Vietnamese Language Aids

Vietnamese Language Aids Vietnamese
Language for Travelers

Along with architecture, laws and cuisine, the modern Vietnamese language reflects the influence of people who settled, invaded and colonized Vietnam over the past two thousand years. Because of their regional domination for many centuries, the Chinese had a particularly powerful impact on the Vietnamese language, and many words are of Chinese origin. For several centuries, a Chinese alphabet was used by scholars and aristocrats.
Modern Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, meaning that all words are only one syllable long. Like Thai, Vietnamese is tonal, meaning that a rising or falling tone changes the meaning of the word. Since most Western languages use tone to emphasize an underlying meaning, interpretation, or emotion (e.g., angry, doubtful, sarcastic, flamboyant, flirtatious, hesitant, etc.) tonal languages like Vietnamese are particularly difficult for Westerners to learn.
Since English is taught in all Vietnamese schools, you will have fewer communications problems than you might expect. Your high school French may also come in handy. Failing that, there’s always charades. You will find most Vietnamese patient, tolerant, and willing to do what they can to communicate with you.
If you plan an extended tour (especially outside Saigon or Hanoi) or plan to live in Vietnam, you should strongly consider taking a class or even buying language tapes. We have reviewed and recommend the self-study programs below.

Get Serious About Learning Vietnamese
Anyone planning to travel extensively in Vietnam, take up residence there, or do business with Vietnamese trade partners should consider "Vietnamese Volume 1" from Audio-Forum above all other recorded programs. This 18-tape, 15½ hour self-study program was developed for use by the United States Diplomatic Service. Includes a 321 page text. Unlike practically every other taped language course we evaluated, Audio Forum's program spent many sessions on correct pronunciation before launching into vocabulary. Short of a class or tutor, Audio Forum's impressive program is probably the most comprehensive Vietnamese language training available. You can purchase yours online.

You can use your computer to learn Vietnamese!
A Little Vietnamese (from Grisser Software) runs on any PC with a sound card or headphones and a CD-ROM drive, and makes Vietnamese easy and fun to learn. Includes language lessons, drills, exercises, spoken conversations, a talking electronic dictionary, games, 75 sets of flash cards, exercises, pictures and sounds. Native speakers provide correct pronunciation while you see the words on your screen. You can sample many of the features of this fabulous program on the publisher's website.
Also Worth Mentioning . . .

"You get what you pay for" applies to recorded language courses, just as it does to many other products. We evaluated Language/30 Vietnamese and Routledge's Colloquial Vietnamese and found them poor by comparison to the two products mentioned above. Both include two cassette tapes and a companion text and cost under US$35. Both are little more than a drill of increasingly-complex sentences, which the listener is supposed to mimic.

Simon and Schuster's Pimsleur Language Tapes (also sold under the "Cybervision" label) offers a "Vietnamese Short Course." They claim that ordinary people can easily learn a foreign language just by listening to their scientifically-designed courses without the benefit of even a text book. We would like to see how this is done. However, our repeated requests for a review copy have all been ignored, leaving our readers to pay about $150 to find out for themselves.