In the previous post I mentioned a main word list for students wanting to comprehend English, the General Service List. A sister list to the GSL is the Academic Word List (AWL) which contains a further 570 words which are important to university students and aren’t contained in the GSL. At that Wiktionary link, the words […]
Once you’ve learned how to pronounce Vietnamese and have a handle on the relatively simple-to-learn grammar, learning Vietnamese is mostly a matter of picking up vocabulary. What you’ll learn in books is the the tip of the iceberg, and may even include a lot of words that aren’t so frequently used.
For English, there is the […]
The Vietnamese word for leather is the same as the Vietnamese word for skin, da. However, the tropical climate in Saigon means that there is little chance for people to actually wear clothes made out of “skin”. More likely they would be wearing bông, which means cotton but can also mean flower. Nhựa is the […]
Have you ever wondered why the Japanese calendar system has seven days just like we have all over the West and why the meetings of Sunday and Monday seemingly match up (”sun” day and “moon” day) while the rest of the Japanese days are so different from what we use in English or in any […]