Thai vs Vietnamese: Round One

I have taken the first tentative steps in to Vietnamese.

Hoo boy.

The tones are interesting. There are six (in the Hanoi dialect), compared to Thai's five. Three of them seem to roughly match Thai's mid, rising, and falling tones. The other three, however, include glottal stops! Very interesting.
The tones are quite easy to write. Thai has a very elegant and insane method to mark tones, involving three classes of consonants, live and dead syllables, long and short vowels, and tone markers. Vietnamese does it much more simply: Each tone has a diacritic, and it is placed over (or in one case, under) the vowel of the syllable.

I'm not sure how to approach the writing system. Tiếng Việt is written in a modified Latin alphabet (like English), and it's very difficult to scan without subconsciously pronouncing it as I do English. I haven't had this problem since Latin class in high school. I do have a vague understanding of the differing orthography of some European languages- but this comes from familiarity with loan words. Vietnamese's phonology is unlike any European language's (or, apparently, Thai's.) So it being written in a Latin script is almost the opposite of helpful.

I need to somehow suppress my instincts until I am comfortable with the spoken language. I should probably seek out an audio-only course of some sort. Teach Yourself Vietnamese has a nice exposition of tones and phonetics, but it's a lot to take in.

Last time I started studying a new language (Arabic), I quickly realized how much Thai I actually already knew, and decided to put my effort in to that language. I hope I don't do that this time, but starting from scratch is honestly a bit daunting.

tiếng Việt

I have decided to start learning Vietnamese.

This is mainly for pragmatic reasons. My study of Thai was precipitated by a visit to Thailand. I continued studying basically for the hell of it- I enjoyed it. But Vermont is a long ways from Thailand, and I don't currently have the means to return there. Basically, my Thai is useless for the time being. After a long period of consideration, I've decided to take a stab at Vietnamese. I like Vermont, and Vietnamese is spoken in my area by a considerable minority. It's simply more practical in the short term than Thai. If I have to "force" myself to study a 2nd language, it is the obvious choice. There will be more opportunity in learning it and more opportunity for using it. Also, it's geographically close to Thai, and shares many traits, like being tonal and analytic/isolating. I should have some familiarity with most of the grammatical concepts, although they are used differently.

I'm going to try and approach Vietnamese differently from Thai. Perhaps I can learn from my mistakes? I'm going to try and emphasize the spoken language. With Thai, my reading far outstrips my listening. I don't want to repeat this imbalance. I also will look in to formal instruction, and adopt a more structured (and more social) study regimen.

I plan to continue my Thai study as a serious hobby (this blog will still be titled ฝรั่งงง) but I'm going to attempt, for the time being, to put the majority of my effort into tiếng Việt.

ทามโบย

I'm on the 5th episode of a Thai "lakorn" (prime-time soap opera mini-series?) called หัวใจ (heart of) Chocolate. Started watching to improve my "ear" for the spoken language and it's helped a lot. But I've also honestly gotten sucked in to the story. The destied couple is kind of boring but I like the tomboy and the "wacky" guy that talks fast.

I mostly read the subtitles and try to anticipate what will be said. They're fan-made and sort of overly literal, which is actually a bonus. I can now "hear" common phrases pretty consistantly,. (Noticing a lot of english loanwords peppered in- "tomboy" being one!) Any sentence longer than a few words and I can only catch bits and pieces. Which is to be expected, obviously. My vocab is scant and even if I know every word in a sentence, that doesn't mean I can parse the grammar quickly enough. ANOTHER problem is the frequent use of names as pronouns, so you have to remember each character's name. Which are usually short and mistakable for words. But getting tuned to the sounds is making my reading faster and that's helping the other areas. Still should do some vocab drills though! Half-assed and haphazard is right.

Also argh I learned ร as a trilled [r], knowing it sometimes was pronounced [l], but it seems [l] is more common so I need to adjust for this. The dropping of the 2nd consonants in consonant clusters also vexes me. But OH WELL that's the way language works, there's no "standard."

Been reading on linguistics recently. I'll try to write some posts connecting the things I'm learning to Thai. Some of it is esoteric and more interesting than useful to me, but some of it really helps snap things into focus. Obviously you can learn a language while knowing nonce about how it works: all children aquire spoken language automatically. But as busy adults, I'm starting to think a passing knowledge in linguistics really helps.