Greetings,
Welcome back to my column “Mostly Asian History,” the column where I write about Asian history, mostly, which includes Chinese, Chinese-American, and other Asian history which lately includes Vietnam, and sometimes culture and cultural issues, mostly. But the last couple weeks, I’ve been drifting. I’m still not back in the swing of things after my three week trip to Vietnam. My last two columns were on politics or race issues in the USA, which is a great sideline that I do plan to return to but I don’t want to make it the regular focus of this column. One would assume that after a few weeks in Vietnam, I would be more focusd on Asian cultures and history, but the truth is that while in Vietnam, I did not actually spend much time studying Vietnamese or Asian history while there. I did get to a museum, and wrote a piece on it, but little else involving study of history. I did bring a book on Chinese American history (“The Chinese Lady, A Fong Moy in Early America,” by Nancy E Davis. 2019. Oxford University Press.) which I confess I never opened once, and I did finish Matthew Boroson’s San Francisco Chinatown fantasy novel, “The Girl with Ghost Eyes.” (2015, Talos Press) and may write a column on that sometime, but not this week.
But I did speak a lot of Vietnamese, admittedly very bad Vietnamese, and I worked at that, and that definitely counts as “Asian studies.” Therefore, I decided to get things back on track and get in the swing of things again, by writing a column on language learning, learning languages in a hurry, decision that MUST be made along the way, and my experiences in learning Vietnamese in particular. Now I have consistently described my own spoken Vietnamese as “bad” and will explain why I say that as well. I will explain how, if you choose to put in sufficient time and effort, something that is not always possible, you can reduce the chance that your own language learning efforts will result in speaking the target language you are seeking to learn in this “bad” way.
For context, I am an experienced teacher of English as a Second or Additional language, which means I am trained and experienced in teaching English to non-native speakers of all levels (mostly adults, I am not good at managing classrooms of children) with a master’s degree in the subject (MS, TESOL Education, U Albany). While a student, graduate or undergraduate, I formally studied Spanish (which was my minor), Mandarin Chinese, Italian, and, oddly, Sumerian. (It qualified as an elective, meeting a linguistics requirement, for the MS in Tesol Education. I did work at it for the class studying an hour a day, but have since sold all the books and abandoned it.) Through informal and self study, I have dabbled in many other languages with varying degrees of effort. It’s a lengthy list, and I am not going to get into it now.
However, chief among these is Vietnamese. And that is the language I will focus on today in my examples.
My advice to all of you out there, just so I say it, in the meantime, is whenever you have the chance, learn to say “hello,” “Thank you,” and “excuse me” (or the appropriate equivalents) in every language you are able. That little effort will pay back nicely over time.
Why spend time studying a language? There are many reasons and many possible goals, but life is short, time is valuable, and the sooner you determine what your actual goals and intentions are, the most likely you are to be able to create a successful plan to reach those goals and achieve success.
Sometimes, particularly with dead languages, one can focus exclusively on reading and translating documents with no need for either speaking or writing it. One only needs to be able to understand what you are reading, and then explain what it says in a different language, Obviously, the study of Latin (generally) or Biblical languages would be examples of cases where people wish to learn to read languages without speaking them in order to better understand historical texts in the original language. And there are scholars who learn to read Manchu or Classical Chinese and other extinct or nearly extinct Asian languages for the same reason. But there are other cases as well. To use an example local to me, during the American Revolutionary War, the British made arrangements with many German states to provide soldiers to fight with the British army against the American rebels seeking independence. Therefore at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, one of the key battles of the war where the Americans first defeated a large British army, there were many Germans in the British army including many units from the independent German state of Brunswick. Years ago, on one of my visits to the Saratoga US National Historic Park and its visitor center museum, I learned how excited they were as they had found someone who was able to read the hand written, Brunswick dialect, 18th century letters of these soldiers and were learning fascinating details of their experience. (The one that sticks in my mind is that these often young solders sent to war on a distant continent far from home were terrified by the sounds of bull frogs in the night.) Historians spend a lot of time learning to read old documents written in a wide variety of languages.
In my case, when I was working on my MA Thesis at Cornell, a thesis that focused on the international cooperation surrounding the Peking Man paleontological digs of the 1920s and 1930s in China, there was some discussion of whether or not I should put time into learning to read Swedish in order to better explore the role of the Swedes and Swedish organizations that had funded the digs. There was no talk of me being required to learn to speak or understand spoken Swedish, just read it. That was all that was needed to better explore the history of evens in the 1920s and 1930s.
But for most purposes, with the obvious exception of sign languages, if one is going to learn how to use a language, then you will need to learn to speak it and understand it when heard. And that means learning to produce the sounds of the language and recognize the same sounds when listening to the language.
And when learning to speak and understand the sounds of a language, one big decision, and this can be a permanent decision (more on that later), is whether or not the learner chooses to make the choice between a long term commitment to not just learning the rudiments of a language and how to make crude approximations of the sounds of the target language, but instead fine tuning and honing the ability to not just produce the sounds of a language accurately to the satisfaction of an educated native speaker of that language, but also distinguishing between recognizing the distinctions in sound that are part of a language that you seek to learn. And this can take a large and near continuous investment of time.
A second similar decision, and one that often uses the same parameters for decision making, is how much time and attention pay to grammar.
Please understand these decisions can have long term consequences, something that will be discussed more later.
For the moment, to understand these decisions and their ramifications, two concepts that need to be discussed are “phonemes” and “fossilized grammar.”
In order to understand how languages work, and how best to make decisions on how to learn one, it is a good idea to understand a concept called “phonemes.” To give context prior to providing a full definition, a “phoneme” is basically a unit of sound in a language. And the word “unit” is carefully chosen because what is a “unit” of something in one context or one culture can be quite different from what is a “unit” in another culture or context. Obviously a kilogram is very different from a pound as a liter is different from a gallon and when buying something it is important to know not just how many units of something one is buying but also what type of units.
And so it is with sounds.
In different languages, the “sounds” are categorized differently. Obviously, if one speaks a language other than one’s own native language, one often speaks it with a strong accent. In such cases, what is happening is a person is speaking a language other than his native language using the sounds -and units of sound or “phonemes” — of his or her native language. and if one speaks a language using the sounds of a different language the results can be difficult to understand.
Most of us have at some point listened to a person speaking English with a very thick accent and the result is that when they say words like “thick” and “dick” and “tick” as well as “dig” and “tig” and sometimes even “rick” and “rig”, as if they all sound pretty much the same. And when trying to speak to such a person using English, and their style of English, then it can be a real challenge. They seem to pronounce “t,” “d,” “th,” and “r” the same way as if they were the same sounds.
And not only can this often be largely true, but not only do they say these sounds the same way, but to them these sounds all sound largely the same. Their brains take the sounds from their ears and divide and sub-divide it into units differently than an English speaker (or a French or German or Spanish speaker of that matter) would.
At my uninteresting day job, I spend a lot of time advising people on how to deal with bureaucratic problems on the phone. Often this involves, in part, carefully spelling out words or names of things while the caller carefully writes them down. Many of these callers are native Spanish speakers as there are huge numbers of native Spanish speakers in the USA. When spelling words to Spanish speakers a common point of clarification is “B as in ‘baby’ or V as in ‘victor’?” This is because in Spanish the two sounds overlap and are part of the same phoneme. Many native Spanish speakers cannot hear the difference.
Similarly, when I took a one evening a week, 8 week “introduction to Arabic” course at an adult learning center where I taught English and could enroll for free if there were empty slots, it was frustrating to me that so many of the different phonemes sounded the same to me but were considered distinct and different sounds to Arabic speakers. (My goal in the course was not really to learn Arabic but to pick up insights that would make me a better ESL teacher for my Arabic speaking students. It improved my tolerance and patieence for Arabic speakers who found English hard to learn.) Similarly when I tried to learn the basics of Korean as part of a plan to teach English in Korea that fell through. There were dipthonged vowels that sounded the same to me, a native English speaker. (My attempt to learn Korean was largely though self study and language exchange with a native Korean speaker in Taiwan.)
To learn more about phonemes, a good start would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme
If you want to learn to understand and speak a language well, then it is necessary to spend a great deal of time familiarizing yourself with the phonemes of the target language. This requires not only time, but also access to relevant resources. Relevant resources would not only be materials that produce the sounds of the target language but also presented in a way that assists the language learner in distinguishing between the phonemes. This is normally done by presenting “minimal pairs” which the language learner can use to develop the ability to distinguish between the target phonemes.
For instance, native German speakers often have difficulty distinguishing between the English sounds for “V” and “W.” (As do Turkish speakers and native speakers of some other languages as well.) In order to improve their English in this area, a good start is by collecting short words that are identical except for the “V” and “W” sounds. – “wine” and “vine” or “vary” and “wary” and so on. (I have included a video teaching this below just to emphasize the concept.)
But for languages that are extremely different from English or other Western European languages, there can be more complex phonemic issues than those mentioned. A major one when learning languages like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Burmese, among others is tones and recognizing and producing proper tone patterns. And this will require extensive time and effort as well as access to resources.
And when I set out to learn Vietnamese, I was planning to go there soon, and thus had little time, and did not really have access to good resources to do this. To make it more complex there are major differences between the tone systems of the Northern Hanoi dialect of Vietnamese and the Southern Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City dialect of Vietnamese. While I did hire a tutor, and he was a great guy, smart and capable and currently working on a PhD in the medical research field, and a big help, he was from the south and not a trained language instructor. And thus I did not spend the time familiarizing myself with the tones or tones system of the target language. I am not really able to hear them or produce them.
By contrast, when I studied Mandarin, I began as an undergraduate in a class where tones were presented quickly and without systematic training in recognizing them or producing them. (And it was at this point that about 25% of the students dropped Chinese 101.)
I didn’t study hard and ultimately developed a plan to go to Taiwan and teach English where I thought I would be able to pick up the language easily through immersion, basically the same way I had greatly improved my Spanish while an exchange student in high school in Argentina. It didn’t work out that way, which is a story for another time, and I went off to Cornell, years later, where I took a placement test and was sent back to Chinese 101. One of the reasons for this was bad tones. I could not hear or produce the tone patterns of Chinese
The Chinese 101 language professor at Cornell, Stephanie Divo, was excellent. She responded to this by instructing to me to visit a website each days and go through an online drill where the website produced one syllable Chinese words and the listener was required to push a button and identify which of the four Mandarin Chinese tones they were hearing. After doing this daily, in one semester, I went from an average of identifying about 50% of the tones correctly to identifying about 85% of the tones correctly. Now this is a big improvement but it is still far from 100%. And it needs to be said that recognizing a distinction in sounds is a very different thing from being able to produce the same sounds correctly.
With Vietnamese, when I began planning my first trip to Hanoi, I did not have time or the resources to do this properly. So I skipped over it, and just began speaking badly.
An introduction to the subject
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