Pimsleur - Albanian - Compact.zip 100.6 MB
Pimsleur - Arabic (Eastern) I.zip 303.3 MB
Pimsleur - Arabic (Egyptian) I.zip 151.9 MB
Pimsleur - Armenian (Eastern) - Compact.zip 227 MB
Pimsleur - Armenian (Western) - Compact.zip 235.8 MB
Pimsleur - Chinese (Cantonese) I.zip 222.3 MB
Pimsleur - Chinese (Mandarin) I.zip 151.4 MB
Pimsleur - Chinese (Mandarin) II.zip 171 MB
Pimsleur - Chinese (Mandarin) III.zip 150.9 MB
Pimsleur - Croatian - Compact.zip 193.2 MB
Pimsleur - Czech - Compact.zip 109.8 MB
Pimsleur - Danish - Compact.zip 189.7 MB
Pimsleur - Dutch - Compact.zip 41.9 MB
Pimsleur - Farsi - Compact.zip 59.4 MB
Pimsleur - French I.zip 232.2 MB
Pimsleur - French II.zip 229.3 MB
Pimsleur - French III.zip 145.5 MB
Pimsleur - German I.zip 357.3 MB
Pimsleur - German II.zip 536.6 MB
Pimsleur - German III.zip 547.9 MB
Pimsleur - German Plus.zip 145.6 MB
Pimsleur - Greek.zip 288.5 MB
Pimsleur - Haitian Creole - Compact.zip 201.6 MB
Pimsleur - Hebrew I.zip 213 MB
Pimsleur - Hindi - Compact.zip 74.9 MB
Pimsleur - Indonesian - Compact.zip 110.9 MB
Pimsleur - Irish - Quick & Simple.zip 92.6 MB
Pimsleur - Italian I.zip 200 MB
Pimsleur - Italian II.zip 194.7 MB
Pimsleur - Italian III.zip 201.4 MB
Pimsleur - Japanese I.zip 399.4 MB
Pimsleur - Japanese II.zip 569.2 MB
Pimsleur - Japanese III.zip 406.7 MB
Pimsleur - Korean - Compact.zip 197.6 MB
Pimsleur - Lithuanian - Compact.zip 257.1 MB
Pimsleur - Norwegian - Compact.zip 94.9 MB
Pimsleur - Ojibwe I.zip 382.4 MB
Pimsleur - Polish - Compact.zip 170.4 MB
Pimsleur - Portuguese (Brazilian) I.zip 383 MB
Pimsleur - Portuguese (Brazilian) II.zip 380.7 MB
Pimsleur - Portuguese (Brazilian) III.zip 353.1 MB
Pimsleur - Portuguese (Continental) - Compact.zip 108.3 MB
Pimsleur - Romanian - Compact.zip 114.6 MB
Pimsleur - Russian I.zip 360.2 MB
Pimsleur - Russian II.zip 444.5 MB
Pimsleur - Russian III.zip 449.5 MB
Pimsleur - Spanish I.zip 203.8 MB
Pimsleur - Spanish II.zip 332.2 MB
Pimsleur - Spanish III.zip 319.9 MB
Pimsleur - Spanish Plus.zip 103.1 MB
Pimsleur - Swahili - Compact.zip 111.9 MB
Pimsleur - Swedish - Compact.zip 174.6 MB
Pimsleur - Swiss German - Compact.zip 95.7 MB
Pimsleur - Thai - Compact.zip 165.7 MB
Pimsleur - Twi - Compact.zip 116 MB
Pimsleur - Ukrainian I.zip 352.6 MB
Pimsleur - Vietnamese - Compact.zip 110.5 MB

Vàng is gold but it also means the color yellow and in the case of hair it means blonde. Silver is bạc which also means money, as well as meager and ungrateful.  I guess that means that gold would make the better gift.  The hán-việt words for gold and silver are kim and ngân which together mean jewelry.  Kim loại means metals while kim cương means diamond (really hard metal).  Ngân hàng is another word you’re likely to see which means bank.

And when you compare the Mandarin language spoken today with the Chinese-derived words in either Japanese or Vietnamese you’ll find that the words in those two more closely resemble each other than their modern counterparts in Mandarin. This is because the Middle Chinese language spoken at the time the Japanese and Vietnamese were importing technology, culture, and vocabulary from the Chinese has changed a lot since becoming the Mandarin dialect spoken today in Beijing and taught all over China. The Middle Chinese language spoken back then in some cases more closely resembles Shanghainese or the Min dialect.

So when you look at a Việt-Hán dictionary and look at the Chinese-derived words at first they may seem dissimilar but then you will notice a pattern that corresponds to the difference between how the Vietnamese imported the original pronunciation of the Chinese and how that Chinese pronunciation changed into modern Mandarin. For example, Mandarin has less syllable endings than other Chinese dialects. In Vietnamese, all syllables end with either a voiceless stop (/k/, /p/, /t/) or a nasal (/n/, /m/, “ng”). Standard Korean has the same set of final consonants plus the flap “r”. Compare this to English where syllables can end in any consonant, not to mention consonant clusters. Mandarin Chinese only allows the two nasals /n/ and “ng” (we’ll forget about “er” for now). This is much reduced from Middle Chinese and it’s worth noting that Cantonese today as well as the Hakka dialect retains exactly the same endings as Vietnamese. In Japanese all syllables are open by the way they define syllables but for this discussion we can say that some syllables end in a nasal, which is always written using the N character but can be any nasal (/n/, /m/, “ng”) depending on the following syllable (likewise, you’ll notice in English that words with the prefix in- only occur when not followed by “b” or “p” in which case it is im- and the same principle applies in Japanese). Moreover, Japanese can actually have a stop when used between two other syllables if one syllable ends and the other begins with the same value. This puts the number of endings on par with Vietnamese and some Chinese dialects.

However, the words (morphemes) that were being imported from Middle Chinese were made up of single syllables. This fitted fine with Vietnamese but Japanese was more limited in the way the stops could be used to end syllables. So Chinese words that ended in a nasal became words in Japanese ending with “N” but those ending in a stop became two syllables in Japanese. And then in Mandarin those stops were dropped altogether. One example is “kingdom” as in the Middle Kingdom, the name all four countries use for China. In Vietnamese the word is “quốc” and in Japanese it is “koku” while in Mandarin it is “guo”, where the “g” is pronounced as an unaspirated /k/. They all begin the same but only Japanese and Vietnamese retain the “k” stop ending.

Sound correspondences

When looking for Chinese-derived words in Vietnamese and Japanese some conversion is necessary. In Mandarin words no longer begin with a nasal “ng” and so Vietnamese words which begin with this will have no initial consonant in Mandarin. In Japanese these words may begin with /g/. An example is “ngoại” which means outside (alternatively “ngoài”), “wài” in Mandarin, and “gai” in Japanese. Vietnamese words that start with the letter “d” will start with “y” in Mandarin reflecting the southern Vietnamese pronunciation of today’s “d” which differs from words beginning with “gi” in Vietnamese which may more closely respond with Northern Vietnamese pronunciation which today is /z/. Vietnamese words which begin with “nh” are transcribed in Pinyan, the system for writing Mandarin in Roman characters, as the letter “r”, which is very different from the English “r”. In Japanese these words begin with “n”. An example is the word for Japan which in Japanese is “nippon”, “nhật bản” in Vietnamese, and “ri ben” in Mandarin. Japanese, at the time of first contact with Chinese, didn’t yet have the “h” sound, rather it was a”p” and b, p, and h are rather like different forms of the same sound in Japanese. So the word for 100 is “bách” in Vietnamese, “băi” in Mandarin, and “hyaku” in Japanese. And the word for white is “bạch” in Vietnamese, “bái” in Mandarin, and “haku” in Japanese. Mandarin and Japanese don’t have the “kh” sound so “khách”, customer in Vietnamese, is “kè” (”k” is aspirated) in Mandarin, and “kyaku” in Japanese. A word similar to “feeling” is “khí” in Vietnamese, “qì” in Mandarin, and “ki” in Japanese.

So we see that sometimes “kh” corresponds to “q” and sometimes to “k”, and it seems to depend on the following vowel. For example, “khi” and “khu” often correspond to “qi” and “qu”. In Mandarin many initial consonants have changed depending on the following vowel sound. In English any consonant can be followed by any vowel. The languages like Japanese on the other hand have certain consonants that don’t precede certain vowels and instead are replaced by similar sounds which are considered basically equivalent in Japanese. For example “ch” precedes “i” and “ts” precedes “u” but is otherwise a “t”. Many Mandarin words that begin with the same letter in Vietnamese start with many different letters in Mandarin. So words beginning with “s” could be “sh”, “ch”, “zh”, and “t” corresponds with a number of letters including “z” like in the word for “word”, “tự”, “zì” in Mandarin and “ji” in Japanese. But “t” never corresponds with “t” in Mandarin, the aspirated /t/. However, “th”, the aspirated /t/ in Vietnamese can sometimes correspond with “sh” in Mandarin.

As mentioned earlier many endings that were dropped in Mandarin are retained in Vietnamese. But Vietnamese words that end in “nh” will end in “ng” in Mandarin, agreeing with the Northern Vietnamese pronunciation.

The “v” sound in Vietnamese is “w” or “y” in Mandarin. Neither Mandarin nor Japanese have the sound.

Other similarities

Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean are quite different languages, each belonging in a separate language family, with the latter two consisting as isolates. Linguists believe that Japanese and Korean are not related to any other languages in the world although many believe they may be related to each other. The reason they are all so similar in vocabulary is due to Chinese influence after each of these languages became a language. But besides vocabulary there are some other commonalities.

For one, all these languages use a system of classifiers which is relatively uncommon throughout the world’s languages. These classifiers must be used when referring to a number of things and objects are classified into classes such as people, books, flat things, round things, rolled up things, animals, and so on.

Another is that Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese don’t use pure pronouns although Mandarin today does. This means that there is no universal word for “you” or “I” and instead the word that is used depends on the relationship between the speaker and listener. In Vietnamese, pronouns are kinship terms and in Japanese they are part of its honorific system. The pronoun used can depend on if the listener is older or younger, male or female, or in a higher or lower position and the word to refer to yourself in one context can be a second person pronoun in another context. And in Japanese and Vietnamese a person’s name can be used in the first or second person. In English it would always be in the third person. Japanese and Vietnamese also have different words for brother and sister depending on if they are younger or older.

The English language has the words “green” and “blue” to distinguish between those two colors. However, our four languages each use a single word which can mean either green or blue, “ao” in Japanese, “xanh” in Vietnamese, “qīng” in Mandarin, and “pureu-da” in Korean. The people in these cultures originally did not distinguish blue and green as different colors but rather variants of the same color. However, many other non-Asian languages also have a single word for green and blue and sometimes even black and blue.

And also, as mentioned above, these languages are similar in regards to consonant clusters. English you will find up to three consonants in a row, e.g. “str” in “string”. But in our Asian languages no clustering of consonants is allowed, meaning each consonant must exist by itself.

Learning a new language is always easier when you know a similar language. So those who speak Vietnamese already should find that it’s easier to pick up Chinese or even Japanese just as an English-speaker will be able to pick up French relatively easily.

If you plan to do a lot of typing in Vietnamese then you should install some software. Many people prefer UniKey while others prefer VPSKeys. If you want to use UniKey then you will have to get through the set up in Vietnamese which takes just a few clicks but the Down and Out Of Saigon blog shows you what to click with screenshots. VPSKeys is also entirely in Vietnamese.

On the other hand WinVNKey is in English. All three programs have the same basic functionality and you can install and run all three at the same time to see which one you like. They stay in the taskbar and you can easily enable and disable them from there.

The programs support input in the three main input types which are Telex, VIQR, and VNI. The Down and Out Of Saigon blog also has a nice quick overview comparing the three.

Often on the Internet you will see raw VIQR as this is what people have been using before the Internet and its somewhat more legible than the others. I think it’s the easiest to learn and most Vietnamese use it today. Unfortunately, it requires hitting the shift key a lot. If you want to convert text written in VIQR you can use the VietUni online script here. Copy and paste in the text you want to convert into Unicode and then select the first pulldown that says Unicode and select VIQR then click Đối sang. This site also functions as a text editor to convert from TELEX, VNI, and VIQR as you type but as for pasting in text from elsewhere I couldn’t figure out how to convert anything besides VIQR. (This online script, VietUni, is available on many other sites so if this site is down just do a search.)

In fact, you can use scripts like the above to do all your Vietnamese typing without having to install any software. Others include Vietjie and MViet.

For details on the VIQR standard look here.

The Vietnamese Central Bank doubled the trading band from 1% to 2% where banks are allowed to trade the dong. But the government made another move as well. They have banned currency trading in currencies other than the US dollar. Before you could convert dongs into other major currencies like the euro or the Japanese yen which were convertible again into dollars but no more.

With banks no longer selling dollars, real estate down, the stock market in Vietnam the worst performing in the world, and gold selling at a premium with imports of gold now being suspended into Vietnam, what’s an investor to do? If you’re going to hold on to your dong you might so put in the bank at nearly 20% annual interest rates.

–

Last time on Vietnamese dong devaluation

All this after Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said that the government wasn’t going to devalue the currency.

The central bank last month boosted the base rate from 8.75 percent to 12 percent.
That means that those of us in Vietnam who are getting paid in US dollars just saw a 2% raise. 2% here or there can happen all the time but maybe this will just be the first raise in a series of raises by the Vietnamese government to devalue the Vietnamese dong. There is still a long way to go before matching the black-market rates or the non-convertible offshore forwards. Goldman Sachs thinks that dong is overvalued. Meanwhile Vietnam’s benchmark stock index has been falling for 25 straight sessions making it the worst performing stock market in the world.

The Foreign Service Institute of the Department (FSI) of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages based on the length of time it takes to achieve Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3) and Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3). The list is limited to languages taught at the Foreign Service Institute.
It must be kept in mind that that students at FSI are almost 40 years old, are native speakers of English. and have a good aptitude for formal language study, plus knowledge of several other foreign languages. They study in small classes of no more than 6. Their schedule calls for 25 hours of class per week with 3-4 hours per day of directed self-study.

For native English speakers all foreign languages are not equally difficult to learn. The Foreign Service Institute (Foreign Language Institute) has broken down the 60 some foreign languages they teach into three categories of difficulty. The first category has the 10 foreign languages that are easiest to learn for native English speakers. These languages are the Germanic languages closely related to English and the Romance languages, which like French, share much vocabulary with English. Although German is a Germanic language it doesn’t fit into the first category. They rate it as requiring 30 weeks of study whereas the other category one languages require 24.

Although they are not taught here I would assume that the Frisian languages, being the most closely related to Old English, would be easiest to learn but I may be wrong. Frisian is spoken by a small number of people in the Netherlands and Germany but whereas modern English vocabulary has been greatly influenced by French, Frisian has been greatly influenced by Dutch.

The third group of languages, Category 3 are some of the most influential languages in the world today: Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. Out of this group Japanese is said to be slightly more difficult to learn and the rest of the languages in category 3.

The rest of the languages fall into category 2. It’s interesting to note that Indonesian, Malaysian, and Swahili fall between category 1 and category 2 meaning they are actually easier to learn than most languages. However, they are harder to learn than the languages most American high school students learn, namely French and Spanish. So when students complain about the difficulty of learning those languages they should realize that most other languages are much more difficult!

Category 2 languages, languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English are approximately twice as hard to learn, taking twice as long to learn as category 1 languages. Vietnamese is a category 2 language although it is harder to learn than regular category 2 languages.

Category 3 languages are languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers and require twice as long to learn as category 2 languages and require one year of study in country.

Although this isn’t a post on learning the Vietnamese language it should be of interest to those foreigners in Saigon who are learning Vietnamese. Especially Americans. The Vietnam dong is one of the few currencies that has depreciated against the dollar. Right now Vietnam is experiencing a high inflation rate of around 25% and the government wants to keep exports to the US competitive by keeping the dong undervalued. But the official exchange rate is out of balance with the open market rate. In recent days a rate of 17,750 Vietnam dong to one US dollar have been seen on the black market. Yet if you go to the bank to exchange dollars for dongs you’d only get around one US dollar for every 16,100 dong.

Banks in Vietnam are allowed to trade the currency within a band of plus or minus 2% per day. But economists are forecasting that the Vietnam dong will continue to devalue against the dollar.

So what should people be holding, dollars or dongs? Right now if you have dongs you can open a savings account with an interest rate of up to 15% which is up from around 12% a few weeks ago after the government uncapped the rate banks are allowed to offer. But if you’re deposit is in dollars you will only get 6% which is unchanged from when interest rates were uncapped. So right now if you have $100 you will get 1,610,000 Vietnam dong and after one year in the bank you would have 1,851,500 dong. But if you instead put the $100 in the bank after one year you would have $106 which could be worth between 2,347,900 and 2,453,900. But that’s only if the government allows the dong to be devalued that much, nearly 40% in a year. But if the government only allows a change of 2 to 3% then it’s much better to have your money in Vietnam dong in a savings account earning 15%.

The Vietnamese alphabet is based on the French alphabet. According to Omniglot:

“During the 17th century, Roman Catholic missionaries introduced a Latin-based orthography for Vietnamese, Quốc Ngữ (national language),which has been used ever since. Until the early 20th century, Quốc Ngữ was used in parallel with Chữ-nôm. Today only Quốc Ngữ is used.”

As you can see a lot of it makes sense and corresponds with the French alphabet and its pronunciation but there are a few letters to be careful of. First, there are the three variations of the letter a: a, ă, â pronounced like ah, ah! (rising tone), u! (rising tone ớ). Secondly, there are two i’s, i “i ngắn” (short) and y “i dài” (long), also “i-cờ-rét” based on French “i grec”. Thirdly, the Vietnamese pronunciation of the letter h is neither English nor quite French. They pronounce it “hát” so the Vietnamese spelling of ch will sound like “say hat”. One last thing to be careful of in both of the Vietnamese and French alphabet’s are the letters g and j which in English are pronounced like “jee” and “jay” but are the opposite in Vietnamese and French. However, note that in the southern Vietnamese dialect they start with a y sound instead of the z sound. This also holds for the letters d and v which are both pronounced y in the South.

Is it Old English? A lost Germanic language closely related to English perhaps?  No, of course it’s Bislama, an urban English Creole based on a pidgin.  It’s spoken on the tiny archipelago of Vanuatu by 6200 native speakers (national motto “Long God yumi stanap”, “In God we stand) but many more in that region as a lingua franca. Vanuatu is also well known for being a tax haven and some filesharing companies are incorporated there, again because of favorable laws.

According to Wikipedia: More than 95% of Bislama words are of English origin; the remainder combines a few dozen words from French, as well as some vocabulary inherited from various languages of Vanuatu, essentially limited to flora and fauna terminology. While the influence of these vernacular languages is low on the vocabulary side, it is very high in the morphosyntax. Essentially speaking, Bislama can be described as a language with an English vocabulary and an Austronesian  grammar.