ポリグロット(数か国語に通じる人)を目指して~
中国人の父にオランダで育てられました。 日本語を勉強しながら、ベトナム人の彼氏と一緒に暮らしています。

Tuesday 23 June 2015

10 reasons to start learning Vietnamese

Ever thought of learning one of those amazing sounding Asian languages? What pops into the mind of most people at the beginning (including myself) is of course Chinese, Japanese and Korean. But how about one of those beautiful languages which are not thought of frequently? Such as Tagalog, Thai or Vietnamese? Imagine studying one of these languages and blowing people away by doing something totally different. Surprising them with your newly achieved skills and introducing them to a language which is so unique.

Vietnam is an amazing country and Vietnamese is an amazing language. For both beginning and advanced language learners, Vietnamese is a perfect language to study. According to the graphic below its difficulty is rated as 'medium' meaning it's significantly different from English but can be learned with some devoted studying. Since Vietnamese is not a common language being studied it's also perfect for the aspiring polyglots among us.
Now let's get to my 10 reasons to convince you even more!

1 - Vietnamese is spoken by 75 million people. which means they have more speakers worldwide than Korean!

2 -  There are large communities of Vietnamese speakers in Australia, the United States and other countries. In the US it's even the sixth most spoken language and in France it's the most spoken Asian language.

3 - Vietnamese is heavily influenced by other languages. Major influences in the early days from Chinese, later by French (through colonialism) and English (trough globalization).
Which makes it easier for you learning Vietnamese if you already speak one of these languages.

4 -  Vietnamese uses a Latin alphabet with accent markings
So that means no difficult memorizing like Chinese or Japanese.

5 - Vietnamese is a challenging language for (aspiring) polyglots, since it's probably something completely different than you're used to. However perfectly doable for beginners since it's a language of medium difficulty.

6 - There are only three accents in Vietnamese language (Northern, Southern & Central)
unlike for example Chinese which has a different accent for almost every part of the country (Yue, Wu, Min, Hakka etc.)

7 - There are only six tones in Northern Vietnamese and even fewer in the other dialects.

8 - Vietnamese, like many other Asian languages is an isolating language, which means it does not use different marking for tense, gender, number and so on.

9 - Also like many other languages (such as Japanese) it uses the SVO (subject-verb-object) word order for their sentences.

10 - And last but not least; Vietnam is a beautiful country, with great history, delicious food, and kind people who will be impressed by you speaking or even trying to speak Vietnamese.

I hoped this sparked your interest for this beautiful language.
If you want to start with Vietnamese I suggest reading my post learning Vietnamese Northern or Southern accent.

Thank you for reading!

~ mei mei


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