November 15, 2023

Dean Robert Watson

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How to start learning Vietnamese (northern dialect) in Auckland

Person opening their mouth and Vietnamese letters and flags flying out

When I visited Hanoi to meet my partner’s family for the first time, it was really hard to be surrounded by the people I most wanted to talk to in the whole world, but not be able to do so. This is what kick-started my journey to learning Vietnamese, a language spoken by around 🗣️ 85-90 million 🗣️ people. Even if you live in a far off corner of the world like I do here in Auckland, New Zealand, you’ll be in good company.

According to the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute it takes 1100 hours to become fluent in Vietnamese. The good news is that’s about half the time it takes to learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Arabic. By my calculations I’ve logged just over 60 hours in my first year of learning, thanks mostly to the language learning app Duolingo.

What follows are the specific steps I would take in the exact order I would do them, if I was starting to learn Vietnamese again. These steps can be adapted to learning any language.

Đi thôi (let’s go!) 🇻🇳

Learning Vietnamese (northern dialect) in Auckland, New Zealand

Step 1 – Find a compelling reason to start learning Vietnamese

It’s okay to start from a place of ‘I’m just curious’. But that will not be enough to sustain learning.

Some compelling reasons to start learning Vietnamese:

🛫 You are travelling to Vietnam or plan to travel there regularly
💼 Your job requires you to learn
👵🏽 👴🏼 You want to speak to your partner’s parents (my reason!)

Writer Tim Ferriss talks about his reason for learning Japanese in the article How to learn any language in 3 months.

“I used martial arts instructional manuals to compete effectively in judo while a student in Japan. My primary goal was to learn throws and apply them in tournaments. To avoid pain and embarrassment, I had tremendous motivation to learn the captions of the step-by-step diagrams in each instructional manual. Language development was a far secondary priority.”

Step 2 – Get a broad overview of the Vietnamese language and culture. Choose a dialect.

Start with this video, which provides an excellent overview of the Vietnamese language and culture.

Next, decide which dialect you’d like to learn. To help you decide, Google ‘is the northern or southern Vietnamese dialect easier’. My partner’s parents live in the north, so this is why I decided to learn the northern dialect.

You can also start thinking about how you want to learn.

If you only read one article from a world class expert on language learning, make it this one: 12 rules for learning foreign languages in record time by Benny Lewis.

You can also try Googling ‘best way to learn Vietnamese’ or dive straight in by downloading the app Duolingo. After a couple of weeks of trying it out, I decided to pay for an annual subscription (NZ$144.99).

Step 3 – Learn the Vietnamese alphabet

Watch this video of the Vietnamese alphabet in the northern accent. The alphabet in the southern dialect sounds a bit different, so make sure you’re getting your alphabet pronunciation from the right part of the country!

You can also watch me deliver the Vietnamese alphabet here!

Step 4 – Learn the tones

There are 6 phonemic tones in northern Vietnamese. It’s good fun learning how to pronounce these correctly. YouTube search ‘northern Vietnamese tones pronunciation’, then filter videos by view count. Pause the videos a lot and say the words out loud.

Step 5 – Do lots of spoken practice with a northern Vietnamese coach (ideally in-person)

If you live in Auckland, this will require some detective work. My partner has lived here for 10 years and she can count on one hand the number of people she’s met in that time who are from northern Vietnam. BUT THEY ARE OUT THERE! My language-learning journey has meant that I now know more people in Auckland from Hanoi than she does!

In-person coaching costs a lot more than an annual Duolingo subscription, but getting regular spoken practice is where the biggest gains await. This is why you need a compelling reason to learn.

We spend money on the things we care most about. If you’re not willing to spend money on learning Vietnamese, it’s not a high enough priority to learn. Which is totally okay! Even without much money to invest, if you have a compelling reason to learn, you will find a way.

Southern Vietnamese teachers are a lot more common in Auckland. However, getting help from them will only slow down your progress if your goal is to learn the northern dialect. Would you learn how to play clay court tennis from someone who’s known for teaching people how to play tennis on grass? You can, but what you learn is a lot less likely to make you effective at playing clay court tennis. Don’t beat around the bush and take the easy option. Go straight to the source and learn from someone who knows what they’re talking about.

This is the Vietnamese short course I’m currently doing at Auckland Uni. It’s an 8 week course that costs $200). I did a lot of Googling when I started looking for in person coaching. I would recommend you do the same, as new courses or coaches will likely appear all the time. Try Googling ‘learn northern Vietnamese dialect Auckland’. It turns out that the teacher of this course has a southern Vietnamese accent, but after checking that they also knew the northern accent and could teach me this, I went ahead and enrolled anyway. I’m glad I did, because I’ve still learned a lot, despite the occasional confusion between the two dialects. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

The only other places I found in-person coaches for the northern Vietnamese dialect was on Tutoroo and another platform called Superprof. Expect mixed responses and often no response when you reach out to people on these platforms.

Try different coaches. Expect to burn some cash. Eventually you will find a great coach.

Step 6 – Keep learning Vietnamese!

Aim to do a little each day. I have set a half hour reminder in my calendar each evening.

A typical learning day for me currently looks like:

20min – Speaking 🗣️
15min – Duolingo 🦉

To immerse yourself further, listen to some Vietnamese songs on YouTube, watch some Vietnamese TV or movies with English subtitles and join some of these Vietnamese NZ Facebook groups:

You can also set goals, like the one I set to be fluent by the end of 2026.

I’m keeping track of the hours I spend learning and I’m trying to increase the quality of those hours. I will know exactly when I get to 1100. And when I do, I will celebrate it hard.

Take ownership of your learning, set aside some of your paycheck to invest in yourself and you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can learn anything. You’re awesome!

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Art by Sierra Truong

Thanks to Christine Chow, Cynthia Gao and Sierra Truong for reading drafts of this.

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One response to “How to start learning Vietnamese (northern dialect) in Auckland”

Dean Robert Watson

June 23, 2024

My Auckland-based friend Chris used to run a successful Vietnamese language learning community when he lived in Vietnam. The community numbered over 2000 people and was targeted at intermediate to advanced level learners.
With his permission, I share his advice for people learning Vietnamese in Auckland:

“I am self-taught and learnt Vietnamese to a high level over 7 years In Vietnam. Since returning I got a bit lazy and focused on other things, but recently I’ve been making an effort to continue improving.

I would like to share some experiences and personal tips that may help you. First what I did, and then what I would do better and some thoughts on how things have changed.

***Move to Vietnam if you can. Do not live in Quận 2 or Tây Hồ 🤣*** Practising Vietnamese in NZ is so hard. I have found it really challenging to have even 1% of the conversation practice here that I could achieve anywhere, anytime in Vn.

What I did:

1. Learn all the grammar like a nerd. Use a reference grammar. The old English/western ones (Thompson) are ok, but Vietnamese ones are way better. I found some in the bookshops around the universities in Hanoi. The grammar is relatively simple, so you can effectively grasp it all in a short time.

2. Pick a dialect and put all your effort into pronunciation all the time for at least 2 years. By 4 years I was indistinguishable from a native over the phone and was cold calling Vietnamese clients for work. Tones are essential, but vowel quality is even more important. It seems people can guess tonal errors from context, but the wrong vowel has too many possibilities! People have very little tolerance for foreign accents due to a lack of exposure (so few foreigners speak Vietnamese).

3. Learn how to use pronouns in a natural way. Little things go a long way in this regard. Enjoy the madness if you have a Vietnamese family or in-laws.

4. Learn a lot of Hán Việt sino-vocabulary and collocations. It works as logical building blocks and lets you guess a lot of new words. Wiktionary is amazing for this now. I wish I had it back then. ChatGPT is also good at making collocation tables.

5. Listen like crazy. Hours a day. Listen to every dialect. Do not ignore southern because you want to speak northern. Transcribe audio. I could never find anything with subtitles so I was forced to do this. Now Youtube’s autosubs are amazing for learning different dialects, but don’t rely on them.

6. Get a Vietnamese girlfriend/boyfriend. Very useful. Wife/husband, not so much 🤣 since daily conversation is always the same…

7. Expose yourself to real, natural Vietnamese. The language is highly idiomatic and often references agricultural life. Duolingo has random content that has nothing to do with Vietnam. Glossika teaches you “my brother plays tennis”. I never encountered tennis once in VN! It should have been badminton. All the apps basically suck.

8. Learn all the teencode textspeak that everyone uses on the internet and texts. It was way worse when everyone typed on dumbphone dialpads.

What I would do better if I started all over again:

1. Speak louder all the time. If you are speaking Vietnamese and they are responding in English, you weren’t loud enough.

2. Do not listen to one dialect exclusively and ignore the others. Is there any English learner who has only heard American and never ever listened to British English? No way, it’s not a big deal that they are different. We expect them to understand both. The sooner you can hear it all as just ‘Vietnamese’, the better… until you go to Nghệ An.

3. Use Viet-Viet dictionaries rather than translation.

Big revelation 1:
When I was in Vietnam, there were hardly any learning materials, but there has been a lot of development since about 2018. Since there is a lot more demand for Vietnamese classes at university, some academics have been designing various courses based on lexical corpora. Their papers (mostly teaching guides) are public and provide a fantastic guideline for self-study (Note: they are all written in Vietnamese). The eureka moment was when I found a paper that classified the most common idioms according to their CEFR level. It was always a challenge to learn idioms because the only resources for them were reference books that literally contained every single idiom in existence. I am still working on extracting useful info from these papers to fill in my gaps, but I’d be happy to share my findings with anyone who is interested. My old landlord is the head of the language department at VNU, so I am quite keen to get in touch with some of these academics in the future.

Big Revelation 2:
Wiktionary is amazing. I basically live on there. But you have to check both the English page and the Viet page for each word, since they usually have different aspects of information and both are useful. This is a bit frustrating as I try to avoid translation and the English page usually has better etymological info.

The hardest thing about Vietnamese?
Từ láy.
You think you know a word… but do you know its láy? Looking up that random word in a story and can’t find it? Ah it’s just the láy part of an obvious word you know. Từ láy is the most wonderful, colourful and infuriating thing about Vietnamese. And it is very common! There are apparently patterns and ‘rules’ to how they are formed, but I can’t get my head around it. I read in a study that the biggest thing that distinguishes Việt Kiều born overseas is that they have limited ability to use từ láy. If you can learn some early on I think people will assume you have higher proficiency and thats good for keeping the conversation going.”

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