You know what? I think I was just in a bad mood yesterday - a raging Father's Day hangover probably wasn't helping.
I've come to the conclusion that I was simply over-thinking Vietnamese pronunciation.
Yesterday I was loath to start on Vietnamese tone sequences, but guess what? Not that bad. Not bad at all.
For the first time the Foreign Services Institute's Vietnamese course has started using real phrases - and spoken Vietnamese is nowhere near as challenging as I thought it would be. Sure, the pronunciation of everything is slightly different, and there are all these wacky tones, but it all seems to come together nicely.
As it turns out, Vietnamese is a beautifully musical language. Think about it: in the Western world we have seven notes in our musical octave. Well, this language has five notes and it basically sounds like a constant song. What a pleasant discovery.
The purpose of the tone sequences part of the course is to try and get you to picture what all the separate tones sound like strung together in a sentence or phrase. It runs through each of the possible combinations in a two-syllable phrase, and then a three-syllable phrase.
So you start off with two Tone 1 words next to each other, then a Tone 1 and Tone 2, then 2-1, then 1-3 and so on. It actually makes a lot of sense when you hear it and arguably more sense than trying to teach the tones separately. It's not like the tones actually change when combined with other tones - you just sort of blend them together. Much like the words 'blend' and together' sound slightly different on their own than if you were to say the phrase 'blend together', where the 'd' and the 't' sort of mix.
What's probably making Vietnamese a bit easier is I'm getting used to all these crazy sounds and they're actually starting to sound normal.
I've made another discovery: I need to work out how to 'Vietnamise' my keyboard so that I can type the extra Vietnamese letters with all the squiggles without having to copy and paste from another text.
Only three tapes to go in the pronunciation. Crikey what else could there possibly be?
I can also proudly brag I'm about 10% of the way through the course! All in four days... so does that mean basic Vietnamese will take me forty days? That would be wicked.
I've come to the conclusion that I was simply over-thinking Vietnamese pronunciation.
Yesterday I was loath to start on Vietnamese tone sequences, but guess what? Not that bad. Not bad at all.
For the first time the Foreign Services Institute's Vietnamese course has started using real phrases - and spoken Vietnamese is nowhere near as challenging as I thought it would be. Sure, the pronunciation of everything is slightly different, and there are all these wacky tones, but it all seems to come together nicely.
As it turns out, Vietnamese is a beautifully musical language. Think about it: in the Western world we have seven notes in our musical octave. Well, this language has five notes and it basically sounds like a constant song. What a pleasant discovery.
The purpose of the tone sequences part of the course is to try and get you to picture what all the separate tones sound like strung together in a sentence or phrase. It runs through each of the possible combinations in a two-syllable phrase, and then a three-syllable phrase.
So you start off with two Tone 1 words next to each other, then a Tone 1 and Tone 2, then 2-1, then 1-3 and so on. It actually makes a lot of sense when you hear it and arguably more sense than trying to teach the tones separately. It's not like the tones actually change when combined with other tones - you just sort of blend them together. Much like the words 'blend' and together' sound slightly different on their own than if you were to say the phrase 'blend together', where the 'd' and the 't' sort of mix.
What's probably making Vietnamese a bit easier is I'm getting used to all these crazy sounds and they're actually starting to sound normal.
I've made another discovery: I need to work out how to 'Vietnamise' my keyboard so that I can type the extra Vietnamese letters with all the squiggles without having to copy and paste from another text.
Only three tapes to go in the pronunciation. Crikey what else could there possibly be?
I can also proudly brag I'm about 10% of the way through the course! All in four days... so does that mean basic Vietnamese will take me forty days? That would be wicked.
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