Not as hard as they sound. When two vowels are sitting next to each other, e.g. hai, thôi, người, and so on, you just blend 'em all together.
In reality it's a lot more complicated than this but as a beginner this is pretty much what I picked up and it's a pretty good rule of thumb.
For some reason the Foreign Services Institute breaks up diphthongs into four groups - I'm not sure what purpose this serves. Maybe we'll find out later on.
Group 1 = syllables ending in 'ai', 'ui' and 'oi' sound variants
Group 2 = syllables ending in 'ua', 'ong', 'oc' and 'iet' sounds
Group 3 = syllables ending in 'iu', 'au', 'ao' and 'u' sounds
Group 4 = syllables ending in 'oy, 'oa', 'an', 'at', 'uy' and 'uyen' sounds
The writer of the course really freaks out about Group 4 syllables and how intense they are. He says all the other diphthongs 'glide' to another vowel, but Group 4 ones start with a glide. He writes an entire page about it.
I don't get the problem. You move from one vowel sound to another, so what? Who cares what you glide from and to?
I'm probably such a noob I can't hear the differences yet.
What I'm getting from all this is that of all languages I've encountered before, it seems as though pronunciation is the most important for Vietnamese. You may be able to bumble and mumble your way through English and be understood well enough, but Vietnamese pronunciation is so subtly nuanced that you could really stuff up if you don't pay attention to it.
Think about it: in a word like 'institution' you really stretch out all the sounds into a multi-syllablic word. I just looked it up in Vietnamese - one synonym is sự lặp. What a difference. It seems like in Vietnamese you really cram all the sounds of the language into tiny little syllables.
I'm really starting to like this language. It seems like nothing else on earth!
In reality it's a lot more complicated than this but as a beginner this is pretty much what I picked up and it's a pretty good rule of thumb.
For some reason the Foreign Services Institute breaks up diphthongs into four groups - I'm not sure what purpose this serves. Maybe we'll find out later on.
Group 1 = syllables ending in 'ai', 'ui' and 'oi' sound variants
Group 2 = syllables ending in 'ua', 'ong', 'oc' and 'iet' sounds
Group 3 = syllables ending in 'iu', 'au', 'ao' and 'u' sounds
Group 4 = syllables ending in 'oy, 'oa', 'an', 'at', 'uy' and 'uyen' sounds
The writer of the course really freaks out about Group 4 syllables and how intense they are. He says all the other diphthongs 'glide' to another vowel, but Group 4 ones start with a glide. He writes an entire page about it.
I don't get the problem. You move from one vowel sound to another, so what? Who cares what you glide from and to?
I'm probably such a noob I can't hear the differences yet.
What I'm getting from all this is that of all languages I've encountered before, it seems as though pronunciation is the most important for Vietnamese. You may be able to bumble and mumble your way through English and be understood well enough, but Vietnamese pronunciation is so subtly nuanced that you could really stuff up if you don't pay attention to it.
Think about it: in a word like 'institution' you really stretch out all the sounds into a multi-syllablic word. I just looked it up in Vietnamese - one synonym is sự lặp. What a difference. It seems like in Vietnamese you really cram all the sounds of the language into tiny little syllables.
I'm really starting to like this language. It seems like nothing else on earth!
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