Joel Swagman (Reviews / TESOL): Struggling to Study Vietnamese

I'm rather proud of how much Japanese I learnt during my 8 years in Japan.

Although admittedly, I wasn't the best in my circle of friends. (Several of my expat friends progressed faster and further than me). But I did alright for myself.
Within about 6 months I was conversational. By about 2 years I was able to read manga and generally understand it. After about 3 years, I felt like I understood most of what was said at my workplace.
I dated a Japanese girl for 5 years, and as she had very limited English, all the conversations were in Japanese.
I debated Jehovah's Witnesses in Japanese. I was able to talk history and politics in Japanese.

By contrast, I spent 4 years in Cambodia and can't speak any Cambodian.
And I've so far spent 2.5 years in Vietnam, and can't speak any Vietnamese.

Why the difference?
Well, there are numerous reasons. Both linguistic, and environmental, and affective.

On the linguistic side:
While the Vietnamese writing system is (thankfully) much easier than the Japanese writing system, the pronunciation and the tones are very difficult for Westerners to pronounce.
Looking back, one of the reasons that I did so well with Japanese is because when I tried to speak Japanese, I was usually understood. Which encouraged me to speak it more.
When I try to speak Vietnamese, no one understands me. Which just causes me to give up.

The environment is a factor as well.
Surely no environment is better suited to learning a language than the JET program. Because I lived in the countryside, I was surrounded by Japanese. Because I worked in the public schools, I was able to constantly listen to the way the Japanese teachers talked to their students. Especially on days when I was in the elementary schools, I got exposed to a lot of simple and clear input just by listening to the Japanese teachers scold their children.

In Vietnam, I'm living in Saigon (an international city with lots of other foreigners) and I'm working in a private English school where all my co-workers are other foreigners, or Vietnamese people who speak English.
I don't use any Vietnamese at all in my daily life.

On the affective side, I'm not 23 anymore, and I don't feel like I have all the time in the world to just pour into my language studies.
Because of my experience learning Japanese, I know that learning a foreign language is tons of time and work and becomes of very limited value once you leave the country.
(Even when I was still in Japan, I had a huge drop in motivation around 2005 when I realized that 4 years of studying Japanese was leading to very little tangible benefits--having upper-intermediate level of Japanese was never going to open up any new career paths).

Instead, I want to spend my free time improving myself professionally--reading books about teaching English, studying vocabulary for applied linguistics and developing teaching resources.

...but, therein lies the rub.
Here I am spending all my time trying to read books on linguistics and language learning, and at the same time I'm not taking any interest in the language of the very country I'm living in! How ironic is that!

Any language teacher should be a language learner. There's no excuse. And so, I guilted myself into studying Vietnamese. Not because I particularly thought it would be useful for my future, but because it was inexcusable to be studying second language acquisition, and completely ignore the language of the country you're living in.

This, then, is my story:

Struggling to Study Vietnamese

When I first arrived in Vietnam, my plan was to give myself a silent period, where I would just listen to the language before I attempted to read it or speak it.
This was partly based both Krashen's ideas, and partly based on my own experience with Japanese.
Despite my success story mentioned above, I never managed to shed my American accent in Japanese. I always pronounced the Japanese liquid consonant as a hard American "r" sound, whereas in Japanese it's somewhere between an "r" and an "l". In retrospect, I think this was a result of learning too much out of the textbook too early on, instead of just listening to the sounds of the language. Because the textbook wrote Japanese words with an "r", I pronounced it as an "r". If I had learned the sounds of the language first, instead of the spelling, maybe I would have pronounced it correctly.
My other mistake was trying to produce too early. Once I started pronouncing Japanese words with an "r" sound, then my mouth got used to that form, and by the time someone brought the mistake to my attention, it had fossilized, and was almost impossible to correct.

So, instead I thought I would just listen to Vietnamese.
And for a while I did. I found a Youtube channel for studying Vietnamese. I had a system where I would watch one video a day, and actively pay attention to it. Then I would put it on a playlist, and play it in the background to get accustomed to the sounds of the language.

Learn Vietnamese

Despite having this on constantly in the background at my apartment, absolutely none of this transferred to my memory.

For months afterwards, I did nothing.
My Vietnamese girlfriend kept encouraging me to study Vietnamese. "The most important thing is to start," she would say.
I tried to explain to her my silent period methodology, and she begrudgingly accepted this. For a while we had a system where we placed vocabulary cards on the table. The cards had English words on them, but my girlfriend would say the Vietnamese word, and I would match her pronunciation to the correct card.
None of these words ever stuck in my memory. Eventually I just sort of gave up, and for several months was doing absolutely nothing to study Vietnamese.

...and then Duolingo launched its Vietnamese module.
Several of my co-workers were already big fans of Duolingo. (Co-workers that were a few years younger than me in particular. Many of them had used Duolingo to help them learn Spanish or French in their student days).
However, several more of my coworkers were skeptical of Duolingo.
Some of them noticed that there were still bugs in the system, and that some of the exercises contained wrong answers.
Even when the answers were correct, the computer was notoriously unflexible, and only accepted one answer as the correct translation, even when several other translations would have been acceptable.
Also, Duolingo was based on Northern Vietnamese. And we were all living in the South.
The pronunciation was different than where we were living. And often the vocabulary was completely different from where we were living. (For example, duolingo uses the Northern word for "umbrella"--cái ô-- which no one in the South says).

Also, because I've been listening to the TEFLology Podcast, I know that duolingo is sometimes looked down upon by linguists. (It's come up a couple times in some of their interview episodes). Apparently Duolingo was not designed by linguists trained in second language acquisition, but by computer game people trained in creating addictive apps--with chimes, and points, and levelling up, and all those little built in reward-systems designed to trick the pleasure centers of your brain into becoming addicted.

Despite all of this, however, I eventually decided to start a Duolingo account because I figured that:
1) For all its faults, something was better than nothing. And currently I was doing nothing to study Vietnamese, and...
2) Duolingo was kind of fun. I liked hearing the chimes every time I got an answer right. I liked getting points and leveling up. I liked following my friends and competing for points every week.

Fortunately for beginners, Duolingo does not require you to type the accents in correctly for Vietnamese. It will let you know everytime you missed an accent, but it will still give you the points for just typing in the plain English letters.
There's also no speaking component for Vietnamese. (In most other Duolingo programs, you have to pronounce the words correctly into a speaker on your computer or phone). None of my Duolingo buddies at work know exactly why this is, but the prevailing theory is that the speech-recognition technology is not yet advanced enough to deal with tonal languages, so the speaking had to be scrapped.

My initial plan was to just blitz through all the Duolingo lessons as quickly as possibly, and then see where that got me in terms of actual Vietnamese ability.
But found that after a few lessons, I got stalled very quickly. The vocabulary was not getting into my long term memory, which meant that I was able to do the initial lessons very quickly, but I got progressively more and more frustrated with the later lessons.
Eventually I decided that well it was certainly fun to get points on Duolingo, by itself, Duolingo was not helping me permanently learn these words.
So I decided to supplement my Duolingo studies with quizlet.
I've been a fan of quizlet for a couple years now--ever since a colleague introduced it to me. I had previously been using it for my students, but also for myself as a way to study terms from applied linguistics (in my quest for professional development). I now started using quizlet for Vietnamese words.

Because I've got a certain personality, I worked through it slowly and methodically. I started out with just 2 words. Then I went up to 3. Then 4. Et cetera.
For the first 25 words, I took all my words from Duolingo. But then I stumbled upon a Youtube video:
100 most basic Vietnamese words (Part 1) from Learn Vietnamese with Annie

This video was appealing for a few reasons. 1 reason was that I thought it would be useful to learn the 100 most basic Vietnamese words. (A criticism that many of my co-workers were making of duolingo was that some of the words they taught weren't very useful).
Secondly, "Learn Vietnamese with Annie" was Southern pronunciation, so this would be a useful counterbalance against Duolingo's Northern pronunciation.
So I decided to make a point of listening to the video once per day, and also to put this vocabulary into my quizlet studies. I started alternating my vocabulary--one new word from Duolingo, one new word from Learn Vietnamese with Annie.
Then I stumbled upon another Youtube video:
Basic Vietnamese Verbs

This second video was actually Northern pronunciation--i.e. not the pronunciation that is most useful to me in my daily life. But the video still appealed to me for a couple reasons.
1) I got advice once from a polygot that the quickest way to break into any new language is to memorize a bunch of basic verbs, and then you can pretty much communicate anything you need to say if you know the basic verbs, a handful of nouns, and gestures.
2) I liked how each of these verbs are in an example sentence, which made them easier to remember.

So, I put this video together with Annie's video into a short playlist. I listened to it once a day, and I also plugged these words into my quizlet studies (alternating with duolingo vocabulary).

Study Vietnamese Playlist

For over a year now, I've been listening to this playlist every day. If you can believe that. (The whole thing is only about 10 minutes in total, so I just put it on in the background in the mornings while I'm getting ready for work.)
You'd think I'd know these words perfectly backwards and forwards by now, right? But actually, very little of it has gone into my memory.

But at least someone's been learning these words, because my Vietnamese girlfriend (who has the patience of a saint) has gotten so used to hearing these videos over and over and over again that every time I play it, she can say the next word before the video does.
She assumed I was also learning these words, and then was shocked when she realized I wasn't. Words would come up when we were out, and she would be surprised that I couldn't recognize them. "Don't you know that word? You listen to it every day?"

The words in the video that I had caught up to on quizlet, I knew in their written form. But oddly enough, I couldn't match the written form to the sounds. Despite hearing them every day. Instead, I had in my mind, stored the sounds of these words according to their English pronunciation (i.e. what their English pronunciation would be if they were pronounced like the English alphabet) and couldn't recognize them when my girlfriend pronounced them in the authentic Vietnamese. Despite hearing them every day.
It was an interesting experience in how exposure to the written form can override any aural input. Under the old Audio-lingual approach, this was why learners were never supposed to see the written form until they had first mastered the pronunciation from aural drills, and I'm beginning to see why. The minute my brain sees the written form, it latches on to that and completely ignores the Vietnamese sounds. (Krashen, in his critique of the audiolingual approach, said that the amount of frustration it caused learners to not see the written form was not worth the benefits. But I'm not so sure.)

Speaking of the audiolingual approach... my manager recommended Pimsleur Courses as the ideal way to learn Vietnamese.
Pimsleur is a series of aural drills--pretty much exactly the audio lingual approach.
I couldn't find any copies in Vietnam, but a friend of mine downloaded a few lessons, and shared them with me.
The good point about Pimsleur is that it did succeed in getting my tongue around the language. After doing a few lessons, I at last felt like a few phrases were ready to roll of my tongue.
The bad part, though, was that it was all Northern Vietnamese.
Not only that, apparently it was a very formal form of Northern Vietnamese that no one uses anymore. When I tried to use one of the phrases that I learned from Pimsleur on my girlfriend after she dropped me off at work, "Chào Chị, Tôi đi" ("Goodbye younger woman, I go"), she got really embarrassed and told me never to say that again. Apparently it was just weird and overly formal. So of course, I used it every day after that, just to tease her. I may not remember any other Vietnamese, but I can remember "Chào Chị, Tôi đi".

The Northern/Southern Vietnamese thing is actually a re-occurring issue with most study materials.
Because Hanoi is the political capital, most Vietnamese textbooks, and study materials are based on Hanoi Vietnamese.
But Saigon is much more populous, produces most of the movies, TV and media, and is the commercial capital of Vietnam. So arguably Southern Vietnamese is more useful, despite the fact that it's very hard to find study materials in Southern Vietnamese.

But more than that, the audio lingual method was just really, really boring. It was working, kind of, but it was hard to keep up the motivation to do 30 minutes every day. (Especially on days that I was busy with work). Eventually I missed a couple days, and then I felt like I had to start back at the beginning again.

Duolingo may not have been very useful for speaking practice, but all the bells and chimes and points gave my brain a real feeling of accomplishment every time I did it. Audiolingual drills, however, did nothing to reward the pleasure centers of my brain.

Eventually, the guy who was loaning me the audio files got sick of it himself, and stopped after a few lessons just because it was so boring. And so when he stopped, I had no one to loan me the files, and so I stopped as well.

Last, but not least, I tried conversation practice with my girlfriend.
Because I knew about second language acquisition in theory, I knew enough to know that I was doing it all wrong.
I needed conversational input from a sympathetic interlocutor, like Krashen said.
I needed practice negotiating for meaning, like Mike Long said.

I needed conversational practice.
So, I arranged with the girlfriend to try to speak Vietnamese with her for 10 minutes every day.
She was very willing, but I soon grew to hate it. I hated not being able to say what I wanted to say. I hated not being able to understand anything she was saying. I got frustrated. I got a headache from trying to make out what she was saying.
Even more frustrating was that I only knew how to ask 2 questions in Vietnamese. And once both of them was used up, I had nothing more to say for the remaining 9 minutes 30 seconds.
Eventually I just gave up with the conversational practice (although I'm meaning to start it up again).

Quizlet Quizzes
Anyway, for whatever it may or may not be worth, here are my quizlet quizzes for learning Vietnamese.
I started off only doing it receeptively--i.e. quizlet would show me the Vietnamese word, and I would type in the English word.
I did it this way mainly because I just did not want to be bothered with messing about with all the tones and the diacritics in the Vietnamese alphabet.
But after a couple months or so, I decided to just bite the bullet and try to learn the Vietnamese alphabet.
I decided that if I was going to get serious about learning Vietnamese, I would have to learn the Vietnamese alphabet sooner or later. And so I might as well just do it sooner. That way I wouldn't have to waste time re-learning words I had already learned.
For a while I kept both lists going--the Vietnamese to English list, and the English to Vietnamese list. But then eventually I decided it was more efficient to just study one list, so now I'm only doing the English to Vietnamese list here.

English to Vietnamese (These are actually mislabeled, because in this set I see the Vietnamese, and type the English. But with 120 sets, I'm not going to go through and re-label them now.
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