tl;dr: entry to the fun stage of learning, and an intuition for the scale of the task

All tracked time is active, 100% focused on the task at hand.

Passive listening time I estimate at 600 additional inattentive hours. I don't really do this anymore.

Starting from: English monolingual beta

Current strategy: Consume fiction

Long-term goal: D1 fluency and a paid original fiction publication by 2040

Past updates:

• 530 hours
• 1000 hours

Current level:

• Can watch movies and television in a few genres in Vietnamese without subtitles and follow the plot and all the dialogue in 3/5 scenes. These genres are romance and fantasy war. When I don't understand a sentence, I can usually explain why. Like I know which words I didn't understand.
• Can watch lectures on topics of interest in Vietnamese and understand enough to hold my attention. In terms of word coverage it's like 70% or 80% so I'm missing a huge amount but it's still fun.
• Finished my first novel in Vietnamese with dictionary, at a comprehension level I could actually enjoy. It was Cô Nàng Cửa Hàng Tiện Ích by Sayaka Murata, translated by An Vy, which I'd read in English already.
• Can talk with tutors about non-special domains. Gossip is okay, plots of shows and books are good topics, but nothing too specific like recipes, history, economics, law, etc. This is not replicable with non-tutors.

Rejected Strategies:

• Apps (too boring)
• Grammar explanations (too boring)
• Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)
• Content made for language learners (maximum boring)
• Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)

Previously rejected strategies that became useful

• Studying explanations of the sound system: In A Vietnamese Reference Grammar, which I read the sound system chapter of, I learned that some tones (most notably dấu hỏi and dấu ngang) completely change based on their position in the sentence. dấu ngang is often described as a "flat" tone but actually it drops in pitch the fastest of any tone when it's got heavy stress at the end of a pause group, and also these pause groups are grammatically predictable, though probabalistic. This is something no tutor or native speaker I know of has ever said, but it explained a lot of anomalies I was hearing, both in my listening practice and out of my own mouth. Cheers to the linguists.
• Perception drills: in the beginning these were absolutely useless and evil, but after I got to the point where only a few stubborn vowel clusters remained which I still struggled to distinguish, a few sessions of minimal pair training provided value.

Reflection on last update:

The main thing that's different now versus at 1000 hours is how much more fun learning the language is. I can read literature and experience entire passages (rarely full pages, never full chapters) without needing to look anything up. This experience of the language is so much fuller than it was at the word level, or even the sentence level. I get the faintest hints of speakers' and writers' personalities coming through in their grammar and diction.

Interviews are harder to follow, but I think by 2000 hours I'll be able to just casually put on a Vietcetera interview with an author or translator and enjoy what they have to say.

This is, I think, the fabled "crossing over point" for first-time adult language learners where there is no more doubt.

As far as my conversational ability goes, it must be better than it was 500 hours ago, like logically that must be the case, but it continues to feel worse. My estimate of 4000 hours for being comfortably conversational is looking pretty spot on about now.

Methods:

A big change in my methods after last update is that I now follow a schedule. I used to worry every day about whether I'd have time after work to practice Vietnamese. To fix that I now put in two hours every day before work, with this routine:

• Anki audio-only sentence card review (15m): This is the best exercises for my listening ability I've found. Basically I hear the sentence, transcribe it in my head and understand the meaning, then check my transcription and understanding by flipping the card. I attribute my strong listening development to this immediate-feedback practice. It was inspired by what I read in the book Peak about efficient language learners.
• Intensive listening (30m): I step through a show with subtitles. I find lots of dubs with matching subs on Netflix (Analog Squad, Ready Set Love, Business Proposal, Our Beloved Summer, etc). If I find a sentence with ONE (exactly one) unknown word, I use asbplayer to send it to my anki deck, with original audio, with one click. An addon called Intellifiller uses gpt4 api to add an English translation on the back for me, which is almost always correct. Note about Viet subs on Netflix: there's a secret hidden Viet sub track on most dubs, that matches word for word, which you can find by setting audio to Viet, refreshing, then setting the subs to Viet.
• Extensive listening (30m): I watch a show without subtitles. This is usually a show I've studied before intensively, or one I've watched in English, or some tv soap I couldn't possibly get confused by. I often repeat dense stuff a few days in a row.
• Intensive Reading (45m): I read a novel with dictionary and repeatedly read sentences or passages as necessary to grok.

After work, if I feel like it and have time, I'll extensively read manga or extensively watch a Vietnamese show.

Time Breakdown:

I use atracker on iOS since it's got a quick interface on apple watch.

• 58% listening (865h09m)
• 32% reading (483h50m)
• 6% conversation (91h34m)
• 4% anki audio sentence recognition cards (61h39m)

Pros/cons of my methods:

On the pro side:

• My vocab and comprehension are beefed according to my tutors.
• My speech is clear enough. When I'm not understood in conversation, it's almost always because I've said ungrammatical nonsense or used the wrong words rather than pronunciation issues.

On the con side:

• If I had more output practice, chorusing practice, that kind of thing, it's possible that would improve my perception when listening and reading, improve my ability to notice what I need. But I just don't like that stuff very much and I'm content to let it arrive late.

On the idk side:

• Without explicit speech instruction, I've picked up sounds from all dialects of Vietnamese. All tutors I have spoken with have pointed this out and said it was odd, but not a problem.

Other thoughts:

In my last update, I noted as a con that my methods may not be as efficient as some hypothetical "practical" way to learn that could get someone through daily interactions. Since then, I've become skeptical that such a method exists, or that if it does it could get any mileage outside a classroom setting. The amount of hours of sustained, regular practice it took me to reliably recognize common words like "đang" as spoken by a variety of speakers suggests to me that there is no shortcut. Or I have a learning disability.

Recording

Last time there was a request for this so I'm including a recording. I don't practice pronunciation outside of reading or chatting, so this isn't offered as impressive results of the method; it's honest.

Here's me reading an excerpt from Giáo Sư và Công Thức Toán by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Lương Việt Dũng: recording.

Recommendations

I'm not yet fluent so I have no qualifications to give advice. My next update, which I'll write at 2000 hours, may contain different opinions.

That said, my advice for Vietnamese learners now is:

• All the pain is front-loaded. Your early days will be the worst part of the experience. It only gets better. Long before fluency, the experience of learning can become one of the best and most rewarding parts of your daily life.
• Choose intervals to assess your progress and otherwise forget about it. Build a system of habits, and let the question of eventual fluency fade from your thoughts. The system will take care of it for you. If you practice with a good system every day, it can't not happen. That's as much a fact as that things thrown up will eventually fall down.
• Relax! Nothing that you don't understand is urgent. No error in your output is urgent. A time will come when it's productive to consult the linguists, and that time will be when you're relaxed, when you've noticed a pattern you want a hint at understanding, but can accept not understanding it if you're not ready. The patience game here has a steep learning curve. It can be hard when approaching a language with a sound system this complex (and multiple of them) to accept that after a year or whatever of study you still can mistake "hello good morning" for a totally different phrase. But it does arrive eventually.
• As a language learner, you are always a descriptive linguist. If native speakers say it that way, that's how it's said.
• Content by and for native speakers or bust. Even from the start.

Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 500 more hours!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a9ND-3zzufZxapFwLf-UOf1srZ-ct418ex4Fi7r4nks/edit?usp=sharing

If you have any ideas about how to make it better please let me know

I've finally found a suitable dictionary; it even provides examples and etymology, especially when the word is of Chinese origin.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page

Hi all - I posted a couple of months back because I need some participants to test my Vietnamese language learning app prototype. I am just a lowly bootcamp student, not a real app developer, so I'm not looking to make any money, just looking to graduate. I finished testing for lo-fidelity screens - now I need 5 new participants for the hi-fidelity prototype.

Here's the participant criteria:

1. Have 30-45 free minutes in the next week.

2. Are a non-heritage learner strongly interested in or actively learning the Vietnamese language

3. Are more interesting in learning Vietnamese for communal, domestic reasons (i.e. a romantic partner or friends as opposed to travel or diplomacy).

4. Are especially interested in learning a Southern or Central accent (northern not excluded, just not as much of my target demographic).

Please comment or DM for info. I prefer to do a video less Zoom call, but I know redditors are strict about anonymity, so I am open to doing a live chat. I do not, however, want to "send you a script that you can fill out and send back to me." For the purposes of this test, I need feedback to be in realtime.

Thanks in advance!

https://learnvietnamesewithannie.com/

It's the only resource I know that teaches Vietnamese in Vietnamese, so you can actually listen and learn

She offers a subscription for 12 bucks a month and has content for all levels

This just inspired me to learn more Vietnamese, I was loosing motivation because of the lack of resources, a lot of stuff out there is either for absolute beginners or natives , and it's impossible to make that jump

Hi all, I'm a beginner and doing self-study with various resources so excuse me if this question is misinformed.

In Duolingo it is taught that asking a question like "Are you a doctor?" follows the formula:

"Bạn là bác sĩ phải không?"

I've been watching Tiếng Việt videos on VTV7's Youtube channel, and the teacher says at one point a sentence that ends in: "đừng không nào", which my captions program translated as "... , right?"

So is there a difference between saying:

"Bạn là bác sĩ đừng không nào?"

and

"Bạn là bác sĩ phải không?"

Cảm ơn mọi người!

This is an aside to my first post on this sub. Over the past few weeks, I have created a new Anki deck that attacks a lot of my personal struggles with learning Vietnamese. Here is some context:

I've learned Japanese to a surprising level with the help of one specific Anki Deck: The Core 2k/6k Optimized Japanese Vocabulary deck. I believe the reason this deck in specific was so influential to my learning is because it contains Example Sentences with Native Audio. I have been struggling so much finding a Vietnamese anki deck that has not only native audio, but also example sentences. I believe that incorporating example sentences into your Anki Cards is one of the quickest ways to learn a language. It circumvents a lot of studying you would need to do otherwise, such as grammar, conjugation, and contextual learning. With other language decks, I often find that I know a lot of words for active recall, however, I never know what their relationship is to each other or how they can be used in a sentence. The Core 2k/6k deck solves so many of these internal nuances without me even realizing. I did minimal grammar studying, some reading, and lots of content consuming. This got me to about N5 level without much effort. I was able to go to Japan and have extensive conversations with locals who understood what I was saying, and I understood what they were saying.

I've created an Anki Deck for Vietnamese that replicates the Core 2k/6k deck, but even better. Như Bình Ngô, PhD Professor from Harvard, has written a very well laid out text book called Elementary Vietnamese. It even comes with an accompanying website thanks to Tuttle Publishing. This website has 14 sets of flashcards, each card containing Viet word, Translation, and 2-4 example sentences. The site also hosts the native audio track from Chú Ngô. I was able to splice together an Anki Deck that utilizes both the native audio, as well as the flash cards. The deck starts out relatively easy, then increases with difficulty over time. I find this a very important hallmark of a good Anki language deck.

I have covered 7 of the 14 flashcards sets and turned them into an easily accessible Anki deck that can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h2hm1FJsyDLO9lgH8or8pQG84OPu0ddV/view?usp=sharing

I plan to finish the other 7 sets in the comings weeks, but I really wanted to share. With this deck and by consuming more Viet content, I've been able to expand my comprehension quite a bit. I've even been able to have some conversations in Viet with some of the native students at my University. I hope that this deck is as useful to you all as it is to me.

Mod(s), please remove if not allowed, struggling.

I'm learning Vietnamese because of my spouse - this has inspired my final project for UX. My husband has exhausted his friend's circle for this user type: the romantic partner of someone who is Vietnamese (and therefore interested in or currently trying to learn Vietnamese).

If you are interested in testing a prototype for this, please let me know! And if not, good luck to you, especially if your partner is from Hue.

EDIT: Many have asked if I can just send them the screens and they can leave comments, but I have a strong preference for calls (not video, just voice). I know many redditors prefer a strict anonymiinity, so if that's you, this might not be the user test for you.

If it comes down to it and I can't get enough real-time participants, then I may open it up for asynchronous testing, but from a UX testing perspective, the data isn't as rich. I'm not trying to dox anyone, so please don't be rude to me or assume I'm trying to do something shady. I'm not forcing anybody to do anything they don't want to do.

Hi all,

I'm finishing up a User Experience bootcamp, and my capstone will be a language learning app. The easiest way to describe the premise is "the app I wish I had when I was dating and engaged to my Vietnamese-American husband." Obviously, the pitfalls of Duolingo have been majorly explored here.

The target demographic is either Viet Kieu*/Vietnamese trying to improve their Vietnamese for family contexts and/or their romantic partners looking to do the same (i.e. you're interacting with Vietnamese Americans or other groups whose language and culture is quite different from those in mainland Vietnam). It would take into account the need for a typically southern (or central) dialect, different terminology...etc.

If you are interested in setting up a brief 30-min interview about your experiences/desires/needs in this sphere, please shoot me a message.

If you miss the interview window and want to help beta test with the mockup, you can also shoot me a DM. Thanks in advance!

*I hope this term doesn't offend anyone, I'm just trying to be inclusive while distinguishing the context from mainland Vietnamese