A few months ago I shared 3 ways to learn Vietnamese through facebook.
To recap, they were:
- Chat with native speakers
- Translate your Vietnamese friends’ status updates
- Consider changing your language settings
I’ve since become a bit more conscious about how I practice and learn Vietnamese through facebook and come up with 3 more.
1. Click on the links your friends share
Instead of scouring the web, or picking things at random from our Resources List, just select the things that your friends recommend. Chances are a lot of these posts will interest you as you have things in common with your friends.
This is my favourite way of finding interesting authentic materials – whether that’s articles, songs, videos or even infographics.
2. Write statuses in Vietnamese
Quicker and less pressure than writing a diary about your day, share short funny anecdotes from your day or ask questions. Interact with the people who comment and continue a short conversation.
In some ways, this is a bit like chatting with someone but you have more time to look up new words and consider how to phrase what you want to say. You’re also just talking about one topic and don’t need to think of different things to say like you do in a chat.
3. Like fan pages
To get more exposure to authentic material (ie. Vietnamese written by and for Vietnamese people), you can like fan pages for Vietnamese a favourite musician, magazine, cooking blog or other celebrities like the most famous ‘foreigner’ who can speak Vietnamese, Joe Dâu Tây.
By liking a page you can take part in the community – read news updates about the person or magazine, read other fans’ comments or even post comments yourself. These news updates should be easier to understand than friends’ status updates which often use a lot of slang or shortened ‘text speak’.
Though if you just want to chat about learning Vietnamese, there’s always the More Vietnamese page.
Over to you: Do you use facebook to practice or learn Vietnamese?