Foreign Languages on the Eights: 11/27

For the past eight weeks, I've been studying Vietnamese using Robert M. Quinn's Beginner's Vietnamese (Hippocrene Books, 1995). I have finished the first nine chapters of this thirty-lesson text. I need to pick up my pace, though. Most of the vocabulary I've encountered has been very familiar, but there are "new" words as well. Vietnamese is an analytic language, meaning that I don't have to spend time learning declensions and conjugations. Nor do I have to concern myself with word roots changing on me. Vietnamese expresses its grammatical functions through syntax, and Quinn provides plenty of syntactic practice with each lesson. My problem is that Vietnamese is a tonal language, and I'm still not too clear on how various words are pronounced according to their intonation. Also, their vowels are pronounced a little differently from English, and I need an audio model to demonstrate the differences. Also, I need to begin assembling a personal vocabulary list that references where I first learned each word. Of course, with Vietnamese, I learned many of the words in the period of 1979-1982, so I'm just going to "pretend" that I just learned them for the first time with the Quinn book.

Another facet of my foreign language study has been to listen daily to news broadcasts in my "designated" languages, either from Webcasts or from my television (with Spanish). In this area, I have been too lax. I need to set aside some more time for listening, as it does give me a good sense of how the various languages flow (not to mention training me to listening to them more quickly).

As I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I'm not exactly a whiz at computers, and I haven't been able to download a Vietnamese font to write it. Although Vietnamese uses a Romanized script (in spite of its many Chinese loan words), specially-modified nouns and numerous diacritics and tonal markers make it rather cumbersome to write out. And I wouldn't be doing it justice to attempt writing in it using the ordinary fonts that I employ in this blog. But it would be pretty cool, once I've downloaded a Vietnamese font and figured out the keyboard layout, to write a short composition in Vietnamese using my already-learned vocabulary. Maybe eight weeks from now...