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

tl;dr:

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

Passive listening time I estimate at 500 additional hours, mostly not focused on the content. During those hours I'm usually cooking, cleaning, or running with something I already know (an episode I watched before, an audiobook of a chapter I’ve already read, etc) playing in my headphones.

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

Current level:

• Can follow the story of most anime in the battle fantasy genre without reading the manga beforehand, or using subtitles. This is my most developed domain.
• Can enjoy basically any manga for teenagers or younger audiences, sans dictionary. Unknown words still happen all the time but for some reason they’re not the obstacle they used to be.
• Once an episode or two, understand every word of an entire scene + the vibes.
• Can navigate independently in no/low-english regions of Vietnam and succeed with confidence in high-context interactions such as paying for things, asking for directions in stores, understanding instructions when someone is asking me to lend them a hand, or small talk. In particular, I’ve hypertrophied the “why do you know Vietnamese” small talk tree, because a lot of people lead me down that one. (I don’t live in Vietnam, just visited.)
• In low-context interactions, where a native speaker can bring up any topic at any time, I’m lost. This milestone, “conversational”, is still way off. Last post, I pegged it at 1250 hours. Now, I predict it will come at 4000 hours.

Rejected Strategies:

• Apps (too boring)
• Grammar explanations (too boring)
• Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)
• Studying explanations of the sound system (invariably misleading)
• Tone perception drills (too evil)
• Content made for language learners (maximum boring)
• Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)

Reflection on last update:

The main thing I’d correct about my last update is my assessment of conversational ability. For some reason at 530 hours, I believed I was having relaxed conversations about a variety of topics with my tutor.

Today my assessment of my conversational ability is far worse. I am an ape.

Methods:

I’m currently gunning hard on improving comprehension, and try to keep a daily routine that provides the necessary nutrients.

But also, I get bored easily, so I have a wide variety of activities and a huge library of content and just do what I feel like that day. This is my set:

• Step through videos with whisper-ai subtitles (or (super rarely, when available) actual viet cc) and zoopdog hover dictionary in asbplayer. Satisfies: Introduces new vocab, improves listening accuracy (being skeptical of whisper-ai and listening for my own interpretation seems to help a lot; whisper is worse than my ears at this point but knows more words)
• Read ebooks with zoopdog. Satisfies: Introduces new vocab
• Listen to audio books of stuff I read already with zoopdog. Satisfies: Improves listening comprehension
• Read manga with no dictionary. Satisfies, surprisingly: Improves listening comprehension. (I find that improved reading speed transfers to improved listening comprehension speed)
• Read manga with dictionary. Satisfies: introduces new vocab
• Anki audio-only sentence cards. Satisfies: Improves listening accuracy

Time Breakdown:

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

Since last post, I dug into my old im messages, calendar events, and youtube history to figure out the categories of my first hours.

• 57% listening (567h56m)
• 35% reading (352h52m)
• 7% conversation (65h56m)
• 1% anki audio sentence recognition cards (13h34m)

Pros/cons of my methods:

On the pro side:

• Vietnamese speakers are consistently shocked I can understand them well.
• Vietnamese speakers are consistently shocked they can understand me well.
• My methods are hyper-custom to my interests and I am not tired at all. I will make it to 2040.

On the con side:

• This is a breadth-first marathon approach, unfit for someone whose goals are more practical than artistic fluency, like asking in-laws whether they’re healthy during each annual visit.
• Occasionally it’s lonely to focus so much on comprehension and not have conversations using the language. Extroverts would probably suffer. I just really hate being in a conversation where the other person is accommodating me (as tutors do), and since my plan is twenty years long, I procrastinate.

Recommendations

I'm not yet fluent so I have no qualifications to give advice. My next update, which I'll write at 1500 hours, may contain different opinions.

That said, my views now are:

• All the pain is front-loaded. Every month is easier than the last because content gets more engaging.
• The written alphabet is a lie used to calm the existential anxieties of Vietnamese school children who can’t handle anarchy. There is no dialect of Vietnamese whose relationship to the written system is internally consistent. Trust only your ears.
• Tones don’t exist. Only vowels exist. ơ and ở are just different vowels.
• When listening, stay with the current word. It may be tempting to hold some word you almost made out in your auditory memory and try to recall its meaning, but 1. that’s exhausting 2. you’re missing the rest of the sentence and 3. that’s not the mental act you need to practice in order to understand speech in real time. Instead, stay with the current word and let the half-recalled words fade. Eventually, when you know the words better, full impressions of their meaning will emerge in real-time.

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