OT - Happy New Year

[Peter]

For all Asian RFFers! Happy Lunar New Year! Xin Nian Hao! Happy Tet! May this year of the Dog be a prosperous and peaceful one! Not to mention, many great gears and photos!

 

[RML]

The Year of the Dog is my year. I'm positive I'm gonna win that ZI!

 

[oftheherd]

My dogs and I wish everybody a Happy New Year!

I had a friend in college, an incredibly bright (and attractive) Vietnamese girl who also studied philosophy. She had come to the US with her family when she was 16 not speaking one word of English....by the time she was 18, she had won a very hefty scholarship to college, and jumped straight into the most language intensive course of study possible...no accent, and a level of language far higher than our infamous President.

Anyway, her name was Ngoc, and damnit, she tried to teach me how to say her name for TWO years. I'm pretty good at languages; my first language was Russian, then of course English, and then German and bits of other languages. I'm very good with accents, and my German doesn't sound American at all, rather Viennese.

I kid you not, I couldn't even hear the difference. I mean how many different ways can you pronounce "knock!" A few times I apparently said it right, but I didn't know what I did...there just was absolutely no difference for me. I felt a little like a hamster trying to learn mathematics; there's just no way in hell that I would ever get it! She wanted to teach me Vietnamese, but hell, if I couldn't even say her name right, what chances could I possibly have of every speaking like anything other than a Gorilla?

The two things difficult about Vietnamese, at least for me were the criticality of the vowels, and the tones. I got the beginning ng sound pretty quickly. Since the words are only one syllable long vowels must be correct; there are no following syllables to take up the slack for accents. Oh, by the way, Vietnamese is rich in dipthongs, that is, two, three, or sometimes up to four vowel sounds in one word.

As in all sino languages, tones are an integral part of the word. To answer your question of how many ways can you say a particular combination of consonants and vowels, it depends. In the north they have six tones. In the south, five.
So, the letters "ma" can mean mother, horse, ghost, and I forget what else, just depending on the tone, whether you voice remains level, goes up, falls or whatever. There is also a low tone, and two breaking tones. That is where the North and the South differ. There are two in the north, one in the south. Your friend should have been able to tell you about tones, but I have read that some people using tonal languages use them and hear them, but aren't really aware they are using them. In Vietnames that shouldn't be the case, but might have been, or not being used to that concept, you may simply have not understood how that was important, and how it was to be done. As an aside, when I was in language school, we had a man who was tone deaf. Imagine his problem!

Well, now you and everyone else knows why it was difficult for you. More than you wanted to know perhaps. Sorry if that is the case. I wish I had been able to use my Vietnames more after I left. I now remember little useful. Perhaps if I were forced to use it again it would come back easily, I don't know. Of course, my other languages are the same. You gotta use them or you lose them.

Cheers and a Happy New Year of the Dog to all.