole host of consonant and vowel sounds that have no direct equivalents in English and need to be learned near enough from scratch. Nasal consonants like nh and ng are easy enough but awkward at speed; the voiced velar fricative g that I mentioned above still regularly trips me up (I think I've more or less got the hang of it but now I find myself reflexively pronouncing the Vietnamese c and k sounds without closing off the airways).
Even those with near analogous sounds can prove difficult, as there may be similar pairs of sounds with subtle but important differences in Vietnamese that are difficult to distinguish with untrained English ears, for example t and đ, kh and h, e and ê, a and ă, ai and ay, ch and tr, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum.
A more nuanced issue, and one which I've really been struggling to get my head around, is pronouns, which in Vietnamese are relative to age, relation, and social status (this phenomenon also exists in a number of other East Asian languages, but thankfully not modern Chinese). For example, if I'm talking to my wife, then the pronoun I use for I could be either anh (big brother, used by males when talking to social equals who are younger but not much younger) or chồng (husband), but when talking to my mother-in-law that changes to con (child). I'm then bác (aunt or uncle) when talking to my niece, cháu (child/grandchild) when talking to grandparents and tôi when I'm posting my writing practice because I have no idea who's going to be reading it so I need to maintain a neutral voice.
Basically, there are no fixed pronouns, there's just a long list of familial relationships that at my stage of learning require constant focus not to mess up and embarrass myself. I'm not even safe with hello, as respectfully greeting someone in Vietnamese takes the form I say hello to you, so I end up freezing like a rabbit in the headlights and have to frantically double-check with my wife when encountering various family members for fear of saying something rude or stupid.
Last, and probably also least based on how much difficulty it's actually caused me, is word order. Chinese word order is easy to pick up, the grammar is simple and there's a natural logic to it, at least that's how it feels to me. Vietnamese isn't much different, but does have a few interesting features that sometimes trip me up, one of which is the order in which you put adjectives and the nouns they describe. In Vietnamese adjectives come after nouns, unlike both English and Chinese where they tend to come before. So I don't live in a tiny apartment, I live in an apartment tiny (although as mentioned earlier, if I do want to say an then I should probably add a measure word too).
Bringing back the Memories: Nostalgia and Frustration
Working through the early stages of Vietnamese has brought back a lot of memories from when I was wrestling with simple Chinese all those many, many years ago. To be honest, the vast majority are pleasant, nostalgia heavy rides back down memory lane, like walking around the running track at the college in Hunan with my friend trying to get my head around the difference between the sha and xia sounds (sand and shrimp), or hours of QQ conversations using simple language and highlighting the words I didn't recognise so that Youdao Dictionary could tell me what they meant.
It's weird to think that the language I learnt with that software's help has eventually allowed me to get a job working for the very company that made it. I remember conversations and breakthroughs and the people I met and became friends with as a result. A lot of those moments I'd more or less forgotten and it's been really nice looking back on them once more.
Where We're At: The Past, Present, and Future
For years I didn't pull my finger out and study Vietnamese as seriously as I should. Then when I did it felt like I was going nowhere. Maybe this is just how it is with languages; maybe it's not the effort or a lack of tools and a consistent method that hold people back at first; maybe it just takes a long time for your brain to lay down the foundations and assemble all the building blocks before one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the visible shell of your new language starts shooting up above ground.
However it works, I'm finally making progress, good, steady, observable progress. The kind whose tiny, satisfaction-based dopamine kicks make it self-propelling. I've gone from awkwardly declaring my imminent intention to do any of five daily tasks around the house to forming my own sentences and communicating my thoughts slowly, but effectively, in the space of a few months, and I feel like I'm gathering pace.
As a result, I firmly believe that by the time we next head home to Vietnam to visit family (probably Spring Festival 2021), I'll be able to chat, not merely communicate, with Nhung's mother, brother, and the whole extended family. If I can, then it'll be the first time I've been able to fully relax and not feel like a useless, bumbling foreigner who stands out like a sore, embarrassing thumb.
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