天美麻豆

ChrisFox wrote:

For beginners there is a great set of videos on YouTube, enter "learn Vietnamese Annie" and you'll find them.

Wow this is a great resource. Annie is funny and makes it interesting to understand.

Thanks

Amy_Duong wrote:

- S峄璦 - repair: s峄璦 ch峄璦

s峄璦 ch峄痑, no?

I've always wondered why Vietnamese doubles up words like this.聽 I call them fix-fix pairs.聽 To l峄沶 is another.聽 Two words that mean basically the same thing glommed together in a compound word.

Good_Man wrote:

ChrisFox wrote:

For beginners there is a great set of videos on YouTube, enter "learn Vietnamese Annie" and you'll find them.

Wow this is a great resource. Annie is funny and makes it interesting to understand.

Thanks

NP.  She's great, the explanations are very clear and the videos are brief, you can watch them several times without getting bored.  #24 told me about the c贸 phải construction which I had never run across.

For those like me who learn best from books, this is far and away the best one I have ever run across:  "Chung Ta Noi" in case the moderators wipe it out. 

My hearing is not good, I'm not at hearing-aid level but I miss a lot of distinctions, like I can't tell t- from th- to save my life.  The Annie video with a piece of paper made it clear.

Amy_Duong wrote:

Yeah, you're right; " sửa chữa"
Eventhough, some words have the same meaning but they create different feeling - expression.
Fix-fix pairs are good for writting & usually, i dont use too many of them in daily talk, just too " sến" lol
To lớn, i guess still have a similar fix - fix pairs: " lớn lao".

I think it's actually pretty cool.  I've learned several languages (forgotten most of them but oh well) and every language seems to slice up the world in slightly different ways.  What's really strange is having learned one new language to then look back at your own and see things you have never noticed before, like how very odd the superfluous "did" is in English ("Did you eat yet?"), or that "can" has no infinitive.  Russian and German sharpened up my English because I became so conscious of verb conjugation.  Vietnamese has me thinking about who I am talking to .. of course we have only "you" but German has du / Sie / ihr, and Vietnamese has .. Jesus .. con, em, c么, anh, chị, cậu, bạn ... bả and 么ng!  How do you know which to use?  I have a really hard time calling someone only a few months younger than me "em."

ChrisFox wrote:

I know two kinds of expats here: those who make no effort to learn the language and those to whom not learning it would never cross their minds.  Most seem to be in the first group though I know one man who abruptly decided to take the plunge and is now actively studying. 

I started before moving here, continued here, then got discouraged and dropped out for about a year.  Now I'm back into it.  On the one hand I forgot a lot of words, on the other hand my comprehension is picking up fast and I can read anything but a newspaper, and when talking with someone I know it no longer sounds like gibberish, though there are still a lot of words go by too fast.

You really need to practice.  Weekly lessons aren't enough.  Making lists of translations isn't enough. 

Problem in Cần Thơ is that people come from everywhere and sound so different from each other.  With my neighbor I can talk about abstractions; with the guy who does our house repairs, I can barely tell he's speaking Vietnamese. 

Friends and I meet a few nights a week at Trung Nguy锚n at Big C, anyone interested in forming a group?  Both Vietnamese and westerners.

Yes, the secret to learning any new language is Immersion.  If I was in Cần Thơ, I'd love to join you.

cang_nduc wrote:

Vincent and I are planning to back CT this month.

Cool.

You guys can stay at the house and save the hotel fees.

khanh44 wrote:

How you refer to someone gets more complicated when your fiance is the niece of your cousin in-law. So now in her presence I refer her uncle as cau bay but not in her presence I refer to him as anh and my cousin who I used to call chi Thuy is now called mo bay. And the list goes on for the rest in the family all having different name references based on my fiance's presence or not.

When in doubt, use the more/higher respected term.聽

I think it's an interesting phenomenon that the Southern Vietnamese use their order of birth as a "name" to call each other.聽 People rarely use their legal given names.聽

So like....

"Hey Two, what's up?"
"No much Three, I'm just chilling.聽 You hear from Five yet?"
"Yah, he went fishing with Six and Eight"

Almost sounds like a baseball team.

Wild_1 wrote:

I will be in Can Tho shortly.聽 I speak fluent English and Vietnamese.聽 CAN I run with your pack?

when? i'll save u a beer )

Wild_1 wrote:

I will be in Can Tho shortly.聽 I speak fluent English and Vietnamese.聽 CAN I run with your pack?

We don't have a pack, we have a herd.聽 Or maybe a pride, a leap, a pandemonium, a gaggle, a congress, a smack, a deceit, or, my personal favorite, a murder.聽

I think pandemonium (parrots) is the best fit.

Language breakthrough.聽 Closing the lips on terminal consonants.聽 I don't hear the difference, not even inside my own skull, but everyone else does. I say t峄憈 just like always, but close lips, making it labial but not plosive, and I'm better understood.

Chris, that's a damned good tip. Thanks for that.