The International Writers Magazine: Learning Languages

Wrestling with the Vietnamese Language By Antonio Graceffo

Vietnamese is, by far, the hardest language to pronounce, of any language
I have ever studied.

At the time of this writing, I have been living in Hanoi for seven weeks
and studying Vietnamese for six weeks with private tutors. I have an hour
and a half of lessons per day, six days per week. Outside of class, I do
as much listening as possible, working with a number of commercially
available and proprietary listening materials.

Before coming to Vietnam, I had made the assumption that the language was
related to Chinese. The two countries had been closely linked until less
than a thousand years ago, when Vietnam won its complete and final
independence from China. Traditionally, the Vietnamese follow Chinese
Mahayana Buddhism. And, until the 19th century, they still wrote their
language, nearly exclusively, with Chinese characters. For these, and many
other reasons, I thought that being a speaker of Mandarin Chinese,
Vietnamese would be easier for me to pick up.

Saying one thing is easier than another, or easier for one person than for
another person is always a loaded statement, fraught with opinions and
based on a comparison of the known with the unknown. The short answer is,
there is nothing easy about learning Vietnamese.

Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic/Mon-Khmer language. Many of the regional
languages in Southeast Asia fall into this category. The two most widely
spoken, the only two which are official languages of a country, are Khmer,
the national language of Cambodia, and Vietnamese. Number three would be
Mon, a language spoken by tribal groups in Burma and Thailand, but the
total number of native speakers is less than one million.

Vietnamese grammar is much more complex than Chinese grammar, which is
fairly simple for westerners. The Vietnamese language also has elements of
registers of speech, with countless forms of address, depending upon the
speaker and or the listeners status and age. Additionally, Vietnamese is
tonal, like Chinese, Thai, Lao, Burmese and many of the regional
languages. But, where many of the other tonal languages only have four or
five tones, Vietnamese has six. Tones are hard for most westerners, but a
difference of four or six is not the Waterloo in learning Vietnamese. The
next hurdle, after the tones, is the sounds. Vietnamese is riddled with
sounds that don’t exist in most western languages. So, the pronunciation
is extremely difficult. And, as with all tonal languages, if you mis-
pronounce something, even by the slightest bit, a listener will not
understand you. By the same token, unless you really dominate the
language, you won’t understand most of what is being said to you.

Readers who are familiar with my research and study in the field of ALG
(Automatic Language Growth) will know that I am strongly against learning
words and phrases. To truly speak a language, you must learn the language,
the communication, not a set of words and phrases. When you go shopping,
you don’t recite a pre-rehearsed dialogue. You have to accept and be aware
of the fact that native speakers can, and will, say things to you that
don’t match the script in your head. To communicate, you will have to be
able to deal with the fact that Mr. Hai who cuts your hair, didn’t read
the chapter in your phrase book called, “At the Barber Shop.”

Another tenet of ALG is that native-like pronunciation only comes from
extensive hours of listening. There is no way to learn pronunciation from
a book. With Vietnamese, if your pronunciation is not close to perfect, NO
ONE will understand you.

The Vietnamese language is more closely related to Khmer, than it is to
Chinese. And like Khmer, it has a large number of sounds. Counting
diphthongs, and long and short vowels, Khmer has well over a hundred vowel
sounds. A slight change in a vowel changes the word completely. Vietnamese
has all of the complexity of Khmer, but with the addition of trip-thongs
and tones. Khmer is nearly the only regional language which is not tonal.

Speaking Khmer is only slightly helpful in learning Vietnamese. Speaking
Chinese will help a bit with vocabulary. Although Chinese and Vietnamese
are from completely different language families, with unrelated origins,
Vietnam historicaly falls into the area of Chinese influence countries,
and as a result, a lot of Vietnamese vocabulary comes from Chinese. These
Chinese loan words were once written with Chinese characters and are
generally monosyllabic words or compound words, such as the Vietnamese
“Dai hoc” which means university. Interestingly, however, the Chinese loan
words often don’t match up with modern, spoken Mandarin. These words
entered the Vietnamese language so long ago, that they came from
Manchurian dialect. Today, there are only a handful of native speakers of
Manchurian still living.

If you have ever studied Korea, you would find that 60 – 80% of the Korean
language vocabulary comes from Manchurian, Chinese dialect, although the
Korean and Chinese languages bear no similarity in structure or origin.
The Vietnamese word “Dai hoc” is very close to the Korean “De Hak” because
they both come from the same Manchurian root.

Occasionally, knowing Chinese does help. For example, the names of
countries, particularly western countries, are often Vietnamese
transliterations of Chinese names for those countries. A British friend,
who is also studying in Hanoi, told me that he learned the Vietnamese word
for Portugal is Bồ Ðào Nha. He asked his teacher what the words
literally meant. She couldn’t answer him, but I knew that the three
syllables each represented a Chinese character, which, in Manchurian
dialect, was the closest they could come up with to sound like “Portugal.”

My explanation of the origin of the word for “Portugal” may have been an
interesting tidbit of linguistic trivia, but in practical terms, will it
really help me learn Vietnamese faster or better? ALG says “NO.” ALG would
also say, “don’t get hung up on words and phrases. Learn the
communication.”

In short, having a few words and phrases of Vietnamese is completely
useless. I see foreigners all of the time trying to “get close to the
people” or “Be sensitive to another culture.” They mix Vietnamese phrases
in with their English, thinking this somehow facilitates communication.
When a foreigner says “xin loi” or “excuse me” without pronouncing the
inflection and tone markers, there is a chance that a Vietnamese person
would turn around or look at them. So, the foreigner thinks his
communication was understood. Actually, the native speaker had no idea
what the foreigner had said, only that he had said something. Other
phrases or names of things that foreigners use in their regular shops or
with their regular friend “appear” to be understood, but actually the
native speaker may not even realize these foreigners are speaking
Vietnamese. They just think, “My friend Francoise always says “café sua”
when he wants coffee with milk.” But it doesn’t mean that Francoise is
saying it correctly. Often when Francoise goes to a new coffee shop, where
he has never been before, he comes back with a story. “The people in that
shop are so stupid. I gave them my order in Vietnamese, as I do in my
regular coffee shop. But they didn’t understand me.”

Across Asia I have seen couples completely inventing their own quasi-Asian
language, where they understand each other, but no one else can understand
them. Many foreigners are sadly encouraged by the ability of their spouse
or significant other to understand them, and their estimation of their own
linguistic ability is inflated.

An American engineer living in Taiwan once told me. “I have learned to
speak Chinese well, but I can’t understand when a native speaker is
speaking.” For me, coming from an ALG background, this is not possible. I
don’t believe that you can learn production without learning passive
skills first. Not only do I not believe it, but I am willing to get in a
boxing ring with anyone who disagrees with me. You learn from listening,
not speaking. If you can’t understand when people are speaking to you,
then this means the language is not in your head in the first place.

This brings me back to Vietnamese and learning words and phrases. A
foreigner living in Vietnam or Taiwan or Turkmenistan, who believes they
can speak but not listen, has managed to memorize a large number of
phrases. For most of what they do during the course of the day, they are
covered. They know how to order food, get a hair cut…if they are really
good, like one Australian I worked with in Cambodia, they even know how to
get their car fixed. But they don’t SPEAK the language. They have
memorized the vocabulary that they need for specific tasks. And the second
that the conversation takes any kind of unexpected turn, the moment that
here is a problem or a bump in the road, they are completely out.

The test that I gave the engineer, who believed he could speak but not
listen, was “Tell me in Chinese that your company is cutting back on
employees and your contract may end at the end of the year, and you aren’t
sure what you will do at that point.”

Is this too much to ask of a language learner? This story about the
contract was something he had told me in English. And it is the sort of
thing Chinese speakers tell each other. If you believe that you speak a
foreign language, then you should be able to talk about these types of
concepts in the foreign language.

So, if learning words and phrases is not the same as learning a language,
then why do so many people do it?

Selling languages, language lessons, learning materials, and courses is a
huge business. In business, you want your customers to be satisfied. The
easiest and fastest way for anyone to learn anything is rote memorization,
rather than understanding. Rote learning is done through repetition and
through a mix of sounds, pictures, and texts. The best way to fool someone
into believing they have learned something is to put questions on the
test, which match exactly what they have learned in class.

This is how 90% of the methods and commercially available language
learning aids work. They teach you a set of phrases and vocabulary through
repetition. Then they test your ability to remember them and spit them
back out on the exam. In the end, even if you earn a mark of 100%, you
still can’t speak the language.

So, how do we learn Vietnamese? How do we learn any Asian language? The
answer is, listening, listening, listening, listening, and eventually,
reading, reading, reading. But, with Asian languages, particularly
Vietnamese, you need incredible numbers of hours of listening to get the
sounds right. The NLSC (National Language Service Corps) has assigned
Vietnamese a category of Three (out of four) for difficulty. The Foreign
Service Institute has established that it requires 88 weeks, 2,200 hours
of study for an English native speaker to learn a category three language.
They also prefer that at least half of this time is spent studying in the
country where the language is spoken.

You can’t learn a language in twenty minutes a day. One hour a week won’t
get it. To truly learn a difficult language, such as Vietnamese, will take
a dedicated student two years. The more listening you do, the better and
faster you will learn. Try to find hours in your day to spend with your
listening. Take your Vietnamese I-Pod lessons with you to work or on the
motorcycle or at the gym. Attend your classes regularly and do as much
homework as you can stand.

And most of all, listen, listen, listen. Be realistic, but don’t get
discouraged. The Vietnamese learned it. So can you.

See Antonio Graceffo’s multipart video series for free, on youtube.
ALG Vietnamese Linguistics Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLuCBEn7b7s

Also see Antonio’s video
ALG Vietnamese Picture Story Le Loi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeUEzYRga4
In a recent round of interviews, networks and media sent Antonio the
question via email and Antonio answered on camera. If you are interested
in doing a similar interview, fire off the questions to Antonio. Antonio
is looking for an opportunity to study for an MA/PHD in linguistics.

Antonio Graceffo is the author of the book, “The Monk from Brooklyn,” and
is he host of the web TV show, “Martial Arts odyssey.”
Contact Antonio Graceffo on facebook.com
Send him email: Antonio@speakingadventure.com

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