The Difficulties of Learning Vietnamese
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The Difficulties of Learning Vietnamese
Sonny Side is the host of the "Best Ever Food Review Show" on CZcams, a series devoted to exploring and appreciating the world's unique culinary offerings.
This clip was taken from JRE #1925 w/Sonny Side.
Host: Joe Rogan @joerogan
Guest: Sonny Side
Producer: Jamie Vernon @jamievernon
#joerogan #JRE #jre #podcast #comedy #jordanpeterson #elonmusk #sonnyside - Krátké a kreslené filmy
That thing he said "Language Anticipation Anxiety" is 100% a real thing. I lived in Japan for 5 years and every once in a while I would walk up to someone in a restaurant and say something in perfect Japanese and they wouldn't understand me. It was cos they saw me coming, and inside their own heads they were thinking, "oh shit this guy is gonna come up and start speaking English at me and I'm not sure I'm gonna understand". So they're so focused on "ENGLISH" that when Japanese comes out of my mouth they can't understand it. 🤣 Then I repeat myself and they go "ohhhhh" and laugh out loud!
😭😭😭
My best friend growing up was Vietnamese, and that really is a crazy language. I always said it was more tones than words.
To all that want to learn how to speak Vietnamese easy. Just know these premises of the language. Vietnamese is known to be the language of birds because all words only have one syllable. There is not a word in Vietnamese that has 2 syllables. Therefore when birds are singing..Vietnamese language is one in the same, we are actually singing instead of talking because you have to hit the right pitch in a word; hence one word spelled the same but with accent marks, sometime it can turn into 5 to 7 meaning. Talking about tough, try learning German. Since I live in Germany for nearly 7 years, its truly is a fun language to know but I learn so much rich past history from its language etymology. BTW..reach out to myself, I`ll teach you how to speak Vietnamese fast to appease to your in-law. I have to do the same for my German in-laws and its tough..so I feel you!!
Deutsch ist leicht.
The only words I can remember of Vietnamese are:
"Plèãse dõn't éât mè Thēô Vòn."
Everything sonny says is correct . The tones are difficult to get down. I’m often struggle speaking Vietnamese because I’m often mixing English grammar
Thanks for learning our language. We really appreciate when foreigners try to speak Vietnamese, even when they messed up with the tones because to be honest we understand what you are trying to say, even with no tones :))
@@dmitrifromrussiaa Aren't you Russian?
Vietnamese is hell to pronounce and once you success then you fly from Hanoi to Saigon to find out that the pronunciation is very different... Then again, you fly to the center and it s different. I ve been living in VN for long, got used to the language and it s a lot of fun. Vietnamese people are also really nice people. Here the written tones : ma má mà mã mạ mả
You are right, i'm born and raise in Việt Nam, 3 years old now and i still sometimes struggle to understand the local speaking of some other regions in my country
@@hohuy1469 Yor English is excellent for a Vietnamese 3 year old.
@@Bob31415 oh snap, 30 years old, not 3 😂 i missed a zero while typing
I'm fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese and I recently have lived 6 months in Vietnam learning Vietnamese for fun, and Vietnamese is so much harder than any other language I have attempted to learn. The tones are not that hard, due to my fluency in Chinese, but it's the pronunciation that is so crazily difficult.
Mặc dù bây giờ tôi không sống ở Việt Nam nhưng tôi sẽ tiếp tục học tiếng Việt mỗi ngày
Think the rest of the world would argue that you already know the world’s most difficult language by being fluent in American English lol
Wait til you try Hmong, 8 tones
Imagine how much harder it’d be for people who only know alphabets if Vietnamese still had chu nom script.
Chúc bạn luôn nhớ và phát triển những gì bạn đã học được tại Việt Nam nhé 😁
You are awesome!!!
I lived in Vietnam, Hanoi for 5 years and he's right. You try to order a coffee in Vietnamese and end up in a confusing mess just repeating what you think the other said. The amount of times I ordered a black coffee and go back and forth and get something totally different. The tonal language is hard 😅
Ca phe sua da ban :D
@@chrisx5127no, Khong, cafe sua, Den em oi
Sunny Side is one of the most interesting people alive!
Yeah... As a Viet, I can confirm this. There's 5 same words with different meanings because of the symbols changing the tones. The vowels and some letters will also have different sound and meaning such as the letter A... or A Ă and Â. Yeah, 1 word will have like 15 different meanings. T and Th are flipped so "think = th" would be "think = t or tink" and same can be said vice versa. T sounds more "the" and TH sounds more of a 'Tuh" in vietnamese. Some require another word to describe one thing. The fun part is that some words don't even exist at all so some words only have 3 words instead of 5 because of overlap pronunciation or something else.
For clarification on tones:
No symbol (Ca = sing) sounds neutral.
The tick mark (Dấu Sác= /) (Cá = fish) sounds higher pitch tone.
The down tick mark (Dấu Huyền = \)(cà) sounds soft.
The question mark (Dấu Hỏi = ?) (Cả =(adj) for whole or main, therefore, Cả lớp = Whole Class ) sounds like you have a question or confused.
The squiggly line/tilde (Dấu Ngã = ~) (Cã=??? --> Yeah i dont know the meaning) sounds like you are twisting and stretching the tone and word in a bit of a high pitch.
The down dot (Dấu Nặng = .)(Cạ = ? --> Sorry idk) sounds like its deep and straight to the point.
Combine all of this together into sentences, it basically sounds and looks like you are having mood swings after each word while speaking.
I totally think language anticipation anxiety exists. I’ve learned a few expressions in different languages but am very Caucasian and look it. And every time I say something in a different lang they ALWAYS say “what?” And I’ve come to realize it’s because they were expecting me to speak English so didn’t actually understand/hear what I said. But if I repeated it in their lang then they understood.
it's so cool that Joe Rogan learns the structure so quickly
In my observations of American students trying to learn Vietnamese I have noticed one interesting phenomenon. Most American students take much longer to master Vietnamese because they get disturbing flashbacks and PTSD style resurgence visions while learning the fundamentals of Vietnamese. Many American students also report of auditory hallucinations after classes where the trees next to their homes or apartments appear to be speaking to them in Vietnamese. This phenomenon is exacerbated if they are next to or see a photo of a rice-paddy field. One must note that many of these American students haven't even visited Vietnam yet ! It is truly a strange phenomenon. This could be a case of resurgence of genetic memories passed on to them from their Fathers and Grand-Fathers.
Lmao
😂wtf
@@happybeach777 FAX bruh FAX
ALMIGHTY GOD KABIR is the father of all souls that JESUS, MOHAMMAD, GURU NANAK, VEDH was telling in BIBLE, QURAN, GURU GRANTHA SAHEB
That's very weird to me
Vietnamese is a very tonal language. The words can be spelled the exact same way, but the punctuations on the letters changes the inflection of your voice. One word spelled the same way can have 7 different meanings depending on the inflection of your voice. Unless you grew up to identify those subtle distinct tones, it’s a very difficult language to learn.
Love Both of Yall Thank Yall both!!!!!
I'm Laotian. We have the same different tone, different meaning thing. I understand why this could be very hard for a foreigner to learn.
damn it's rare seeing a Laos online
he basically said that he was very ugly, not he was very hungry
Chris Lewis on CZcams speaks Vietnamese with proper dialect and grammar, better than most Vietnamese Americans. I love watching that guy speaks Vietnamese, Mandarine and Hindi.
Great channel suggestion for those who are curious about an American who speaks Vietnamese very well.
🤢🤮
Mikachu also speaks it very well. Sonny did pretty good here, actually.
I heard this comment a number of times: people keep saying "I try to speak Vietnamese but no one understands and no local wants to help guide me towards the right way". The problem is that with Vietnamese, if you don't speak with the right accent, it sounds like you're speaking a foreign language to the native ear, and that's why no one can help you. Most foreigners when they first learn Vietnamese, their pronunciation is very "timid" when doing the accent. So they end up doing an "off-white" version of the real thing. All the accents they speak sound the same, a middle-ground that doesn't sound like anything. In the clip above, one example is when he said "đói quá". He ended up saying a foreign version the word, somewhere in between "đòi, đồi, đỏi". I mean, even the "đ" is not the Vietnamese đ but more like the English 'd'. So the native year, it easily sounds like some foreign word of a language they don't know about. That's why the reaction is more like being puzzled rather than being helpful.
For other languages, it's easier to recognize that you're trying to speak the language, and to recognize the word you're trying to say. Then it's easier to help.
As a Vietnamese person, he is very good
Mandarin has 4 tones as well, and Cantonese has at least a whopping 9. I'm 52 and been a musician since I was 15 years old and started learning Mandarin when I was about 27-28 and found it incredibly easy - mostly because they don't conjugate verbs and the verb doesn't change whether it's past, present, or future (you add a modifier word after the verb to indicate those tenses). I was speaking very rudimentary Mandarin within a week. Nothing to write home about, but I was at least having simple conversations with actual Chinese nationals. So, I think if you have a musical ear, it's far easier because the gramar and syntax is pretty simple and highly practical.
I've never tried Vietnamese, and I may be wrong on this, but watching Sonny's videos, especially when he is with Calvin or Nguyen, and hearing it spoken, I suspect there are more than 4 tones. It sounds more "musical" than Mandarin. Can anyone comfirm? I'm curious.
Yes. I tried learning it. I didn't manage to learn Chinese but I started it, and it seemed fairly simple. Japanese OTOH has more complicated sentence structure but at least the words are easy to pronounce.
In Vietnamese, every word is one syllable. It has tones as well as accents. The sentence structure didn't seem too complex but just getting your head around the word pronounciation is a headache.
I've forgotten everything which is good because even when I tried to speak sentences to a native Viet speaker, the look they give me makes me think that they think that I'm having a stroke.
Yes, Vietnamese actually has 6 tones which is flat (-), deep (`), sharp ('), heavy (•), asking (?), tumbling (~). That’s the standard textbook anyway. There are probably more or less tones depending on the dialects. I live in the south and people here often turn tumbling into asking when they talk so essentially the south only has 4 or 5 tones
6 tones.
yeah, not really accurate. Cantonese and Vietnamese has same number of tone contours or relative pitch levels, which is 6.
They both also have entering/clipped "tones", or glottal stop finals, meaning that words end in hard/sharp consonants (p,t,k etc.) But these end up being at the same relative pitch levels of the former category. So that's where you end up with people saying that Canto has 9 tones or Viet has 8
Grown up as a vietnamese born in europe i do hear the difference nouances when someone else speak but beeing able to pronounce it the same way, is a whole different thing. I‘m fluent in 5 languages and my vietnamese is the worst out of all of them
I speak 5 languages
It's sometimes hard to translate 😕
That's why the translator professionals have a good pay
Same with some words in the Philippines. Like for example in Visaya "puso" has 3 different meanings based on how you say it. It could mean water pump, hanging rice, or heart-although this meaning is Tagalog but has also a different intonation compared to the Visayan versions. Many more examples like "lata" has different meanings based on intonation or tubo, baga, paso, etc. I think southeast asian languages has a lot of this.
the Asian tonal languages are fascinating for sure. I do not know any of them in the slightest, but always fascinating to listen to. I will observe, however, that you said that the same word for water pump could also be heart. And the human heart is, technically, a form of biological fluid pump, pumping our blood, which is mostly water. Very interesting! Hanging rice… I got nothing for that😅.
Yeah, there's roughly 3 level of Javanese in general
"crude" Javanese used to talk with younger person or your close friend
"middle" Javanese used to talk with formal peer
"high" Javanese used to talk with someone you respect
But you can bypass all of these by using Indonesian language as it sounds formal
my two closest vietnamese friends. i always imitated their words, and i got the intonation wrong each time.
There are 6 tones and Vietnamese is also difficult because it is a mono-sollabic language.
6 in north and 5 in south
Only American I've seen speaking vietnamese was laushu the master of languages and from that you can notice how difficult this language actually is
The issue here is even if it sounds like gibberish, they should be able to tell it's supposed to be Vietnamese, not understanding a language doesn't mean it doesn't have a specific sound. It would obviously depend on the person, but regardless of whether or not you understand a language someone speaks, I think a lot of people would still be able to infer. If I meet a Mexican person and they don't really speak English, but they're trying to make sounds that are clearly similar to or ARE words in English, even pronounced wrong or in the wrong order, it's still understandable to the point that you'd know they're trying to speak English. I bet there's plenty of Vietnamese people who could understand that you're trying to speak Vietnamese and wouldn't think even poor Vietnamese sounds anything like English (or any given language that couldn't reasonably be misconstrued. Again, you don't have to be familiar with a language, even if it's one a lot of people in the world have likely read or heard at some point (English, Mandarin, Spanish, German, those that tend to be fairly wide spread)
Perhaps the level of difference makes it easier to not understand attempted Vietnamese to a Vietnamese person, but actually I would have thought the uniqueness would make it easier to tell when someone is trying to speak it. It's just difficult for me to fathom not recognizing the language that you and everyone around you has spoken for your entire life, even if it's bad (and yes, the more a language spreads, the more non-native speakers try to pick it up, and thus you'll have more and more examples of it spoken badly at some point. Most people who speak English have heard someone not as good at it try to speak it, but I bet most of them still get what's being attempted, and this can't be a unique trait to any language, there have to be Vietnamese people who would see some other Vietnamese person not understand someone trying to speak Vietnamese to them and say "Anh ngu như cứt"
Idk how to explain but i LEGIT sometimes cannot understand when ppl speak viet. The tones help me understand so when ppl speak without the tones well its hard like yes ik its vietnamese but i still cant understand exactly
Tonal languages are something else.
From another planet ...... maybe quite literally.
@@SirLangsalot ?
@My-cat-is-staring-at-you listen to JRE guest, David Cho. He thinks asian people originate from outer space. Similar height, eyes, and high IQ to grey aliens. Look it up.
@SirLangsalot of course Joe had a guest who was off his rocker.
1:29 Yes it is WILD even as a Vietnamese, and thats also the reason why if like my parent's guest or friend is coming I wouldn't want to go greet them cause I don't know what pronounce to use and what do I call them, I don't want to be rude lmao.
That why Vietnamese are highly intelligent, and why they are undefeated in war. A language so hard only those with IQ higher than 100 can speak it.
Not sure if alot of ppl know or even heard of hmong ppl but the hmong language is the same idea. Its all about tones. A different tone can completely change the meaning of the word. Interesting to know that vietnamese is kinda the same.
English is the same way
vietnamese, chinese, and hmong all use tones but honestly hmong is pretty easy too learn. Hard part is just remembering which word is which tone. Id say vietnamese is harder too learn just by hearing how they talk
Lol yes we’ve heard of Hmong. But American English is the same way and then some. Even more baffling is that American English has words that are spelt identical, but can mean completely different things and sound completely different. We call em homonyms of course. Partly why English is largely seen as the hardest language to learn. Wonder if these other languages have homonyms similar to English ones. It only makes sense that they’d have a few, but I wonder to what extent and how common.
@@Easymoneysniper5 No. English is not the same way.
@@Easymoneysniper5no sorry the tones of English definitely do not work the same way as the tones of the tonal languages of Asia like Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, et cetera. It is a totally, totally different concept. Simple example: Saying the word “yes” in English in a very low whisper or yelling the word yes in a loud voice are two different tones of yes but DOES NOT change the meaning of the word nor does it make it a different word. The tonal concept of Asian languages is exactly opposite. It WOULD change the word into a totally different word AND a totally different meaning potentially. So I do not know any of those languages but the linguists and anthropologists who have studied the different cultures have made study of this difference for hundreds of years and it is really well researched and documented so I am not trying to be a karen a-hole know it all but hopefully trying to help one understand that English language tones and Asian language tones are absolutely NOT the same concept in any respect.
Max McFarlin speaks pretty good Vietnamese from the south. I think he's only lived there for 3 or 4 years.
That's pretty good Sonny.
There is a teacher of Vietnamese here on YT (I forget who) who would not answer a basic question. She was explaining the vowel pronunciations. When she pronounced the 2nd "a" she did so with a rising tone. I asked why. It is supposed to have a different vowel *sound* but the tone is not part of its pronunciation since the tone can be different depending on what word it's in.
I am currently on a voyage to learn Vietnamese and I had this exact same question. The answer I've found is that when you are saying "ă" as a letter by itself, they use the rising tone simply to distinguish it from the first letter "a". But that tone is NOT used when "ă" appears in a word. When "ă" appears in a word, it is pronounced the same as "a", but is much shorter. So when you say "dăm" to mean "a few, or some", you would shorten the "a" sound and linger on the "m" sound. Hope this helps.
@@daveygiggles Thank you for the response. Of course the tone I referenced (rising) COULD be used in some words but my point was that there is a distinction between the tone of a vowel and the basic pronunciation of it. The teacher in the video (in fact more than one did this) was giving a rising tone to the 2nd "a" when she should have just given its pronunciation. By doing this she was implying that the 2nd "a" *always* has a rising tone which is of course not correct.
@@Bob31415 Yes, I understand what you're saying. My wife is Vietnamese and she also uses a rising tone for ă when saying the alphabet. But ă does not inherently have a rising tone when used in a word unless the rising tone mark is also present. This is just one of those things you have to accept when learning the language. The pronunciation for "a" and "ă" are the same. The only difference is the length of the vowel. Same for "ơ" and "â"; pronounced the same but â is shorter than ơ.
@@daveygiggles Very interesting. You explained it better than the native speaking instructors here on CZcams. " *But ă does not **_inherently_** have a rising tone when used in a word unless the rising tone mark is also present* ." THAT is all they had to say to avoid the confusion.
Joe NEEDS to have CZcams influencer Xiaomanyc on his show, this dude is amazing!
He totally butchered the "anh" pronunciation. 😂😂😂
Writing super easy to read. Speaking is the same idea in many language due to social status goes into consideration. pronoun n word of choices have to change. Speaking generally easy for people who use tonal language as native tongue.
You must be referring to Harrolson
If you learn how to get iced coffee in Vietnamese you are good trust me
what do you call a line of people waiting outside a vietnamese restaurant?
the pho queue
haha
hahaha nice one. dude i knew a Vietnamese American guy that is his parents immigrated he was born in USA. Went by David but his Vietnamese name was literally and actually Phuc. Yes! Seriously!😅😂 And he would tell us stories of how growing up here in America and being totally American but also totally fluent in Vietnamese still… he would “fuck” with his teachers at school. And yell at them, yelling his actual Vietnamese name of Phuc. (my name is Phuc say it right!) Hahahaha and what fantastic fun he had with it growing up. Alas I do not know what the male Vietnamese name of Phuc even means! Good stories from him though.
@@nozrep great stuff haha
thanks for getting my joke!
imagine they started learning the Nghe An language💀💀💀
Buc duc luc fuc - I grew up around Vietnamese people...that right there means welcome to Vietnam how you doing enjoy your stay goodebyeeeeeno joke there's more vocabulary of certain words that mean ten different things
Laughing in Mizo tawng 🤣🤣
chinese also has 4 tones for each word /sound, and each sound is connected with 100s of words, that all share the sounds, so outside of tones you also have to understand the context of other words used around them, homonyms galore. Once a literary scholar wrote an entire essay using one single sound, different tones and it made complete sense when you heard/read it.
Chinese use sharp tone, Vietnamese is round. Easier for Westerner to make fun off and hear. Westerner cannot do that with Vietnamese. Hence, why Vietnamese are superior and more loved. And Vietnamese are like a melody especially in songs.
@@chrisx5127 lol yeah one group is more "superior", sounds like its coming from a fascist. So why do vietnamese all watch chinese tv drama and listen to chinese pop, steal it and make a clone song?
I’m sorry but don’t we have there, they’re and their?
Korean language is more closely related to Japanese than to Chinese.
I will always say foe for pho! I am American dammit😂😅. I definitely do not mind being ridiculed for saying word wrongly in a different language which is not my own native American English. It is what it is. Besides, I live in the city with the first or second largest Vietnamese community in the entire country of USA and most Vietnamese folks I have met are totally cool about it. Yes, they make fun of me. Yes, but also, they understand and it is all in good fun.
I'm an Australian Vietnamese. An easy way for you guys to say it is "huh?" but beginning with a "F". :)
@@tl7556 I'm Australian Australian, and I always thought of saying "Fuck" but just drop the "ck" off the end! 😉😆
@@FukUrUsernameRules lol if you say it like that but with a high tone, it means to break something in Vietnamese...
In a way, I like the way Anericans just pronounce foreign words the way an American would naturally say them, in American English, without even trying to say it "correctly." It can be a way of being natural and dropping all pretense and effort. Like "we are what we are, and we speak like we speak, in our language, and it is what it is, so be it." - A kind of self-acceptance.
trust me no one gonna ridiculed you for trying to say vietnamese
Funny on JRE. Since JR struggles, even with English, most of times 08]
French is the same way too when you are talking in a formal or elder way
Vietnamese are totally cool with mispronunciation of “pho” in my city where there are many, many many many Pho restaurants, well, at least all the Vietnamese I have met anyways. There is even one in Galveston that did an EXCELLENT play on words, taking advantage of the mispronunciation. Pho Twenty noodle house. 😅😂😅 Get it? 420? Fo-Twenty? Pho Twenty? Yep!!!! It exists! In Galveston!
His Vietnamese is not that bad💁💁
Their, there, they're.
English homonyms with different meanings, yes. Bravo! Good for you. Alas, a wholly, wholely and absolutely separate concept from the tonals of Asian languages. Where saying their in a whisper or their in a yelling voice will be as of two totally different words with two totally different meanings. But yelling their or whispering their in English still will always have the same meaning. Yes, totally different. But still, good job on your spelling🤓
em đói quá😆
Có thể phát âm tiếng việt là khá khó. Nhưng học chữ viết thì rất dễ, bởi hệ thống ngữ pháp rất đơn giản. Đơn giản nhất trong các loại ngôn ngữ.
Start everything with “du ma” and everything will make sense
Aha...now we know that Sonny's wife is Vietnamese. Mystery solved coz he keeps her off camera even though she travels with him.
my gosh :) this dude will make you more confused about Vietnamese Only to explain the word I :)
the pronouns thing is like Javanese. we're in the same region afterall
The way Vietnamese is written makes absolutely no sense. G is pronounced as S. D is also pronounced as S.
It depends on the province. A lot of different ways to make the 'Z' sound where I am: D, gi, r, x and different words might pronounce them as 'S.' Tones and diphthongs combine to make very tricky pronunciation and understanding; for example, the Vietnamese words for new, salt and ten are quite similar (differ by diphthong), whereas the Vietnamese words for coconut, cucumber and pineapple only differ by tone.
1: U have to be on uppers to even speak Vietnamese. 2: U have to be on uppers to even listen to Vietnamese. 3: He didn't marry his wife for her culture. 4: Think Vietnamese is hard!? Try speaking an Eskimo language!! There's many words for snow!! Soft snow, hard snow, wet snow, sideways snow, bouncing snow, water snow, sea snow, igloo snow, tall snow, & on & on & on....
Du Ma Con Cac
Why does he need a vietmanese wife?
Shes tight fo long time.
@@Pepe-dq2ib 😂😂
Why not?😂 What kind of question is that?
@@extendo7137 Lets not be naive. Generally the only reason somebody would go all the way to SEA to get a wife, is because theyre old and want a young Chinese Wife!
He doesn't need a vietnamese wife he just lives in Vietnam that's his home now
he cant even talk Vietnamese tho
I didn’t know Sonny’s wife is Vietnamese until now
It’s the first time he’s mentioned if she was Vietnamese
If you've seen enough of his videos, she's sometimes doing the filming. Sometimes she's even appeared with him. Not often but it has happened. More often she is wielding the camera in some videos.