I have once again gotten to a point where I can no longer remember all the vocabulary in the lessons I have learned on the Vietnamese Duolingo. I've been increasingly frustrated the past few weeks, and I think the best thing to do is, once again, just delete my progress and start from the beginning.
(For the record, I had made it all the way up to Section 2 Unit 32: Describe people around you).
I think it's becoming increasingly obvious Duolingo is not a good way to learn Vietnamese, at least not for me. It might be a good way to practice Vietnamese for people who have already learned it, but it's not good for learning the language from scratch. Which is unfortunately what I've been trying to do for the past 9 years.
At some point in the future, I may write a longer post with my thoughts on language learning. But I don't have time to do that at the moment.
So, for the moment, I'll just note that I'm restarting my progress again.
As always, you can follow me on Duolingo here: https://www.duolingo.com/profile/JoelSwagman
9 comments:
This is also a good forum of (illegally uploaded) books:
There are also officially uploaded reformed textbooks here:
Please delete this comment of mine (or edit out the links) once you saw, if possible!
Also I forgot to mention: you may want to steer away from news articles (assuming you do read the news to learn the language) about Western issues or curated from Western outlets, if you want to learn actual Vietnamese.
Sure they may be good for vocabulary for you, and even the Vietnamese language is getting Westernized day by day, not to even mention overseas Vietnamese tend to be affected and already say in a thoroughly Westernized language.
However I don't think it's easy for a foreign learner to know which parts of a translated article are comprehensible to Vietnamese people and so are imitable - most of the time foreign news read funny and not so comprehensible to natives, but people just shrug and not voice an issue, since they lack the knowledge to understand international news to begin with (they might just read the news in English). The point is people may find those Westernized Vietnamese turgid or incomprehensible - they are acceptable in simple conversations, just not when you wanna talk about deeper things.
Unfortunately I can't edit specific comments, but I've reposted your comment with the links deleted, and then deleted the original. (I didn't want to lose the whole comment.)
I'll hopefully do a new post about my thoughts on language learning in the near future, but in the meantime, I've been reflecting a lot on why I've been doing such a bad job of learning Vietnamese, and I've concluded that it's because I've been trying to learn vocabulary without context. When I relaunch my Vietnamese studies, I'm going to try to focus more on listening to conversations, and then trying to memorize conversations. There's a lot of free material already on Youtube, so I'm planning to just use that to start out with.
Was that first link also sensitive? Maybe I'll remove it, just to be safe. Here's the original comment with that link removed:
I'm nobody to opine and I can't imagine what's it like learning Vietnamese as a foreigner. But you may want to try the brute force approach, of focusing mainly on reading actual texts a lot and looking up the dictionary constantly, instead.
The case for this is that Vietnamese is a vague, ambiguous, and (kind of) backward language itself. Trying to cram reading actual texts would serve you better to understand the language. There's a strong love to say ambiguous things in East Asian culture, so you want to know where all those out-of-nowhere things come from. You learned Japanese so you may have known how ambiguous that language is. While I wouldn't say Vietnamese is more ambiguous than Japanese (or equally ambiguous to it), Vietnamese people would mostly not try to, or can, explain to you what they said that confused you. You may have seen often enough Vietnamese people make it like you can understand what they have to say for granted anyway.
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Poems may not be your thing but this may serve somewhat as a resource:
It wasn't, otherwise I would have put it into the original 2nd comment - which should have had only the links at first so you might as well have just deleted it.
Actually even the textbooks link doesn't seem to be any sensitive, I just wanted to be safe. It's an official site by the publisher after all. I don't know why they just put them up publicly like that.
Also
>not _so_ comprehensible to natives
should be:
>not _completely_
>>It wasn't, otherwise I would have put it into the original 2nd comment
Yes, of course. My mistake.
One last note to bother you with, which is kinda obvious and maybe even redundant or irrelevant to you, but I just write it out here anyway in case it's not clear that it naturally leads to this:
the "you may want to steer away from news articles about Western issues or curated from Western outlets" is actually more true for any translated Western thing in general, be it novels or essays or Wiki articles, not just news articles (at least the Vietnamese editorial does try to make the language comprehensible). Reasons and logics for that should be enough on my 2nd comment already. To repeat again, basically it's very hard to translate Western stuff what their expressions say functionally, so Vietnamese translators have to resort to translate only the literal meanings without adapting to proper Vietnamese.
Sorry for bothering you again. You don't need to reply or might just ignore this comment.
No bother. I appreciate the advice.
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