It’s “bác”, to be exact. So you can’t really fault the language but the people lol. However I think Southern tones are easier for Chinese people to make. Personally for me, it's hard for me to understand people from middle or south Vietnam. There are, of course, exceptions to the pronunciations but that is also the case with Mandarin but that language isn't even written phonetically but even its Pinyin system has exceptions. While the ingredients may be similar, the preparation sets them apart. Vietnamese trắc: sắc, hỏi (ngã), nặng It is a real pain to start over.I learn Mandarin myself now.But I made mistake that I tried to learn both traditional and simplified Mandarin at the same time.Second,I should have applied grammar translation method because Vietnamese has 70 % vocabulary of Hán Việt. It’s isolating, so no conjugation: A blessing after Japanese. I think Vietnamese grammar isn’t very hard, it’s similar to English in some aspects. The big differences between Vietnamese and Chinese food come into play when you consider the French occupation of Vietnam. I think knowing Mandarin will help you a lot though, in multiple ways: Being aware of tones. ); ɲin12, Ôc zaŋ12, Ts ʐjən12, Shuangfeng in12, Nx lan31, Hm ʐin12, $ laŋ12, Hai. Many words are closer to Mandarin, other to Cantonese. Mandarin 平: 1st and 2nd tones, Examples: But I think, Vietnamese speaking is the hardest part. I can speak Vietnamese, Chinese, French, Spanish, and English. Yes, I hear people say bắc alot. Press J to jump to the feed. But after a 3.5 month break (to have our second child) I arrived in Hanoi and realised I could barely be understood. In both Mandarin and Vietnamese, we categorize the tones into 2 groups: bằng (level 平) and trắc (oblique 仄). Also, what is with that “few of the vowels being remotely similar to English”? Thus I can totally understand your frustration in learning Vietnamese. Southern tones are too exaggerated and hard for speakers of non tonal languages to make. There were some occasions in the past where I had great trouble just trying to figure out what the locals were trying to say; sometimes I even gave up trying. But few words in Hà Nội still pronounced different like letter “L” can become “N”,Nokia will turn into Lokia. Chinese is like so easy. Even though there are many native Vietnamese who does not use the Hanoi dialect, they still have to know all the 6 marks. Do you know of any resources, hopefully online and free, that show specifically ONLY the words shared in Chinese and Vietnamese? The Grammar Is Totally Different… But That’s a Good Thing. 法律 -> pháp luật. 政治 -> chính trị It’s not as easy to learn as people make it out to be. Integrated Chinese (Levels 1, 2): A View From the Trenches, http://nomfoundation.org/nom-tools/Nom-Lookup-Tool/Nom-Lookup-Tool, http://www.viethoc.org/hannom/tdtc_intro.php, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ620nh_S0, Catholic Mass in Shanghai in the Time of COVID (2020). I have worked as an aid worker all over the world for 16 years. Language variation - Chinese has several dialects and is spoken over a huge area by more than a billion people. Mandarin has some sound distinctions that are alien to English but ultimately the number of possible syllables is far more limited than in Vietnamese (or English, for that matter). I’m putting together a table / database of how characters / syllables in various Asian languages are related, so it’s nice I got to add these. As for the tones, we are very forgiving and most of the time, the context will determine the meaning of the word anyway. At the moment I use Step by Step chinese book, learn 2 hours a day 5am-7am, learn 20 words a day(my limit so far).at the moment i focus on building vocabulary before i can have a foundation to lean on and move on to other skills. My teacher was kind on me in Australia and I tested well. Will my Mandarin help me at all if I decide to take up Vietnamese, like are there loanwords or will I learn the tones more easily or whatever? My undergraduate degree was in Chinese, and I learned Thai quite well when I lived there. It is the listener. Both awesome! The pronunciation of Vietnamese seems even harder than Mandarin (which I struggled with), both in the consonants/vowels and the tones. But it’s not so clear-cut, at least in the South. I'd be a bit scared about learning Vietnamese to a super high level in order to get a competitive position, but I'm in position to fill a hole that no one else really can. Also, the writing system in Vietnamese, although it uses roman characters, has a staggering amount of diacritical marks...so...it's easier in a sense, being phonetic, but harder in a sense too. Food is generally fried in a hot wok in both countries and eaten with chopsticks. :). There doesn’t seem to be many exceptions here. 保險: bao xian vs bou him vs bảo hiểm. But if we’re talking about “Chinese” in the broader sense, I wonder how Vietnamese stacks up to Cantonese? Sawatdee jow instead of sawatdee khrup for example. In IPA it is recorded as /tʰ/. But to most beginners, Vietnamese is a HARD language. Not for men so much: Em, if they’re a lot younger; Anh if the same age or up to a decade older; and Ông for the elderly or someone in a position of authority. Also, the dấu sắc (high-rising) tone is tough for me, because I tend to produce it like the second tone of Mandarin, which is wrong. Regular Chinese-Vietnamese/Vietnamese-Chinese dictionaries abound. Chinese vocabulary in Vietnamese resembles its counterparts in Korean and Japanese. Vietnamese has none of that. You can stick to things like anh, chi, em, toi, ban, ong, ba, chu, co… no need for things like thim, mo, duong, co/coc, noi, ngoai…. But for women it’s much harder. When I started learning Mandarin, the 2nd and 4th tones used to trip me up like they did to you. Ngày mai tao đi làm. Umm…waiter? This leads me to a suspicion that I have had about foreigners learning Vietnamese – Vietnamese people don’t expect you to speak Vietnamese, and they can be confused and even embarrassed when you do, or when you try to. On a Chinese polyglot forum I see some people are saying Burmese>Khmer>Thai>Lao>Vietnamese.. Burmese being the hardest one while Vietnamese being the easiest one. Proof why Viets aren't related to the Chinese. Pretty much impossible, if you ask the Vietnamese themselves. We don’t have tenses and and question form is only to put some words at the end. As a native vietnamese speaker, I might be biased and think Vietnamese is easier lol. I’ll leave you with this song, which I think has quite easy pronunciations and slow enough for a learner to catch up with all the words, I think another feature that makes Vietnamese hard is also the amount of Chinese vocabulary we have acquired. người (1) nhân, (2) thằng, (3) người 人 rén (nhân) [ Vh @ QT 人 rén < MC ɲin < OC *nin | cđ MC 臻開三平真日 | Pt 如鄰 | PNH: Hai. By using our Services or clicking I agree, you agree to our use of cookies. Actually you can omit pronouns in informal situations. True, this is just my own experience, but don’t take my word for it—every person I know who has studied both languages sings the same sad song—Chinese is far easier than Vietnamese in every way except, just maybe, reading. I should probably keep working on my Chinese for a while first though. Most people are correct Vietnamese had borrowed a lots from Chinese especially Cantonese. As for the sharing with Khmer, I believe linguists are not stupid, so there should be many words similar, but Malay has very different words so that most linguists considered them different family. Interesting, because being Spanish, I find the t/đ pair easy to differentiate (in Spanish it is almost identical, and no, English and Spanish are not similar at all here), but I find the Chinese pairs t/d, b/p and g/k extremely hard to differentiate in normal speech. I have worked on Vietnamese – the first year I was here with a tutor – and it has been an exercise in frustration. We even have a saying for it: “Phong ba bão táp không bằng ngữ pháp Việt Nam” (heavy storms are less difficult to deal with than Vietnamese grammar). It’s going to be hard to find someone that can comment on all 4 languages! Structural similarities, especially in ways that they are different from English. Everything is just putting the words together. But if I go to Mexico they cannot. I'm going to say: Vietnamese has a more complex phonology and Mandarin a far more difficult writing system. For example, “special” in Vietnamese is “đặc biệt”. I did a bike tour from Hanoi with a Vietnamese tour guide and bus driver.. by the time we got to Nha Trang (halfway down) he was unable to understand what the locals were saying.. this I say without any word of exaggeration. Chinese is much simpler than Japanese when it comes to grammar, syntax and matching your speech patterns to the relationship between the speakers (levels of politeness and so on). I woudld say the “th” is most closer to the English t. Easy trick to remember t and th: T = Spanish t. Th = English t. The Vietnamese “đ” (with a little slash on top) is pronounce very similar to the English d (not completely the same but almost). As Guangning Tian said, Chinese to Vietnamese is like Latin to English. The cruel truth is, there are tonal sounds that Europeans simply cannot make!!! Its flaw is that it doesn’t provide definitions or examples of usage. Some will sound drastically different like 日記: ri ji vs jat gei vs nhật ký. Very well written post btw. Grammar: They're about on par but I find that Vietnamese has somewhat more exceptions. Serge, as a learner / speaker of Mandarin myself, I do also want to know what words are the same in Chinese rather than attempt to recognize them or guess when I encounter then. First off, in Vietnamese D(d) and Đ(đ) are two distinct letters. lol. But it has probably been simplified for foreigners learning Mandarin. Notice that all Vietnamese people sing in Northern Vietnamese, unless they are singing country songs or folk songs from their own region. To be honest, I am regretting that I have spend so much time trying to learn this language, I could have been fluent in TWO other languages by now (French and Russian) with the amount of time and effort I have spent on Vietnamese. English and Spanish, although belonging to separate families (Germanic and Romance respectively) fall under a broader family called Indo-European. Angela, I’ve argued (in vain up to now), for a re-designation of Vietnamese to a ‘super-hard’ rather than just ‘hard’. (Go where?) So sometimes in conversations we would throw in a Chinese proverb. The word đồng derives from the Chinese tóng qián, which refers to Chinese bronze coins from the dynastic periods of China and Vietnam. This central dialect is again different from the ones in HCMC and Hanoi. I can’t recall one off the top of my head (and that’s a good thing). Cookies help us deliver our Services. In fact, the Huế people pronounce tones differently from Northern and Southern people and we understand them just fine. You don’t have to remember any special rules. All rights reserved. For me, Vietnamese is not hard because it is my native language. I was never a brilliant linguist and I struggled with tones but I could be understood. If she’s older it’s chị. Louisville is pronounced louvol or something like that, and don’t get me started on their grammar and double negative “I ain’t do nothing” or “I done did it” lol. When John asked me to comment on my experiences learning Vietnamese and Chinese, I was happy to oblige, because it allows me to try and wrap my head around what I’ve been through since I began studying Vietnamese last September (8 ½ months ago now). Why is this? Lao has 6 tones, but we were never really taught them, and I will say that incorrect tones will not inhibit communication with Lao people. Stu Jay wrote a very interesting article about learning Vietnamese. well, how about bạn & tôi? Vietnamese has single, double and even triple vowels. The manner in which one addresses another is also something that is more complex in Vietnamese. As a person who was born, raised in, and had lived in Vietnam for 11 years before immigrating to the U.S. , I can tell from my own experiences that out of all the regional dialects, the Central (Trung/Hue) dialect is the most difficult to comprehend. More difficult than Mandarin? I, too, tried some tonal transfer to suprasegmentals my informant was uttering, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. Having done considerable Mandarin and a smattering of Vietnamese, I have had much the same experience. Mandarin is the standard dialect, but there are many variations within that dialect, regional and otherwise. The consonant pair that has given me the most difficulty is t/đ (different from the ‘d’ above). Oops. In addition, vowel length is an issue in Vietnamese as well. I'm not sure what you mean by Vietnamese sounds being less intuitive. And at least my teachers tell me I sound tonal when I speak, albeit with a somewhat pronounced Chinese accent. I really enjoyed reading it. If you see my question to Serge, though, I’m looking for a dictionary or something that shows shared words between Chinese languages and Vietnamese. Of course, there are also things that make learning Chinese harder than you think (or perhaps as hard), sometimes even the same things from different angles or on different proficiency levels. Sign up for the AllSet Learning Product Newsletter and find out what new Chinese learning projects John is working on. I can speak Vietnamese, Chinese, French, Spanish, and English. This is an interesting perception coming from a foreigner who has tried to learn Vietnamese. To be fair Mandarin was hard, too, back in the dark ages, but I have had so many more resources for learning Vietnamese in the Internet age and after having Cantonese come smoothly I was sure I’d do better at Vietnamese. Chinese is rich in synonyms too, of course, but the difference is that in Chinese, you might commonly encounter two to three of them in typical popular usage. ngủ chưa (sleep yet?) I think Northern tones are easier to make than Southern tones. They will understand you at least 90% of the time, mostly due to context, and also because the Lao have such an easy-going nature–they really want to talk with you. làm cái gì (vậy)? đi đâu? That, however, is not the focus of this article. If you don’t believe me, at least consider this. Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language that originated in Vietnam, where it is the national and official language.Vietnamese is spoken natively by over 70 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It seems like while I can't bank on guessing Vietnamese words based on my Mandarin, comparing the forms of words between the two will give me an easier way to remember new vocabulary. E.g if you’re 18 and she’s 30, it’s cô.
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