On Vietnamese Writing | Hacker News Reader

On Vietnamese Writing

limdauto.github.io

59 pointsluu21 comments

I've been living here in Vietnam for five years now and read & write Vietnamese pretty well. Written Vietnamese may not be as elegant as Chinese but it's very practical and I think it gives the Vietnamese a huge leg up in learning Western languages and dealing with the Western world. For any Westerner, learning to read & write the language is vastly easier than Chinese, Khmer, or Thai. Which is a good thing since mastering the tones is quite difficult.

In a lot of casual conversation people don't even bother to write the accents and tones out because it's a bit of a hassle on a mobile phone, which makes it look even plainer.

As another commenter said, the plainness of a lot of everyday written Vietnamese has more to do with utilitarian fonts and poor typography than the language itself.

I found writing Thai to be not so difficult to learn. It uses an alphabet, although it does have more letters than English and some tone marks. But it is very regular and pronunciation is consistent. I haven't studied Vietnamese but at first glance it seems not much easier than learning the Thai alphabet. Learning tones is difficult, as you said. I couldn't even hear them at first - the words for "news", "rice" and the color "white" all sounded the same to me. Trying to put together sentences resulted in some hilarity when I mixed up tones for words that differ only in tone like "dog", "horse" and "come here".

Question: How many consonants, vowels and tone marks in Vietnamese?

Hope I'm not too off topic, but what/where did you use to learn the alphabet? Each time I try, I am overwhelmed and I can't seem to find some good starting point.

I had a tutor I met once a week for 3 months. We studied one page, a page that listed all the letters in their tone groups plus the diacritic marks. She would give me homework of vocabulary words that I had to look up in a Thai-English dictionary which forced me to learn the alphabetical order. I would also practice writing them. We would work on pronunciation at our weekly sessions. It was the tones that were tough for me, thought I'd never get them because I just could not hear the difference.

Okay, thanks.

Tones are the hard part, but if you get a native speaker to drill you on them every day for a month or two you can get good enough at them to make yourself understood.

There are five different tones in Vietnamese, although in the southern half of the country two of them sound almost the same. They enunciate more clearly in the north.

> It uses an alphabet, although it does have more letters than English and some tone marks.

Korean's even simpler than that. It looks a little like Chinese, but the "glyphs" are just groups of consonant-vowel-consonant or null-vowel-consonant, and there's basically nothing tonal, just some hard and soft versions of consonants. I literally learned how to read Korean one afternoon 20 years ago and can still do it.

The brutal thing about Thai, for me, was learning the matrix of how consonant class, tone markings, and the "live" or "dead" status of the syllable all came together to determine the tone of the syllable. There's a little lookup table, which I've so far found impossible to memorize. Of course, it's totally ingrained in the ear of any native Thai speaker, and they hardly know they're doing it.

Written Vietnamese may not be as elegant as Chinese ...

Would be curious as to what, specifically, you mean by this.

(BTW, I have no knowledge of either language family).

Look at the history of a Chinese character like 馬, which means horse [1]. You can see how it's a drawing of a horse, and has evolved over centuries. There's plenty of scope for emphasizing particular strokes etc.

Modern Vietnamese uses the Roman alphabet, so their word for horse is "ngựa" (probably).

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Translingual

Fascinating. Thanks.

It's unfortunate that the article does not provide any source for its central claim. All references in western literature point to quốc ngữ being by far the most widespread script by the beginning of the 1920s, largely owing to the colonial administration pushing for it aggressively.

There was no choice to make by 1945, and indeed none was made.

The population of Vietnam in 1945 wasn't anywhere near 45 million, instead it was a bit under 25 million. This article seems to have been written by someone who only has a strenuous grasp of Vietnam's history, and is very likely confusing the declaration of independence in 1945 with the reunification in 1975.

In addition, I find the claim crediting the Communist government for adopting Latin character to be bogus. If this is true, then south Vietnam would be a lot more illiterate than the north and not the thriving commercial and research center it is today, simply because these government-sponsored programs would be most effective in the northern part where the central government is. In fact, the Communist government was driven out into hiding in rural area as soon as they declared independence. So they wouldn't have the time or mean to implement country-wide education reforms. As one data point, my grandma, who did not come from privileged background and was born in 1920 and like most of her peers spoke and wrote French and Vietnamese fluently, received all her education prior to 1945. I'm pretty sure the Latin writing adoption was started much earlier and it was more natural simply because it's closest to French, which was the official language at the time

I know nothing about Vietnam. But a trend in centrally controlled countries is often the further near the center one is, the more dependent on being fed they are.

The further away, the more they get used to feeding themselves, so when the state takes a reduced role in daily economic life, for example partially deregulating industries, as they have in Vietnam, those that were feeding themselves are now able to flourish, and where government subsidies are taken away, areas turn into comparative rust-buckets.

A lovely article. I highly recommend this ebook on Vietnamese typography for anyone interested in learning more about the modern writing system: https://vietnamesetypography.com/

It's aesthetically unpleasing because most of the default fonts on OSes weren't designed for vietnamese writing. Add on to that, a bigger line height is also important to not make paragraphs look all cramped up because of the accent marks taking up vertical space.

This goes to bit of tangent:

"In my opinion, we are, unfortunately, a people who define ourselves not by who we are but by who we are not."

That's the only recipe of identity that I'm aware of. Personal identity seems to be just bunch of descriptions you assume. For you to be "good at math" someone has to be bad at math, or the description is meaningless. National identity is just some approximate lowest common denominator of similar sort.

The best we can do is to avoid putting ourselves on good - bad axle and try to find descriptions that are different and neutral.

I agree that the expression is confusing. It looks like they are unable to define themselves.

I'd like to respectfully disagree. Statements like that do come from lack of conscious definition of identity. Which for a nation is only possible if there is very strong emotional identity. Then there is no need.

About 86% of Vietnamese are ethnic Vietnamese. I come from similar country and recently visited JFK airport. The fuss Americans have with the flag seems like compensating for something nations like mine have naturally. It's probably manifesting the difference between civic state and nation state.

I'd say both you and the parent have misunderstood that. Of course defining yourself by what you're not is essential to the notion of identity.

But that's a general platitude too, when "the thing you're not" is something like "bad at math".

What TFA meant was that the Vietnamese define their themselves more from having resisted those enemies and fought those struggles, so, in another way to put it, as a fighting, determined and stubborn nation -- as opposed to other, non conflict oriented national characteristics (e.g. americans are self defined as "individualists", italians as passionate, german as hard working and logical etc, which are not things that stem from conflict as is the case with the Vietnamese).

I tried to google translate the poem. It's far from perfect, but it gives you a good idea about what it conveys and makes the rest of the article easier to understand:

    i, t hook both.
    short i dotted, t long horizontal;
    e, f, l also a species.
    ê cone hats, long l more body;
    o rounded like an egg.
    cell, hat, beard Matt extra time

Reply on news.ycombinator.com