Notes On The Vietnamese Language

Vietnamese was the hardest for me to learn even a few words than any of the other SE Asian languages. There were also several other factors that made it even harder. One was the extreme difficulty in pronunciation. Vietnamese has many sounds that are utterly unpronounceable by the Occidental tongue. So learning a word from a phrase book is of no use, since you still don't know how to pronounce it properly. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that pronunciation changes markedly from city to city. Another difficulty was the fact that it bears no linguistic connection to the Thai or Lao languages, so I could not use my knowledge of those to gain any leverage. It does bear a distant connection to Chinese, but they long ago abandoned the Chinese system of writing, in favor of an incredibly retarded transliteration system devised by incompetent French linguists. In fact it took me more than a week to get over my anger at the French linguists before I could settle down and start learning some Vietnamese words. To date, no competent linguist has looked at the Vietnamese language and devised a better transliteration system (this is something I could do, but I don't have the time). This last item was by far the biggest barrier to learning Vietnamese.

Vietnamese has a number of unique features that I have not seen in any other language. One is the use of titles in place of personal pronouns in many cases. For example, to say "I love you" you would not use the pronouns "I" and "you", but replace them with titles. So you would say "Anh yeu em" (man speaking to woman). This means something like "Mister loves Miss". If she returns your affection she would say "Em yeu anh" ("Miss loves Mister").

Here are some more Vietnamese phrases I learned:

gam an	thank you
sin jao	hello
dam biet	goodbye
khong go zee	you're welcome
sin loy	sorry