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Learning

How to celebrate your progress – the Can-do List

Sometimes it's good to look back!


Sometimes when learning a language we struggle with motivation. It seems like a never-ending uphill climb. You’re so focused on where you’re going and how you’re progressing (or where you’re failing), that you forget how far you’ve already come.

Something that you once struggled with is now second nature. Because it’s second nature you don’t think about it as a skill or step you’ve mastered. Sometimes it takes an outsider to point it out.

For example last month I was killing time on a flight by writing a diary of the morning, in Vietnamese. A very normal thing for me to do. My friend peeked at what I was writing and told me my level of Vietnamese must be good if I could write freely and easily like that.

There I was cursing myself over the words I couldn’t remember the tones for, completely missing that fact that I can write spontaneously in Vietnamese. I hadn’t thought about it like that. I was looking up the mountain without noticing how far I’d travelled up the slope already.

Sometimes it's good to look back!
Sometimes, when learning Vietnamese, it’s good to look back!

So, inspired by this I decided to make a list of all the things I can do in Vietnamese. A list I can look back on when I’m struggling with motivation and can’t see what progress I’m making. A reminder of how far I’ve come and a little ego boost.

Make your own can-do list

Now it’s your turn to make a list of all the things you can do in Vietnamese. Forget about the top of the mountain for now and just focus on what you are able to do.

Some ideas for your can-do list

Grab a notepad and start with writing ‘I can’, then make a list of everything you can think of – from the little things to the bigger ones.

I’ll give you ten examples from my list to get your inspiration flowing.

Elementary

  • Give directions to a xe ôm or taxi driver.
  • Name foods at the market.
  • Haggle in the market.
  • Read a menu.
  • Write about my day in Vietnamese.

Intermediate

  • Pick out a few words or phrases when watching a TV programme.
  • Read some comics or short stories.
  • Write a short essay on a familiar topic.
  • Pass a driving theory test.
  • Change my accent at will (primarily from the standard southern accent with v’s as v’s to an accent with v’s as y’s).

Remember to think about each of the four skills – speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Over to you: What’s your #1 Can-Do that you’re most proud of? How awesome do you feel reflecting on this?

Photo credit: misbass and H

Categories
Learning

It’s ok to forget words when learning a foreign language

Raw.. what is the word?!

Picture the scene. You’re in Vietnam, sitting down to eat with a friend and having a conversation in Vietnamese. It’s going well, your understanding is high and you’ve asked lots of questions. It’s a great feeling. Your food arrives and you bite into a piece of carrot. It’s still raw in the middle and you want to exclaim your disgust but the word has totally slipped your mind. You’ve been in Vietnam for months, you love the food and talking about food. You know this word well, but right at this moment you simply can’t remember it.

Raw.. what is the word?!
Raw.. why can’t I remember this word?!

It’s a situation we’ve all been in. How did you feel? Frustrated? Angry at yourself? Disappointed with Anki because it’s supposed to help you remember vocabulary? Doubting your ability because you can’t remember a ‘simple’ word that you ‘should’ know?

If you’re anything like me, you experience one (or several) of the above emotions and you’re pretty hard on yourself because it’s something well within your comfort zone, yet you’re drawing blanks. Often it’s not forgetting the word that disrupts the conversation, but the frustration you feel that ties you up in knots. Because actually, when it comes down to it, we forget words mid-conversation all the time. Even in our native language.

Think for a minute about conversations in your native language. How many times in the last month have you had the same pause in a conversation where you’ve had to ask the other person ‘what’s the word when…?’ and a guessing game ensues until one of you figures out what the specific word you were looking for was.

While it doesn’t usually happen on a daily basis, it is no strange occurrence. In fact, it’s common one that we’ve all faced. Remember, we’re talking about your mother tongue here! So if it’s natural to forget words in your own language, it’s more than natural to forget them in Vietnamese. Stop beating yourself up about it and accept it as it is – a natural part of communicating in any language and part of the learning process in another language.

So next time you forget a word, pause, remember it’s natural and ask your conversation partner ‘what’s what word when…?’.

Over to you: How do you react when you forget words while speaking a foreign language? Does it frustrate you or do you take it in your stride?

Photo credit: SteveFE

Categories
Resources

An unusual use for google translate: as a spellchecker

Whoops, that should have been 'chưa' (yet).

Google translate has advantages and disadvantages. For a computer I think it does an alright job, especially for European languages, but it’s no substitute for a human and should be used in moderation.

A problem it does have is that when it doesn’t recognise a word, it won’t translate it. In fact, this can be a handy problem.

I often use google translate as a quick spell checker when I don’t have a spell check facility on hand. If I’ve written an email in Vietnamese for instance, I post my text in google translate.

I then quickly read through the English side and look for any words that haven’t translated. Most likely it’s because I’ve made a spelling mistake, so I can look at the word and see if it needs fixing.

Whoops, that should have been 'chưa' (yet).
Whoops, that should have been ‘chưa’ (yet).

This does seem to work better for European languages such as French or German, as a lot of the time google translate seems to skip over missing tones and translate it anyway. It can also be a bit hard to read through google’s English translation.

I’d still say you can catch some errors with your Vietnamese this way, though I do use it more for other languages.

Categories
Language & Culture

How to address your Vietnamese teacher (and yourself)

traitaoToday is Teacher’s Day in Vietnam. A day in which students show appreciation for their teachers with flowers or presents. A big thank you to all the teachers out there!

Vietnamese has many personal pronouns and how you address somebody depends on various factors such as your age and relationship with that person. Many people have covered these in depth.

You learn that certain words go together like anh-em, ông-con…

You may also learn about the words to address a teacher: cô for a woman and thầy for a man.

But how do you refer to yourself?

If you were a schoolchild, you would call yourself ‘con’. But as an adult, this isn’t appropriate.

If your teacher is quite a bit older than you then refer to yourself as ’em’. This is what university students use and what I use in my classes.

If your teacher is not so much older than you, your teacher may address you as ‘anh’ or ‘chị’. You could perhaps use ‘tôi’ but in the south it’s most common to use the more informal ‘tui’.

If your teacher is a similar age to or younger than you, you should still address your teacher as cô or thầy out of respect. Your teacher may address you as ‘bạn’. (This was the situation I was in when I briefly took a Korean class.) Ideally you should avoid addressing yourself with a pronoun. For example, instead of saying “anh/chị không hiểu” you’d say “không hiểu cô ơi”. This is a bit tricky, but it’s good to get used to as it can be useful in other situations.

If you’re still not really sure what to use, ask your teacher – that’s what they’re there for!

Happy Teacher’s Day!

Photo credit: lhys

Categories
Language & Culture

Why choosing between Northern and Southern Vietnamese is important

How you order this depends on where you are...

While I’ve already put together a guide about whether you should choose to learn Northern or Southern Vietnamese, I didn’t explain why it’s important.

Firstly there are pronunciation differences. But as long as you have a fairly standard Southern or Northern accent, you can probably get by with speaking that in most places. Your ears will probably always prefer one accent over the other, but with a little effort you should be able to get used to listening to either standard accent.

However where huge problems can, and most often, arise are the different words used for a lot of practical or tangible items. From street (đường/phố) to bowl (tô/bát) to a thousand (ngàn/nghìn), use the wrong word in the wrong region and you might not be understood!

How you order this depends on where you are...
How you order this depends on where you are…

Food words are probably what differs most from region to region. If you want two pineapples in Saigon you’d ask for hai trái thơm but in Hanoi it’d be hai quả dứa. In Saigon chén is the small bowl you eat rice from, whereas in Hanoi chén is a small glass to drink rice wine!

If you’re going to be in Vietnam, you definitely need to know the right words for the region you’re in. One time I was with a native speaker who spent several minutes trying to order an extra portion of plain rice while in Huế. Because in Saigon we’d say cơm trắng (white rice) whereas in Huế they say cơm không. Interestingly that’s how you order a plain baguette (as opposed to a sandwich) in Saigon: bánh mì không.

If you want to dig deeper into these differences, there’s an Android app (or a reference list here).

Over to you: Which form of Vietnamese did you choose to learn? Have you found it makes a difference?

Photo credit: lioneltitu