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Before the present day Vietnamese writing system, Quoc Ngu, based on the Latin alphabet with diacritic marks for vowels and tones, there was a writing system based on Chinese characters called Chu Nom. Chu Nom, like Japanese kanji, used Chinese characters with localized pronunciation and original meaning. But this was more or less just a […]
Today I ran across an academic paper of questionable standards on the possible relations or origins of Vietnamese pronouns from a number of languages including Chinese languages, other Southeast Asian languages, and even French, English, and Japanese.
The paper is titled “Đại Danh Từ Tiếng Việt” (Vietnamese pronouns) and the authors are Nguyễn Đức Hiệp and […]
A Japanese-speaker learning Vietnamese or a Vietnamese-speaker learning Japanese will both notice that a lot of words in the other language seem to correspond with words in their native language. And both the Japanese-speaker and Vietnamese-speaker ought to know that the corresponding words (cognates) are part of the Chinese-derived vocabulary that make up about […]
The Foreign Service Institute of the Department (FSI) of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages based on the length of time it takes to achieve Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3) and Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3). The list is limited to languages taught […]
How about some light humor this weekend for those studying foreign languages. Russel Peters is an Indian Canadian comedian from Toronto who often jokes about other ethnicities. In this act Russell peters talks about Vietnamese speaking English, funny Vietnamese restaurant names, and the name of Vietnam’s national currency, the dong.
Russell Peters talking about Chinese […]
If you’ve ever used any speech recognition software you’ll know that the state of the art in this field is still far from perfect, far from the performance of a real human being. Even with big players like IBM and Microsoft, with the latter including speech recognition in its Vista operating system, speech recognition […]
I find that I can learn a language much more rapidly once I’m able to read in that language because it allows you to subconsciously pick up grammar and contextual vocabulary and you can sometimes pick up the meaning of a word you don’t already know without having to look it up in a dictionary. […]
What language do they speak in Belize? Well, the simple answer is that they speak English and are the only English-speaking country in Central America. And if that’s the language you speak and I assume it is since you’re reading this then you can get by just fine in Belize. But of course in Jamaica […]
I recently ran across a new web site for learning languages called Mango Languages, which like every other web application on the Internet right now is in beta. But that doesn’t mean it’s broken or useless. Quite the contrary. And it’s totally free. The courses they currently offer are Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Greek, Italian […]
In schools across America language study has been expanded from the traditional romance languages (French, Spanish, Latin, maybe Italian) and German to now increasingly include Mandarin Chinese.
High Schoolers Prepare For Future, In Chinese
Old Lyme Scott Lunde is a goal-oriented high school student, one who already knows he wants a career in business engineering.
To prepare, the […]