How about some light humor this weekend for those studying foreign languages. Russel Peters is an Indian Canadian comedian from Toronto who often jokes about other ethnicities. In this act Russell peters talks about Vietnamese speaking English, funny Vietnamese restaurant names, and the name of Vietnam’s national currency, the dong.
Russell Peters talking about Chinese […]
I said before how it’s useful to learn a foreign language by reading material in your mother tongue and the foreign language at the same time. It helps if the subject matter is interesting. I just learned that the Vietnamese government’s visa extension website for overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) has finally been translated […]
Some things I’ve noticed about Vietnamese vowels in the Saigon dialect:
‘u’ is like the pure vowel in European languages but can be closer to ‘o’. To me it sounds more like ‘u’ when the final sound is a stop t/c/p then when it’s an open vowel ending word so for example ngủ sounds closer to […]
Many people who learn Vietnamese will learn or will want to learn the Vietnamese of the northern dialect (Hanoi) but when they encounter people from the South there may be some confusion such as with the way some tones and vowels are pronounced. Here are some things I have noticed at least among some […]
If you’ve ever used any speech recognition software you’ll know that the state of the art in this field is still far from perfect, far from the performance of a real human being. Even with big players like IBM and Microsoft, with the latter including speech recognition in its Vista operating system, speech recognition […]
It is now the new year in Vietnam, Tết Nguyên Đán, Feast of the First Morning. It is a huge holiday celebrated for several days and much time is spent with family making it somewhat of a lonely time for foreigners in Vietnam. However, everybody, Happy New Year!
In Vietnamese they would say Chúc Mừng Năm […]
I find that I can learn a language much more rapidly once I’m able to read in that language because it allows you to subconsciously pick up grammar and contextual vocabulary and you can sometimes pick up the meaning of a word you don’t already know without having to look it up in a dictionary. […]
On spelling Vietnamese there is one more language hack I wanted to mention:
since ơ and â are basically longer in shorter versions of the same vowel and so are i and y you will only find ơ and i paired together and â and y paired together. Long plus short and short plus long. […]
Language hack:
Spelling Vietnamese is difficult. It’s difficult because it’s hard to understand and differentiate between vowels and it’s difficult because there are many ways to write the same consonant sound. For example, in the south of Vietnam they pronounce gi, d, and v the same — as y. There are some tricks […]
Here’s a tip for learning foreign languages. To make classes or lessons, even when self-taught, go by much quicker and more easily you should have the vocabulary down. That way when you’re reading something you don’t get caught up trying to either figure out the meaning or look it up. Instead you […]
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