Danny's Weblog

The "Vietnamese for Beginners" series

The Lonely Planet guide says that the Fahasa bookshop is run by the government and has a good selection of language books and maps, so it was the first place I went in Saigon. (In the following text, I have omitted Vietnamese diacritics.)

I went to the branch at 185 Dong Khoi. The LP book describes another branch that we went to later, and I noticed a third branch nearby (which was smaller than the other two).

The staff speak English, although a little hesitantly. You need to be aware that there are two cashiers, one for the audio/video dept and one for the rest, ie you have to pay separately. (There may be still others that I did not encounter.)

Among other things, I bought volume 1 of "Tieng Viet Vietnamese for Beginners" by "Phan Van Giuong". I think the price was 50,000 Dong, ie a bit over 3 USD. The price includes two CDs. When I got the book back to the hotel I glanced at it (without trying the CD) and it seemed OK, so later I got volumes 2 and 3 (which were all they had – the course description in the book is not very clear, but apparently there are actually 6 books in the course, intended to last a total of 3 years).

The book carries a publication date of 1990, and refers to being produced by the Asian Languages Project to support a course run at the Victoria University of Technology in Australia. The publisher's name is apparently Nha Xuat Ban Tre. The phrase "VIETNAMESE FOR FOREIGNERS" (as shown, including the quotes) is on the cover but not I believe part of the title.

There are many passages which do not appear to have been edited. For instance, on page 1:

"The Vietnamese alphabet is composed of 12 vowels and 17 consonants."

On page 2:

"There are 28 consonants symblos in the Vietnamese alphabet but only 21 consonants phonemes and only eight of them may be in final positions. They are marked with an asterik in the following chart:"

The typos and slipshod English are not very important. What is important was that he had an important point to make but he made it with zero clarity. I *think* he is trying to draw a distinction between a glyph such as the letter "g", which of course can be a consonant by itself, and what I might call a "two-glyph" consonant such as the pair of glyphs "gi", which is not pronounced like "g" then "i". (You may not think my explanation is much better, but I'm not expecting you to pay for it.)

As expected, the discussion of tones was utterly inadequate:

"Vietnamese... is a tone language. That is, each syllable is formed with at least one vowel accompanied by a tone (or musical pitch) which is meaningful and forms part of the syllable." This is terrible by itself. (Wikipedia refers to a doctoral dissertation by Pham, Andrew Hoa: "Vietnamese tone: Tone is not pitch", but this explanation of what tone *is* is rotten even compared to the usual low standard.)

Page 5 brings in the term "tonemes" which I have not seen before but which is OK. It's not really necessary I *think* because you can just use the term "tones", but it's conceivable that, for instance, Hanoi Vietnamese uses a different tone for "low broken" than Saigon Vietnamese, but both tones count as a single phoneme, just as English people sometimes pronounce "t" as "dt" and sometimes as "th" without being conscious of any difference.

As usual, the explanation of the tones seems to conflict with the diagram, eg "low broken".

Incidentally, it seems to me that existing Vietnamese fonts are not suitable for the beginner, because the diacritic marks are extremely hard to distinguish, even in fonts where they are not whimsically distorted. If I were to study the language seriously, I would develop my own font in which each character had plenty of space to allow the diacritics to be large and clear. I would certainly do so if I were selling a book.

Today I had a chance to try one of the CDs, and was immediately sunk in gloom. Although the CD read OK, the first track on the CD appears to be the whole of one side of a tape, making it absurdly difficult to find any particular position. Additionally the audio is very difficult to follow even if you are looking at the book.

But worst of all, the audio quality is abysmal – perhaps telephone quality. I do not believe the CD was made from original recordings; it appears to have been made from tenth generation cassette ripoff copies. Sometimes, it's hard to make out the English, never mind subtleties in the Vietnamese (eg final "nh").

I suppose it's my own fault for buying a ripoff copy, but I really didn't expect a bookstore operated by the Vietnamese state to baldly rip off a textbook. What a naif I am.

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