Since he has a background in Chinese and linguistics, he goes into detail about how he used his knowledge of Chinese and other Asian languages to pick up Vietnamese quickly. Luckily, at my age and station in life, I’m probably never going to tackle either one. Not to mention how hard it is to learn the Mandarin characters. The word đồng derives from the Chinese tóng qián, which refers to Chinese bronze coins from the dynastic periods of China and Vietnam. Structural similarities, especially in ways that they are different from English. Ngày mai tao đi làm. Maybe because I’m Vietnamese, I find it no difficuty. So it’s more beneficial to learn The Hanoi dialect. Vietnamese people talk about their societal problems all the time – be it pollution, traffic, corruption, academic cheating, etc. Similar to Chinese, sentence particles are a very important grammatical component, but Vietnamese takes this to a stratospheric level of complexity. The one that sounded like second tone was clearly not so, but the difference was too subtle for me to detect. If Vietnamese were still written in chữ Nôm then it'd be a full house. There was a bit of this in Mandarin but...it seemed pretty straightforward to work through it. I agree with most of John Pasden’s initial comments above; Vietnamese pronunciation is quite difficult, and despite what IPA symbols are used, Vietnamese vowels are not really similar to those of any European language, and frequently are different from those in other Asian languages too. 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. This central dialect is again different from the ones in HCMC and Hanoi. China is the north neighbour and the French colonized Vietnam for a while. 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. Pretty much impossible, if you ask the Vietnamese themselves. I learned to partially speak many languages, I was never able to be totally fluent since once an emergency ended I returned home. This, compounded with the tones, can easily render one’s speech unintelligible or worse. I wonder whether they are similarly difficult to learn like Vietnamese. (Especially someone whose mother tongue is English, and not one of the 4, which would inevitably distort their perceptions of the other 3.). I'm not sure what you mean by Vietnamese sounds being less intuitive. I can speak Vietnamese, Chinese, French, Spanish, and English. Mandarin is like a breeze. Hải is hai (ocean/sea) Going back to China last year after 9 years, and my Chinese came flooding back – and people understood. Not sure if that description really fits in. Due to the roughly 1000-year period that Vietnam was a colony of China, Chinese had an enormous influence on the Vietnamese language. Of all the accents of people speaking English that I’ve hear, I’d say Vietnamese natives is the hardest to understand. Not impossible though but tones are everything. 十 -> thập (we got this from the Cantonese sap6) I think Vietnamese grammar isn’t very hard, it’s similar to English in some aspects. In addition, Vietnamese people are not capable of guessing what it is you want. We rather use bắc (Hồ Chí Minh is a good example), there’s a slight difference between these two words. These are obviously just approximation but they can get you pretty close. I’ll add it to that list of languages I want to learn someday but never probably will unless I end up living there. 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. I continue to plod along because my fiance is Vietnamese… , I think Europeans can definitely make Vietnamess tones haha. You can learn the various ways by watching ancient drama movies. 政治 -> chính trị I think it would help you learn Vietnamese as well. And unless you can get to grips with them, nearly everything else falls by the wayside. Of course, this makes the effort to learn the language frustrating – if nobody wants to talk to you, why bother to learn it? All are welcome, whether beginner or polyglot. That, however, is not the focus of this article. 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). But I think, Vietnamese speaking is the hardest part. But few words in Hà Nội still pronounced different like letter “L” can become “N”,Nokia will turn into Lokia. Basically no real grammar. This is a subreddit for anybody interested in the pursuit of languages. Here’s a real-life example of why this is so critical: a very common dish in Vietnam is phở bò tái—rare beef pho. Vietnamese has none of that. First off, in Vietnamese D(d) and Đ(đ) are two distinct letters. But in Vietnamese, you are not allowed to omit ‘you’/’I’. I’m Vietnamese speaker, and I’ve been learning English for nearly 10 years, Japanese for 3 months and Chinese for 1 month and I found the most difficult parts of these languages: Chinese writing, Japanese listening and English collocation and idioms. Russian. Food is generally fried in a hot wok in both countries and eaten with chopsticks. This posting is exactly right. I speak Spanish with a horrible accent. I know people who have been here 16 years, who speak perfectly to my ears, who still have Vietnamese people staring at them blankly when they try to converse with them. 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. However, I agree that if you want to get those sounds right, you need to practice with a coach. Its close relationship with Chinese is both a blessing and a curse, however. 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? And I am only 12. I can speak Vietnamese, Chinese, French, Spanish, and English. Thai took a while, but after one year, I managed to speak like a 6 year old, ”me like me no like’count to ten, tell time etc, I was able to be understood quite easily with my pigeon Thai / English as I traveled around doing development projects. Hands down. I definitely plan to stock up on these kinds of reference materials once I arrive in Saigon. I don’t think the blanket statement Mandarin is harder than Vietnamese applies. Sign up for the AllSet Learning Product Newsletter and find out what new Chinese learning projects John is working on. Sure they are trying but the tones never comes naturally when having conversation. And at least my teachers tell me I sound tonal when I speak, albeit with a somewhat pronounced Chinese accent. Is that also true for you guys? I would NOT recommend learning it if you only know English ( Beginners ). I did find a pretty cool dictionary, however: Từ Điển Thành Ngữ-Tục Ngữ Việt-Hán, 越汉成语俗语词典, by publisher Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Hoá Sài Gòn. It is hard! i went to 重庆 2 times and Hongkong once, but what a shame to my chinESE cos I just can ask for directions and order food, as one local says 他 可以说和听懂简单的汉语.Back to vietnamese,i think learners should learn Hanoi voice first as I think it is standard, I don’t remember what Chinese to me sounded like when I didn’t know it, but Vietnamese does sound very difficult phonologically. As for the tones, we are very forgiving and most of the time, the context will determine the meaning of the word anyway. But after a 3.5 month break (to have our second child) I arrived in Hanoi and realised I could barely be understood. There is one powerful step, however, that many Westerners avoid taking: learning Mandarin Chinese. I studied both languages in a very intensive environment, but when I recall my (much greater) proficiency in Chinese after the equivalent period spent learning Vietnamese, I can only cringe in shame at my Viet inadequacy. Vietnamese “r” theoretically should be pronounced as the rolling rr in Spanish, but no one I know does that, most pronounce it similar to the English r. In the North, people like to pronounce r as English z. I know that since I am Vietnamese-Chinese. However, people who already know that I can speak some Vietnamese have no trouble understanding me. 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. Each VILLAGE has its own dialect.. these differ dramatically as you go further up and down the coast!! If it’s a maternal uncle then it’s cậu, if it’s a maternal aunt then it’s either cô or dì if they are older and younger than your mother respectively. Its flaw is that it doesn’t provide definitions or examples of usage. As Guangning Tian said, Chinese to Vietnamese is like Latin to English. 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