Gaston Dorren & Phạm Bảo Thanh Huyền - 10 Reasons to Study Vietnamese (and 5 to regret it)

Studying Vietnamese is not a wildly popular pastime among Westerners, yet it repays the effort in many ways. It offers all the linguistic excitement, cultural ‘East-Asianness’ and economic ebullience that makes people flock to Mandarin. As a bonus, Vietnamese is written in plain Roman letters. Moreover, it’s spoken in a country that can be explored and enjoyed within a single lifetime.

Once we’ve whetted the audience’s appetite, it’s time for full disclosure: some of the things that make Vietnamese linguistically attractive also make it challenging. Huyền, who’s an experienced teacher of Vietnamese and English and a speaker of 4 European languages, will provide a taster of what mastering her mother tongue is like. Gaston, who has been studying Vietnamese for 2 years, will report on his frustrations, embarrassments and forthcoming triumphs. We will also give some pointers on studying this language more effectively than he has done.

Since Vietnamese is neither a member nor even a neighbour of the Indo-European family, it’s well outside the linguistic comfort zone of Westerners and considerably widens their concept of what a language might be like. Huyền’s teaching experience enables her to draw in the audience. Gaston’s experience as a student and a public speaker will make sure the presentation is not only informative, but also entertaining. We believe our talk will provide the audience with fascinating facts, a fair foretaste – and fun.

The Language Event

Filming & Editing: Simos Batzakis

[VietnameseGlobal]

Ill speak on Vietnamese language on your next polyglot conference. You someone who speaks, knows, teaches the language and has passion about it.

[AndyJugglesLanguages]

I am fascinated by Vietnamese. I was at this conference but wasn't learning Vietnamese at the time. Interesting questions at the end. I've been learning Mandarin and some Cantonese for a few years, so the tones don't scare me. Nobody mentioned that some of the tones in Vietnamese are clipped. It would have been nice to hear some examples of the differences between the dialects. I was learning Northern VIetnamese (Hanoi). I met a lady from Saigon and she said that sometimes she can't understand people from the north. They use different pronouns for addressing people. Very confusing but an interesting challenge. 🙂

[tslangue]

22:35 🤣 😂 I’ve never been more encouraged!

[nguyyen]

The commenter on quốc-ngữ and chữ Nôm is mistaken, missing the fact that these are 2 scripts for the same spoken language. It is not 2 versions the language.

[tslangue]

Amazing layout of the ups and downs.

I Personally would not consider the script familiar at all and am glad you brought that up first, the fact that it is so similar at first glance is really holding me up as I keep reading it as my instinct english would without marks. Where as Hangul Chinese characters and devanargi never presented this issue for me being so different than my confortable abcs

I recently started looking into Vietnamese after hearing Emmanuel Terron speak for Langfest I have found the historical usage and consequential modern vocabulary of the chinese characters and cultural dominance and became extra interested after using his CJKV dictionary. This all started with Korean’s hanja. It’s all quite fascinating and yes very very difficult. Beyond speech even the grammar is a beautiful challenge but I find all the extra pieces (like classifiers) are great for understanding (like i dont know the animal but i hear the plural and the animal classifier and know were talking about the zoo then i know atleast they are talking abut an animal and not the man zoo keeper even if I dont know the noun i can recognize some blurry meaning by what is it not based on the classifier.

This was very very helpful as a new learner!!! Set the exoectations

[michaelewing]

Polyglot Conference, We need one in Chicago!

[inouelenhatduy]

46:00 lol no, Nom have a lot of Vietnamese made character and it made no meaning to Chinese reading Nom even it have a lot of Chinese character but the way we used the word and using the new character made it look like Chinese but Chinese cant understand the meaning of what we write  , quoc ngu is the modern latin alphabet

[lamnguyen]

This guy should have done more research.

[GypsieSeeker]

This guy’s speaking is frustratingly broken.