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Good news if you plan on learning Vietnamese

Vietnam National University, Hanoi has been tasked to create an online Vietnamese language education site for members of the diaspora. According to the university’s website, the programme will feature six levels and some lessons will be launched this month.

I'm honestly surprised and only realizing now that large powerful countries like the US, China, and Russia don't provide free courses to learn their respective languages. I think that would help push their popularity a lot more. Though I don't think English is necessary because it's basically expected that you learn it as a child regardless of country.

  • AllCatsAreBeautiful [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Grammar wise I find Vietnamese super interesting, but I have a hard "no tonal languages" policy for myself. I can hardly pronounce English, including tone as part of the grammar is gonna fuck me up.

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think every official South African language, of the 11 we have, excluding English and Afrikaans, is tonal lmao.

      It's why westerners primary learn Swahili if they want to learn a language from sub Saharan Africa, as Swahili is not tonal, while something like Zulu is.

      • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Afrikaans is like mangled Dutch, right? Not like Dutch wasn't mangled already of course.

        • beanyor [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          It's evolved both as a pidgin of Dutch that was spoken to/by slaves and an actual version of the 1700s Hollandish dialect that was spoken by settlers at the same time. It's seen as a sister language nowadays.

          I feel like the Dutch calling Afrikaans "mangled Dutch" is a cope. Afrikaans has way shorter words for a lot of things because needless syllables got stripped out when the language got transmitted, leading to it being way easier and quicker to converse in. Dutch tends to have a lot of sentences that feel like 2x longer than they should be, but they're just like that because there is no briefer way of putting something.

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Kind of, like I can understand Dutch when I hear it. But Afrikaans is more like "why use many words when few do trick" in comparison

    • AmericaDelendeEst [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      man I speak english and I spent like literally the first 15 years of mylife with my mom getting mad at me about some kind of "tone" I had and I'm like "i'm just talking"

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      It’s so fucking difficult. I can kiiinda tell them apart when it’s slow but if you speed things up to even half conversation speed I lose it immediately