There's a fair amount of reading before you start the first lesson on the Foreign Services Institute Vietnamese course. Above all, the writer of the course stresses you must completely master one lesson before moving on to the next.
The first dialogue is as follows:
Chào ông. Ông mạnh giỏi không? Hello. Are you well?
Dạ mạnh, cám ơn ông. Còn ông? Fine, thank you. And you?
Dạ tôi cũng mạnh. I'm fine too.
Ông đi đău đó? Where are you going?
Tôi đi lại nhà ga. To the railroad station.
Vặi thì hay lắm. Tôi cũng đi lại nhà ga. Oh, that's great. I'm going to the railroad station too.
Pretty simple stuff right? Well, I'm going to do what the man says and learn it off by heart and be able to respond at normal talking speed to the man in the recording.
While I do this, on a side note I found a link for how long the Foreign Services Institute thinks it should take an average English speaker to master a language here.
Vietnamese? 1100 hours apparently - a Category II language. Not quite a Category III - Arabic and Mandarin - 2200 hours. But not a Category I either - French and Spanish, etc - ̉600 hours.
Still, to think that Vietnamese could be on a par with Polish? And that it's not considered the most difficult language for English speakers to master, not by a long shot? Very reassuring.
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