wow you are extremely smart to figure this out. The classical classification in Vietnam was 8 tones like you mentioned. The new classification of 6 tones was introduced by the French during colonism period. Most Vietnamese people nowadays don't know about the classical classification of 8 tones.
This was very helpful. I'm not sure a native Vietnamese speaker could have done this lesson. It is very good for a native English speaker to do this lesson. He understands what we are doing wrong and why. Great lesson!
Well, just like many Americans don't understand their language as much as learners from other countries. Usually if it's your language you don't go and analyze it. You just naturally and subconsciously speak it.
As a Vietnamese and also someone learn a but linguistics, I really enjoy this. Btw I do can realize 2 kinds of 'dấu sắc' and 'dấu nặng' based on Northern accent, but me as a Huế people, I also try pronounce those words with Huế accent and I feel they're different at all tho. Hope to see others opinions too😁 Tbh, I do think Vietnamese people are way too focus on teaching Vietnamese language based on the writing alphabet but not in phonetically way. Seems like Vietnamese people havent had enough linguistic research on our own language so we cant understand our own language properly and teach it for foreigners.
Cái này nghiên cứu ngôn ngữ chuyên sâu sẽ có. Còn thực hành thông thường chỉ 6 là đủ bởi 2 thanh kia sẽ được phát âm 1 cách tự nhiên hoặc biến mất tùy vùng miền.
Yup, most Vietnamese language instructors are completely unaware of the natural sound changes they do when they speak their mother tongue & expect non-native learners to "just know" or pick up these phonological rules. It's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE for untrained ears & vocal chords.
no need to be discouraged because the phonetics in English differ a lot more and the pronunciation is in syllables at once so Korean and Vietnamese I'm not surprised at all, Vietnamese linguistics is still better than English I have to guess every time the pronunciation😅
This is so awesome to have a non-native vietnamese speaker as a teacher in the videos, because he knows all the struggles and things that non-native must be learned! Disclaimer, i consider myself still as a beginner. After your previous video about tones, i started to pay attention to differences in the same tones. I can feel that many tones, if not the all, have their own quirks. Recently I started to notice this distinction of two different dot tones. Now this video explained it much more!
@@daotruong2275 That’s no opinion but fact 😂 The hardest sounds in Finnish are: ö, y and distinguishing between ä and a plus double constants, that’s it! You can count them on one hand lol. On the other hand grammar is 15 cases, passive/active voice and the spoken/written language difference. Vietnamese has one tense 😂 but hella weird sounds excluding tones. Beautiful languages either way.
Cô giáo có cho bạn biết: ia nờ = iên hăy IAn = IÊn ? Tương tự, ia ngờ = iêng, hăy IAng = IÊng, Tiếng Việt = TíaNG VịaT. .... kw = cw = qu (w=uơ, uờ là phần cuối của âm u. k + w = c + w = c + uờ = qu) .... Âm /to/ khi khéo dài hoặc nói thật chậm sẽ nghe thấy 2 âm: to, oooo . Âm /hoa/ khi kéo dài hoặc nói thật chậm sẽ nghe thấy 3 âm: hoa, oa, a. (Tiáng Viạt (Tiếng Việt) không có quy tắc ráp vần , thực chất là THÔNG CHUYỂN KHẨU HÌNH ÂM (giữa 2 khẩu hình âm là 1 khẩu hình âm: giữa âm i và âm ê là âm ia (khi khẩu hình đang ở âm i thì phát âm ê sẽ sinh ra âm ia, nên iê=ia, iêN=iaN, hiên=hian. Tưang tự, ươ=ưa, uô=ưa....). Và tiếng Việt không phải tiếng đơn âm mà là NHIỀU LỚP ÂM LIÊN TIẾP: phiên âm đầy đủ của từ hoa là /hoa, oa, a/, đã là /đã, ã, a/...không phải chỉ có 1 âm đâu) Một số khác, nên thêm ký hiệu w vào tiếng Việt sẽ giải quyết đươc nhiêu vấn đề (w = uơ, uờ gần giống /w/ của tiếng Anh nhưng đặt ở cửa miệng (front sound) hay nó chính là phần đuôi của âm u khi kéo dài hay khi nói u bạn đưa cằm lên rồi hạ xuống sẽ nghe thấy âm w (uơ, uờ) rõ hơn): Âm h trong từ ha thì phát là hờ, nhưng trong từ hoa sẽ phát là hw (huơ, huờ): hoa = hwa, wa = oa, wang = oang, uy = wy = wi, hwang=hoang. Uyên=wyên=wian (do yên hăy iên = ian). TưaNG tự với l, ng, b...có thể phát thành lw, ngw, bw trong lua, ngoa, boa thành lwua, ngwa, bwua. Tiếng Việt (Tiáng Viạt) có trên 50 âm mới đầy đủ. Người Việt học tiếng Việt dễ vì hầu hết họ biết nói trước khi biết đọc, viết. Học sinh đến lớp chỉ cần nhớ mặt chữ cái rồi ghép cho đúng âm là xong dù họ không hiểu bản chất tạo âm của tiếng Việt. Nhưng với người ngoài nước và người dân tộc thiểu số thì rất khó học theo theo kiểu ráp vần. (Học như con VẸT)
It's one of the most important videos for anyone trying to learn Vietnamese. Every teacher should start with this video before explaining ANYTHING about pronunciation and tones. It should be at the beginning of every single teaching material. I can't emphasize strongly enough how valuable this video is and it's been already 3 year since I watched this for the first time and everything made sense immediately. Btw... I owe you, John. I really do. Thanks
I'm Vietnamese, and this video make me think more about my own language as a strange language, it's deeper in the core that a lot of points i'd never noticed.
this makes so much sense, i`ve been learning vietnamese for one year and haven`t noticed this, but when you explained the difference it made so much sense, like I would have pronounced all these words correctly because my teacher would pronounce them like that, but now i am aware that there are some real differences!!
Is this young student the same one who explained how to pronounce dấu hỏi? He's really helpful, thank you. i did much of this without realizing if tvo collaborated w their students to make a textbook youd make a lot of money
Actually and amazingly, I'd discovered that Vietnamese has 8 tones when I was only 4. I'd told my mom and some of my friends but no one supported me on this view.
Thanks for this video. Pretty interesting. Also kudos to you for your effort in coming up with this tone system independently. Most contemporary Vietnamese speakers and learners might not know this, but this 8-tone system was thoroughly studied and taught by Vietnamese scholars before the modern Latin-based script became widespread. According to this system, the Vietnamese tones were traditionally consisted of 4 kinds: 平 bình, 上 thướng, 去 khứ, 入 nhập, each one of them split into two classes: 陰 âm and 陽 dương. 平 bình is split into 陰平 - âm bình and 陽平 - dương bình, respectively equivalent to contemporary thanh ngang and thanh huyền, 上 thướng is split into 陰上 - âm thướng and 陽上 - dương thướng, respectively equivalent to contemporary thanh hỏi and thanh ngã, note that accents in the southern dialect typically don’t separate these two classes, the people there learn to write them as two tones nowadays but they sound the same when they speak, 去 khứ is split into 陰去 âm khứ and 陽去 dương khứ, which are respectively equivalent to contemporary thanh sắc and thanh nặng in sounds that end with ‘soft consonants’ like n, m, ng, nh (per the video’s explanation), 入 nhập is split into 陰入 - âm nhập and 陽入 - dương nhập, equivalent to contemporary thanh sắc and thanh nặng in sounds that end with consonants like t, p, c, ch (per the video’s explanation). I read this from a 19th-century booklet that presented one Vietnamese script based on the language’s phonology. This script has never been adopted widely. This system is also discussed in a book about Vietnamese and chữ Nôm, see Khái luận văn tự học chữ Nôm, by Nguyễn Quang Hồng, NXB Giáo dục, 2008, p. 483. It’s also referenced on the Wikipedia page about the Vietnamese language (page in Vietnamese). Personally I’m strongly of the opinion that chữ Hán-Nôm (Hán and Nôm scripts) need to be made mandatory in the teaching of Vietnamese language, alongside chữ quốc ngữ (Latin-based script). Vietnamese learners will be a lot more confused in more areas and will find the language painfully difficult the further they learn it knowing of only chữ quốc ngữ as our writing script.
As a Vietnamese person, if you truly want to achieve the highest level of pronunciation and improve quickly, here is my advice: the following letters: a, â, ă, e, ê, i, o, ô, ơ, u, ư, y. Each of these letters can have 6 tones, which means we have a total of 72 pronunciation styles. Please note that these 72 styles mentioned here are for individual letters. If you combine these individual letters, they will form different pronunciation styles: ươ, uô, uê, iêu, ưa, iu, ao, iếp. Only the word "iếp" is default with a tone mark, that's why I specifically mentioned it. For the other 7 compound words, they will have all 6 tones, resulting in a total of 42 pronunciation styles. When considering reading and recognition alone, we have a total of 115 pronunciation styles. Please note that these are words that are connected to their respective tone marks, and you need to combine these words with at least one more letter to give them meaning and form complete vocabulary.
In Vietnamese we have a wordplay called “nói lái” or “vần đảo” for rapping where we mix and match consonant and vowel of syllables to create new fun sounding word. For example: còn thơ becomes cờ thon. It does get tricky for hard vowel is in the equation. Your table perfectly explains how “thìn đẹp” would become “thèm địt” when we try to do the wordplay. Thanks for the eloquent explanation.
Holy hell in the "Động vs Độc" section, I just realized that the complications come from the FACT that it is pronounced in a Northern Vietnamese style, so it sounds so freaking similar. In the Southern manner, they are SO distinct, and you wont have ANY problem distinguishing it.
@@Jumpoable LoL, sorry my man. I was born and raised in SaiGon, South Vietnam. Naturally I speak the Southern Vietnamese accent. When I first listened to people speak Northern Dialect or Middle Dialect, it sounded like a different language to me. On speaking, you just have to pick one dialect and master it. About the listening part, it is just training & exposure. Once your ears are trained and exposed enough, you will understand other dialects. You may not able to speak like the people from different dialect, but you will understand them just fine. 😅
Agree with southern accent. The tones are pronounced more distinct. Northern accent makes those tones sound too similar, almost merged together. This makes it harder for the non native speaker to hear, learn to speak.
Anh này học accent miền Bắc nên đang phân tích dựa trên cách phát âm của miền Bắc. Mỗi vùng miền có cách phát âm khác nhau. Ví dụ: Ở miền Nam, từ "ngả" và "ngã" sẽ có cách phát âm khó phân biệt.
As a Vietnamese, I never knew that "dấu nặng" and "dấu sắc" have two different tones until I watched this video. I just pronounce it in the way that is familiar for me. Thanks for the interesting video, I understand how difficult it is for non-native speakers to learn Vietnamese 😢
This is no theory, it's simply true. Linguistically the reason for this is that in closed syllables (those ending in hard consonants), it is generally difficult to distinguish multiple tones. Hence, only the simplest contrast exists in such syllables: that between high and low pitch. Confusingly, the sắc and nặng symbols got reused for these tones. This phenomenon (closed syllables having few tones, often just 2) is cross-linguistic; an identical phenomenon exists in Cantonese. You did miss one important point about dấu nặng, which is that in open syllables, it results in them being cut off with a *glottal stop*. There is some assimilation like that you talk about (eg chọn ends with a hold in the /n,t/ position) but the primary cut off is always a glottal stop, regardless of how the open syllable ends. Btw- none of this final cut-off of nặng business applies to the southern accent, where nặng in open syllables in something like a lower dấu hỏi
It's still blowing my mind that you watch these, tiền bối Dan. Thanks for your input - as you know well, I'm very far from a linguist, most of the content here came from my own amateur grappling with the phonetics of the language. I found that picturing a word like 'bạn' as a mid-tone 'bat' with a creaky, glottalised end to be a useful heuristic for correct pronunciation - although sometimes northerners do pronounce it more like baʔn for emphasis. Whether or not the primary cut off is the glottal-stop or the denasalised consonant is a question for people far more educated in this area than myself.
For Chinese speakers, the hard syllables are called 入聲 in the Chinese tonal system. In the Chinese tonal system, there are 平上去入 4 categories. The 4 categories were split into "yin 陰" syllables and "yang 陽" syllables. Hence, there are 8 tones.
Let's not describe them using a model from a foreign langauge that is centuries old (& hence OUTDATED). These are VIETNAMESE WORDS and VIETNAMESE TONES with VIETNAMESE SOUND CHANGES. Did the examples given in this video sound like Chinese tones to you? Putonghua, Cantonese, Hokkien or Shanghainese? Nope. NONE of the above. If you speak Hakka, then PERHAPS the glottal stop one might just vaguely be mapped onto the Vietnamese tonal system. Yes it's fun when comparing historical linguistics but using an archaic Chinese tonal system to learn Vietnamese helps NOBODY.
@@Jumpoable I am sorry but you might have missed the point. First of all, this comment is for Chinese speakers. Second of all, according to Wikipedia, 四聲- 現今各種漢語標記聲調仍然沿用平、上、去、入四類聲調。
I've only taken 3 Vietnamese lessons. Been struggling with the tones. In my head I knew that I must have not been alone in noticing the inconsistencies in the dau sac tones in the words I learnt. But I didn't bother to look up the internet. I thought one day this question will be moot when I'll get the hang of the tones. So, coming across this video is a god send. Thank you so much!
In other tonal languages the same concepts are called open and closed syllables or live and dead syllables. Cantonese counts the tones as different depending on which of those two categories the syllable is. Thai and Lao count them as the same. Mandarin only has open/soft consonants.
This actually reminds me and makes me think of the tones of Cantonese, many people argue between the 6 tones vs 9 tones because the tones for the checked syllables, ending in a p, t, k, sounds, all sound different than the tones of the non-checked syllables. Really interesting!
Actually for Cantonese it's not really a thing. There are 6 tones in HK Cantonese, 7 spoken in Guangzhou. The -p -t -k finals are just that, consonant finals, but they map within the 6 Cantonese tones. Vietnamese, however, as explained in this video, CHANGES their tones as well as consonant pronunciation with certain endings. So yeah, it's an 8 tone system. Together with a complex CONSONANT FINAL pronunciation shifts. But yes, in natural or very theatrical speech, Cantonese could double those 6 tones & may go up to 12 tones, but nobody's teaching 12 tones to non-native Cantonese learners. SIX TONES is quite enough, NOT 9 because they simply are not needed.
@@Jumpoable I'm struggling to understand how many "tone/pitch contours" Vietnamese actually has with all considered. Like you said, In Cantonese you'd have 6 or 7, with the clipped finals distributed among the level tones contours. In Cantonese, you'd have low & high rising tones. With this you'd have still have 8 distinct tone "contours" in Vietnamese?
don't give up just yet, Vietnamese is not easy, but it's not that difficult, watch this video of us to find out why ruclips.net/video/dRjldjs4u5M/видео.html&pp=ugMICgJ2aRABGAE%3D
Vietnamese native speaker here and I can’t help laughing at your comment. Keep pushing on. You’ll get there one day. Maybe learn some Chinese will help you expand your vocabulary faster.
I always noticed that but I'm studying all by myself and thought that it was just because I'm not a native or because of how people talk in daily life. tysm for this video
Thank you for making this video. I've started analyzing Vietnamese phonetics before I start learning the language, and I was wondering why they were pronouncing words differently with the same tone marks. I played them back multiple times and was scratching my head 😂 like why are they spelled with the same tone mark?! I've studied Mandarin, Cantonese, and Thai, and Cantonese has a similar thing between soft and hard endings like sî and sîk. Thai has 5x2 tones depending on long vs short vowels. In Thai the ending also changes the tone based on the spelling, making the orthographic system rather complicated; that's on top of multiple spelling redundancies like in English! 😆 รถ รด รส, are all "rót" homophones, but spelled differently: R-Th, R-D, and R-S, like rain, rein, and reign, but even crazier cause they're all pronounced as different consonants at the beginning of a word, but as and ending they're all "T" sound, and then there isn't even a vowel in there! 🤣 Took me over 40 hours of study for Thai akson to sink in, vs Korean hangul which took about 20 minutes and Hindi devanagari which took ~40 minutes to get, but to be fair, I learned devanagari after Thai akson, so it felt like easy street! Viet orthography looks like it's gonna be a bit tricky to learn, but after this video, things make a lot more sense. With that said, I definitely agree that there are 8 tones. There are people who say Cantonese has 9 tones, but the distinction is kinda nonexistent for 7 and 8 (sī 1 and sīk "7", si 3 and sik "8"). So I would argue that there are only 7, since sî actually has a different tone pattern from sîk, which would be the 6th and "9th" tone, but it's really more like 7th tone. It's actually kinda funny, cause the Cantonese 6 and 7 is similar in an inverse way of the two sac tones, since Canto 6th goes from mid slightly down, and 7th is flat slightly low, starting and ending at the low end of 6th tone. Language learning can be such an adventure 😂 esp when you go beyond the Indo-European family. Korean phonology was mind blowing after learning Japanese, how they're similar yet Korean has 8 vowels rather than 5 like in Japanese, and Korean aspirates the S, and have no F, yet they pronounce the R and Sh the same way as Japanese Namaste 🙏🧋🌺🌈
This is really interesting. What do you think of the idea that the hard/soft syllable variants of these tones could be considered allophones? I like your approach, thank you for this! I’m learning Southern dialect (because living in the US, that’s what I’m surrounded by!) so some of the tonal issues are different. I wish someone would analyze southern tones from your angles as well. I have often noticed that Vietnamese teachers will demonstrate a tone and then say it differently in a word, and found it confusing. So rather than try and pronounce them like I’ve been taught I “should” say them, I’m going to be listening more to what they’re actually saying, with these issues in mind. This sort of teaching issue seems so common with native speakers hearing allophones as “the same” or hearing according to an official analysis without ever stopping to consider the inconsistencies between theory and practice.
Hey, thanks for commenting! It's true that the hard nặng and soft nặng are in complementary distribution, so they could be considered allophones of each other. But remember that hard nặng is *also* in complementary distribution with all the other 6 tones too. So why not consider all the hard nặng words hard huyền instead? Writing 'bạt' as 'bàt' would make just as much sense, considering both hard nặng and huyền are low, smooth sounds. It could be that it's worth treating the extra 'hard' tones as seperate tonemes, in the same way we consider the english 'h' and 'ng' as seperate phonemes despite also being in complementary distribution. Ultimately, I'm not a linguist, and I'm not the right person to draw the distinction between an allophone and a phoneme. But I do think that, allophone or not, it's worth understanding the distinction as a vietnamese learner.
@@JH-ty2cs Not a linguist? Well this right here sounds like a very linguistically grounded and sound description and statement of the analytical options! But I salute your humility. Thanks a lot for this very useful and insightful video!
I have been learning Vietnamese for 2 months now and you helped me save much time and effort with your lesson. I noticed there was something wrong with the tones since I speak mandarin chinese and I'm already used to tones. I had put it aside for a while but it was bothering me lol. Finally got it figured out. Thanks mate ! Your Vietnamese just sounds awesome to me btw :)
Thank you so much for your excellent explanations of the tones in actual usage. It came at the right time for me, since I have been studying Vietnamese on my own. Your work is great!!
I actually want to make a point here, since we both integrate the "pitch" notion to Vietnamese pronunciation. "Nhấn mạnh" actually still has the first word's pitch higher than the second one (well I do some vocal training so I could say my ears are tuned more or less). But yes, it's true that we can break down the tones system in Vietnamese into pitches. From how I speak and how I hear native people speak in a normal manner, they usually go in this ascending scale: huyền - nặng - ngang - hỏi - ngã - sắc (ofc, considering only the ending sound, since "ngã" and "hỏi" are uttered with a bit of riff)
Great video! Just some context: this concept is quite common among tonal languages, in Thai the syllables you called hard/soft are called dead/alive, depending on whether they end in a "sonorant" (i.e. a consonant which you can extend forever like n, m or l) or a non-sonorant (like t, k, p). In Thai this actually influences which tone a syllable gets! :)
Ah Ok. This is why sometimes it use ไม้ตรี (rising tone) or ไม้จัตวา (falling tone) in our language to represent the different tone for Dấu sắc. The ending consonant has a different indication. I have to change it accordingly to match the exact sound for Dấu sẵc but sometimes get lost. Talke about Dấu Nặng, I also used to ask my VN friend who is a teacher and perfect in Thai in all areas, speak like a native + perfect writing. Why "học" pronounce like it has พ/บ/ป (IPA - p̚) instead of letter ค/ก (IPA - k̚) in Thai when nặng comes to play? She explained to me but I didn't get it at that time. So I use it directly instead of understand it. This is why it's intermittent lost during the learning if new words come up for me. "ng" sound also gets me confuse since we have the letter ง to represent this sound (IPA - ŋ) where the position doesn't matter either initial or final consonant. But in Vietnamese languages, it seems change to m or ม in Thai (IPA - m) when it's final consonant e.g. "không". I have to close my mouth suddenly after pronouncing ŋ to match the final m like Vietnamese speaker. To my ears, it's weird in the first place since it's not exactly ŋ sounds that consonant ng represent. Now I just go with the flow by using "ŋm" as it said in IPA for ng final consonant. Back to the word "học", I've learned that It pronounces like โอะ sound in our language without any tone marker for "ọ" which is quite identical and then change final consonant from C to P / ก to พ/บ/ป to represent final sound p̚. But your summary chart is far more clear to me like an advance alarm before pronouncing VN words. The hard part of Vietnamese pronunciation for Thai people who speak only the standard one is ngã sound. But It's not the case for Sounternner Thai since we got far more tone than the central one. Need some time to familiarize then tweak a little bit. Anyway, it takes time to make it perfect like a native speaker. Otherwise, we'll speak like a robot and weird to their ears. :) Thank you very much for your summary and the effort you've put into this clip. Really fun and enjoyable to see videos like this. It's the same idea when I try to speak English where someone said ... "How can you communicate with them if you don't talk like them". ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Side note: Talk about example glottal stop word "BAT". Now I know why Thai people always confuse to pronounce when they talk to English native speakers. Since the way we write to represent the English language makes our own people confuse. The way we write "Batman" is "แบทแมน" : Literally spells : แ + บ + ท + แ + ม + น Symbol "แ" can represent to vowel "แอ" (IPA - ɛ: ) or "แอะ" (IPA - ɛ ) in term of writing. To represent the correct IPA sound one by one it will be: IPA: (แ = ɛ)ː + b + t + (แ = ɛ:) + m + n In our writing, we drop the symbol "ะ" for vowels "แ-ะ" (IPA - ɛ ). And in English language itself also doesn't have any indication to specify. So this could lead our people to understand that it has แอ sound (IPA - ɛ:) instead of แอะ (IPA - ɛ).
Cảm ơn anh! He's so good right? :) If you like what we do and wish to receive more exclusive learning materials, become one of our Patrons at www.patreon.com/tiengvietoi nhé 🤩
I'm trying to learn Vietnamese. I was there for a short time many years ago, but I didn't have time to learn the language. I would like to go there again. There are a lot of videos and I'm watching them to learn. They help me a lot. I have many Vietnamese friends here and they also help me to learn. All the videos are from a few years ago. Are they still being made? Is there any new content?
As a fluent speaker of both Vietnamese & English I find your analysis very accurate. Never realized it till now. I’ll use this new found knowledge to teach my son.
Omg, i’m vietnamese and when I watch this video, I feel Vietnamese is difficult to learn. So I hope to find a friend who speak native English. Let’s learn together ^^
I was like: Wait... There are different kind of sắc and nặng? P/s: I'm Vietnamese btw, don't mind the name (I'm just a big disgusting weeb shit myself )
That's Hanoi voice. In southern, we pronounce dấu nặng and dấu sắc just 1 way. We do not say giảo viên, we say exactly dáo viên, just like tôi muổn we say tôi muốn.
As a vietnamese, I thing there is a way to make sure you speak the works "động" and "độc" correctly: Try to continuously say the "động" like "độnggggggggg". If you can do that, you did it right And with the "độc" you can't do that all
It’s funny because I speak Japanese and I’m learning Thai and Taiwanese so I can hear the difference super easily and also noticed it too when I learnt a bit of Vietnamese. (I think) This is usually taught because a) teachers are teaching based on writing but also b) the writing was based off a different dialect than what’s considered standard now so the underlying -ng and -c distinction is there, it’s just that Hanoi does that distinction with tone rather than with the coda consonants
Almost 70-80% of the words the teacher gave as an example in this vid are of Chinese origin, which means they can all be written with Chinese characters. I'm not sure if this teacher has learned Chinese before or is aware of the fact that not only the lexicon of Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese have this in common, but the phonetic system too. As these are the most historically heavily Chinese influenced languages, it is very easy for a speaker of one or at least two of them to just guess the meaning of the words when you know how to read Vietnamese. I'm a native Korean speaker, living in China for more than 20 years, understand Japanese and Chinese enough to access academical stuff. My wife is from Guangzhou, so I also learned how to speak Cantonese(9 tones), some Teochew(8 tones) and Hokkien(8 tones) which are widely used in Guangdong, Hokkien, Taiwan and Singapore and even in Maleysian and Indonesian Chinese expat communities. If you understand the phonetic system and the tonal system of those Southern Chinese dialects, learning Vietnamese is just a piece of cake. When it comes to vocab, the more easier. Take this as an example : the official name of Vietnam goes like the following. Cộng hòa Xã hội Chủ nghĩa Việt Nam 共 和 社 会 主 义 越 南 (Chinese) 공 화 사 회 주 의 월 남 (Korean) きょう わ しゃ かい しゅ ぎ えつ なん (Japanese) It's just like as a French speaker would have no big problem when trying to learn Spanish or Italian. As for me, I was already able to speak and express basic daily needs in just about half a month after watching several RUclips videos teaching Vietnamese in Chinese or Cantonese. The tonal system of Thai, Laotian and Burmese work the similar way with the same principles. In fact, what this teacher explains is actually TRUE, seen from the phonetic system of Asian tonal languages. Northern Vietnamese has 8 tones, whereas Southern Vietnames has 7 because the 'dấu ngã' and 'dấu hỏi' are merged together. Those so-called " hard endings" the teacher is explaining are actually called 'entering sounds' or 'clipping sounds' . These sounds are all pronounced with a glottal stop. The difference lies in the actual position of the tongue. To exactly distinguish between these sounds is a huge difficulty to overcome for those who speak only European languages. These phonetic phenomena actually happen in most languages, with the difference whether they are allophones or not. In English these are allophones.
Am vietnamese native speaker here, siubd that he pronounce độc và động was similar to me. They actually sound so different. But appreciated for his hard work and explanation tho. Cheers.
I am a native Vietnamese speaker. I have lived in US for almost 35 years now. I am still fluent in Vietnamese. In the beginning of the video where you spoke in Vietnamese. I could understand you about 90%. I got to glance at the subtitle a few times to catch up what you were saying. You spoke a little bit too fast and with the accent it was a little bit difficult for me to fully understand. Nonetheless, for a foreigner to speak Vietnamese like you, it is extremely good. Anyway, as a native speaker, I have never recognized and appreciated how difficult for a foreigner to learn Vietnamese. You have done a great job breaking the learning down to make it easy. The more you talk to the native speakers, the faster you learn the language. And it goes with any language learning. For Vietnamese, if you learn from the Northern Accent, the pronunciations are more "correct". The Southern Accent has many words mispronounced but people still understand you.
Really helpful! I live in Danang and i have heard friends even pronounce the dot tone as the wobbly one.... But like a low wobble (sorry i cant remember the proper tone names). This video was great though.
>even pronounce the dot tone as the wobbly one.... But like a low wobble You're not crazy - in central and southern vietnam, the dấu nặng is often pronounced like a low version of a dấu hỏi/ngã. This can really confuse people, because nặng is always taught as a low/dropping tone, when it's actually a rising tone in the south/center,
so... seems like it's just about glottal stop finals, or entering/clipped "tones" 入聲. Same deal with Cantonese, where you have 6 tone contours and 3 entering tones, thus 九聲六 調
The thing is, this is true, especially in Standard Vietnamese and the other Northern Dialects. My Vietnamese girlfriend also dismissed it, until I showed her more of the studies. Now she believes me about the pitch now but still says "Thats still nặng, it just sounds different, because m and p are different"
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Absolutely agree on the tones. I can hear them even from the beginning. I noticed how tones don't really represent to the speaker how to speak proper Vietnamese.
He's absolutely spot on regarding the tones. Only one caveat is this is mainly appropriate and applicable to northern accent. In many words, Northern accent blurs the line between 2 tones: dấu sắc and dấu ngã. Southern native speakers like me, we have more clear cut distinction between these 2 tones. However we make almost no distinction at all about 2 other tones: dấu hỏi and dấu ngã. So basically we have dấu săc, dấu huyền, dấu hỏi/ngã, dấu nặng, dấu ngang. That makes a total of 5 tones.
The native speaker cuts off the ô later in độc than in động, making the vowel sound longer in the former than in the latter. Is that a thing with my poor ears or just overall irrelevant? Oops. Didn't watch long enough before I commented. Love the technical details. Keep it up!
So interesting, thanks so much! 😃👍 It’s worthy of a 30 minute part two with lots of examples. 😃🙏 As for nhấn mạnh though … it still seems to me that the mạnh is very slightly lower pitch than the nhấn and not higher… 🤔
8 tone can also correct, but for me I count total 9. Cause the 9 one I called tone "ngang" For example "Tư" and "tơ" both sound none like any other. When you read letter "A" in Vietnamese your tone sound strike blank in medium tone. But letter "Ư" doesn't sound like "A" strike blank medium tones but in low hard medium tone. When you add another letter in like "Tư (4)" it turn into medium low tone. I might be wrong
Impressive, bro. In general, when we speak fast or naturally, the pitches are softened. Those pitches can be annoying for non-tonal speakers when there are competing noises as we speak.
Great analysis! I'm a native speaker but I'm in central Vietnam so I can't master the 8 tones. People in the northern part of Vietnam normally can speak with the 8 tones. For foreigners who want to learn Vietnamese, I highly recommended to learn with people who speak with the "Ha Noi" accent instead of other regions of Vietnam.
I suppose you have nothern accent,because in the south we say "giáo viên" with really clear "dấu sắc" even if it's fast conversation,"giáo" or "tất" doesn't become lower.Personally, I reckon if you don't lower "dấu sắc" ,the word will be ,like, smoother and more gentle
After studying Vietnamese for 12 months - this video finally makes sense......and is extremely helpful.
Being Vietnamese watching this video, I now realize how hard Vietnamese is lol.
Haha, xem IPA Vietnamese
Hahaahaha me too, very hard
@@NgaTran-dk9sh Same😂
righhhht Totally Agree. I am first gen AmeriViet and whoa.... Im sitting here trying to relearn Vietnamese so I can properly teach my children. lol
Jus the pronunciation. The grammar is easy 😂
wow you are extremely smart to figure this out. The classical classification in Vietnam was 8 tones like you mentioned. The new classification of 6 tones was introduced by the French during colonism period. Most Vietnamese people nowadays don't know about the classical classification of 8 tones.
This was very helpful. I'm not sure a native Vietnamese speaker could have done this lesson. It is very good for a native English speaker to do this lesson. He understands what we are doing wrong and why.
Great lesson!
I struggle to do this eeee
@@duongha683 - Tell me more.
@@rubiks6 like, I can't do the "." or "nặng" sound, it's too sharp and heavy to pronounce.
Well, just like many Americans don't understand their language as much as learners from other countries. Usually if it's your language you don't go and analyze it. You just naturally and subconsciously speak it.
uya + n = uyên = uyê + n
=> uya = uyê
= > u+ya = u+yê
=> ya = yê hăy ia = iê 🤸♂️
----------------------------
ia ngờ = iê ngờ = iêng, Tiáng = Tiếng;
ia tờ = iê tờ = iêt, Viạt = Việt;
=> Tiếng Việt = Tiáng Viạt 🤸♂️
As a Vietnamese and also someone learn a but linguistics, I really enjoy this. Btw I do can realize 2 kinds of 'dấu sắc' and 'dấu nặng' based on Northern accent, but me as a Huế people, I also try pronounce those words with Huế accent and I feel they're different at all tho. Hope to see others opinions too😁
Tbh, I do think Vietnamese people are way too focus on teaching Vietnamese language based on the writing alphabet but not in phonetically way. Seems like Vietnamese people havent had enough linguistic research on our own language so we cant understand our own language properly and teach it for foreigners.
Cái này nghiên cứu ngôn ngữ chuyên sâu sẽ có. Còn thực hành thông thường chỉ 6 là đủ bởi 2 thanh kia sẽ được phát âm 1 cách tự nhiên hoặc biến mất tùy vùng miền.
Yup, most Vietnamese language instructors are completely unaware of the natural sound changes they do when they speak their mother tongue & expect non-native learners to "just know" or pick up these phonological rules. It's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE for untrained ears & vocal chords.
no need to be discouraged because the phonetics in English differ a lot more and the pronunciation is in syllables at once so Korean and Vietnamese I'm not surprised at all, Vietnamese linguistics is still better than English I have to guess every time the pronunciation😅
This is so awesome to have a non-native vietnamese speaker as a teacher in the videos, because he knows all the struggles and things that non-native must be learned!
Disclaimer, i consider myself still as a beginner.
After your previous video about tones, i started to pay attention to differences in the same tones. I can feel that many tones, if not the all, have their own quirks.
Recently I started to notice this distinction of two different dot tones. Now this video explained it much more!
Ị Í Ì Ĩ =))
Just my opinion, vietnamese pronunciation is harder than finnish pronunciation, and finnish grammar is harder than vietnamese grammar
@@daotruong2275 That’s no opinion but fact 😂
The hardest sounds in Finnish are: ö, y and distinguishing between ä and a plus double constants, that’s it! You can count them on one hand lol.
On the other hand grammar is 15 cases, passive/active voice and the spoken/written language difference. Vietnamese has one tense 😂 but hella weird sounds excluding tones.
Beautiful languages either way.
Oh god his accent sounds so good 😭 even sounds better than mine although I’m vietnamese lol
Chào
@@Lycanyt2858 Hello! I am Vietnamese 🤣
Ghê
Vietnam đây
Cô giáo có cho bạn biết: ia nờ = iên hăy IAn = IÊn ? Tương tự, ia ngờ = iêng, hăy IAng = IÊng, Tiếng Việt = TíaNG VịaT. ....
kw = cw = qu (w=uơ, uờ là phần cuối của âm u. k + w = c + w = c + uờ = qu)
....
Âm /to/ khi khéo dài hoặc nói thật chậm sẽ nghe thấy 2 âm: to, oooo . Âm /hoa/ khi kéo dài hoặc nói thật chậm sẽ nghe thấy 3 âm: hoa, oa, a.
(Tiáng Viạt (Tiếng Việt) không có quy tắc ráp vần , thực chất là THÔNG CHUYỂN KHẨU HÌNH ÂM (giữa 2 khẩu hình âm là 1 khẩu hình âm: giữa âm i và âm ê là âm ia (khi khẩu hình đang ở âm i thì phát âm ê sẽ sinh ra âm ia, nên iê=ia, iêN=iaN, hiên=hian. Tưang tự, ươ=ưa, uô=ưa....). Và tiếng Việt không phải tiếng đơn âm mà là NHIỀU LỚP ÂM LIÊN TIẾP: phiên âm đầy đủ của từ hoa là /hoa, oa, a/, đã là /đã, ã, a/...không phải chỉ có 1 âm đâu)
Một số khác, nên thêm ký hiệu w vào tiếng Việt sẽ giải quyết đươc nhiêu vấn đề (w = uơ, uờ gần giống /w/ của tiếng Anh nhưng đặt ở cửa miệng (front sound) hay nó chính là phần đuôi của âm u khi kéo dài hay khi nói u bạn đưa cằm lên rồi hạ xuống sẽ nghe thấy âm w (uơ, uờ) rõ hơn):
Âm h trong từ ha thì phát là hờ, nhưng trong từ hoa sẽ phát là hw (huơ, huờ): hoa = hwa, wa = oa, wang = oang, uy = wy = wi, hwang=hoang. Uyên=wyên=wian (do yên hăy iên = ian).
TưaNG tự với l, ng, b...có thể phát thành lw, ngw, bw trong lua, ngoa, boa thành lwua, ngwa, bwua.
Tiếng Việt (Tiáng Viạt) có trên 50 âm mới đầy đủ.
Người Việt học tiếng Việt dễ vì hầu hết họ biết nói trước khi biết đọc, viết. Học sinh đến lớp chỉ cần nhớ mặt chữ cái rồi ghép cho đúng âm là xong dù họ không hiểu bản chất tạo âm của tiếng Việt. Nhưng với người ngoài nước và người dân tộc thiểu số thì rất khó học theo theo kiểu ráp vần. (Học như con VẸT)
It's one of the most important videos for anyone trying to learn Vietnamese. Every teacher should start with this video before explaining ANYTHING about pronunciation and tones. It should be at the beginning of every single teaching material. I can't emphasize strongly enough how valuable this video is and it's been already 3 year since I watched this for the first time and everything made sense immediately.
Btw... I owe you, John. I really do. Thanks
I'm Vietnamese, and this video make me think more about my own language as a strange language, it's deeper in the core that a lot of points i'd never noticed.
this makes so much sense, i`ve been learning vietnamese for one year and haven`t noticed this, but when you explained the difference it made so much sense, like I would have pronounced all these words correctly because my teacher would pronounce them like that, but now i am aware that there are some real differences!!
Is this young student the same one who explained how to pronounce dấu hỏi? He's really helpful, thank you. i did much of this without realizing
if tvo collaborated w their students to make a textbook youd make a lot of money
Me, a Vietnamese: Interesting. I approve.
Actually and amazingly, I'd discovered that Vietnamese has 8 tones when I was only 4. I'd told my mom and some of my friends but no one supported me on this view.
Thanks for this video. Pretty interesting.
Also kudos to you for your effort in coming up with this tone system independently.
Most contemporary Vietnamese speakers and learners might not know this, but this 8-tone system was thoroughly studied and taught by Vietnamese scholars before the modern Latin-based script became widespread.
According to this system, the Vietnamese tones were traditionally consisted of 4 kinds: 平 bình, 上 thướng, 去 khứ, 入 nhập, each one of them split into two classes: 陰 âm and 陽 dương.
平 bình is split into 陰平 - âm bình and 陽平 - dương bình, respectively equivalent to contemporary thanh ngang and thanh huyền,
上 thướng is split into 陰上 - âm thướng and 陽上 - dương thướng, respectively equivalent to contemporary thanh hỏi and thanh ngã, note that accents in the southern dialect typically don’t separate these two classes, the people there learn to write them as two tones nowadays but they sound the same when they speak,
去 khứ is split into 陰去 âm khứ and 陽去 dương khứ, which are respectively equivalent to contemporary thanh sắc and thanh nặng in sounds that end with ‘soft consonants’ like n, m, ng, nh (per the video’s explanation),
入 nhập is split into 陰入 - âm nhập and 陽入 - dương nhập, equivalent to contemporary thanh sắc and thanh nặng in sounds that end with consonants like t, p, c, ch (per the video’s explanation).
I read this from a 19th-century booklet that presented one Vietnamese script based on the language’s phonology. This script has never been adopted widely.
This system is also discussed in a book about Vietnamese and chữ Nôm, see Khái luận văn tự học chữ Nôm, by Nguyễn Quang Hồng, NXB Giáo dục, 2008, p. 483.
It’s also referenced on the Wikipedia page about the Vietnamese language (page in Vietnamese).
Personally I’m strongly of the opinion that chữ Hán-Nôm (Hán and Nôm scripts) need to be made mandatory in the teaching of Vietnamese language, alongside chữ quốc ngữ (Latin-based script).
Vietnamese learners will be a lot more confused in more areas and will find the language painfully difficult the further they learn it knowing of only chữ quốc ngữ as our writing script.
As a Vietnamese person, if you truly want to achieve the highest level of pronunciation and improve quickly, here is my advice: the following letters: a, â, ă, e, ê, i, o, ô, ơ, u, ư, y. Each of these letters can have 6 tones, which means we have a total of 72 pronunciation styles. Please note that these 72 styles mentioned here are for individual letters. If you combine these individual letters, they will form different pronunciation styles: ươ, uô, uê, iêu, ưa, iu, ao, iếp. Only the word "iếp" is default with a tone mark, that's why I specifically mentioned it. For the other 7 compound words, they will have all 6 tones, resulting in a total of 42 pronunciation styles. When considering reading and recognition alone, we have a total of 115 pronunciation styles. Please note that these are words that are connected to their respective tone marks, and you need to combine these words with at least one more letter to give them meaning and form complete vocabulary.
In Vietnamese we have a wordplay called “nói lái” or “vần đảo” for rapping where we mix and match consonant and vowel of syllables to create new fun sounding word. For example: còn thơ becomes cờ thon. It does get tricky for hard vowel is in the equation.
Your table perfectly explains how “thìn đẹp” would become “thèm địt” when we try to do the wordplay.
Thanks for the eloquent explanation.
Holy hell in the "Động vs Độc" section, I just realized that the complications come from the FACT that it is pronounced in a Northern Vietnamese style, so it sounds so freaking similar. In the Southern manner, they are SO distinct, and you wont have ANY problem distinguishing it.
So there is chaos in both varieties of Viet to totally trip up & frustrate a learner. LOL.
@@Jumpoable LoL, sorry my man. I was born and raised in SaiGon, South Vietnam. Naturally I speak the Southern Vietnamese accent. When I first listened to people speak Northern Dialect or Middle Dialect, it sounded like a different language to me.
On speaking, you just have to pick one dialect and master it. About the listening part, it is just training & exposure. Once your ears are trained and exposed enough, you will understand other dialects. You may not able to speak like the people from different dialect, but you will understand them just fine. 😅
Agree with southern accent. The tones are pronounced more distinct. Northern accent makes those tones sound too similar, almost merged together. This makes it harder for the non native speaker to hear, learn to speak.
Anh này học accent miền Bắc nên đang phân tích dựa trên cách phát âm của miền Bắc. Mỗi vùng miền có cách phát âm khác nhau. Ví dụ: Ở miền Nam, từ "ngả" và "ngã" sẽ có cách phát âm khó phân biệt.
The southern dialect on the other hand mixes up hỏi and ngã
As a Vietnamese, I never knew that "dấu nặng" and "dấu sắc" have two different tones until I watched this video. I just pronounce it in the way that is familiar for me. Thanks for the interesting video, I understand how difficult it is for non-native speakers to learn Vietnamese 😢
Cảm ơn Hoàng vì đã theo dõi và nhận xét nhé. :)
It's just an example of entering tone that exists in southern Chinese languages or Thai and of course Vietnamese too.
Vietnamese is my mother tongue and I have learned Thai and Chinese too, but this video messed me up 555
Tieng Viet (Vietnamese): Khmer+China
Nice xừ
Tieng Viet (Vietnamese): Khmer+China
Nice xừ
Fascinating (and impressive)! Similar somewhat to connected speech in English where the presence of one word influences the pronunciation of another.
This is no theory, it's simply true.
Linguistically the reason for this is that in closed syllables (those ending in hard consonants), it is generally difficult to distinguish multiple tones. Hence, only the simplest contrast exists in such syllables: that between high and low pitch. Confusingly, the sắc and nặng symbols got reused for these tones. This phenomenon (closed syllables having few tones, often just 2) is cross-linguistic; an identical phenomenon exists in Cantonese.
You did miss one important point about dấu nặng, which is that in open syllables, it results in them being cut off with a *glottal stop*. There is some assimilation like that you talk about (eg chọn ends with a hold in the /n,t/ position) but the primary cut off is always a glottal stop, regardless of how the open syllable ends. Btw- none of this final cut-off of nặng business applies to the southern accent, where nặng in open syllables in something like a lower dấu hỏi
It's still blowing my mind that you watch these, tiền bối Dan. Thanks for your input - as you know well, I'm very far from a linguist, most of the content here came from my own amateur grappling with the phonetics of the language. I found that picturing a word like 'bạn' as a mid-tone 'bat' with a creaky, glottalised end to be a useful heuristic for correct pronunciation - although sometimes northerners do pronounce it more like baʔn for emphasis.
Whether or not the primary cut off is the glottal-stop or the denasalised consonant is a question for people far more educated in this area than myself.
For Chinese speakers, the hard syllables are called 入聲 in the Chinese tonal system.
In the Chinese tonal system, there are 平上去入 4 categories. The 4 categories were split into "yin 陰" syllables and "yang 陽" syllables. Hence, there are 8 tones.
Let's not describe them using a model from a foreign langauge that is centuries old (& hence OUTDATED). These are VIETNAMESE WORDS and VIETNAMESE TONES with VIETNAMESE SOUND CHANGES.
Did the examples given in this video sound like Chinese tones to you?
Putonghua, Cantonese, Hokkien or Shanghainese? Nope. NONE of the above.
If you speak Hakka, then PERHAPS the glottal stop one might just vaguely be mapped onto the Vietnamese tonal system.
Yes it's fun when comparing historical linguistics but using an archaic Chinese tonal system to learn Vietnamese helps NOBODY.
@@Jumpoable I am sorry but you might have missed the point. First of all, this comment is for Chinese speakers. Second of all, according to Wikipedia, 四聲- 現今各種漢語標記聲調仍然沿用平、上、去、入四類聲調。
@@Jumpoable lol the Chinese tonal system isn't archaic at all what are you on...
@@Jumpoable Except that Vietnamese has a thousand years of influence from Sinitic Languages. It would be foolish to ignore Chinese influence.
Native Vietnamese speaker here. Very useful information I would say. Thank you for the explanation 😊
I've only taken 3 Vietnamese lessons. Been struggling with the tones. In my head I knew that I must have not been alone in noticing the inconsistencies in the dau sac tones in the words I learnt. But I didn't bother to look up the internet. I thought one day this question will be moot when I'll get the hang of the tones. So, coming across this video is a god send. Thank you so much!
The dau nang difference is still hard for me to get, but the dau sac ones are easy. I'll work on getting that down first
@ xin chào! thank you so much for sharing your Vietnamese learning journey. Please keep it up and we're glad we could help!
In other tonal languages the same concepts are called open and closed syllables or live and dead syllables. Cantonese counts the tones as different depending on which of those two categories the syllable is. Thai and Lao count them as the same. Mandarin only has open/soft consonants.
This actually reminds me and makes me think of the tones of Cantonese, many people argue between the 6 tones vs 9 tones because the tones for the checked syllables, ending in a p, t, k, sounds, all sound different than the tones of the non-checked syllables. Really interesting!
Actually for Cantonese it's not really a thing. There are 6 tones in HK Cantonese, 7 spoken in Guangzhou. The -p -t -k finals are just that, consonant finals, but they map within the 6 Cantonese tones.
Vietnamese, however, as explained in this video, CHANGES their tones as well as consonant pronunciation with certain endings. So yeah, it's an 8 tone system. Together with a complex CONSONANT FINAL pronunciation shifts.
But yes, in natural or very theatrical speech, Cantonese could double those 6 tones & may go up to 12 tones, but nobody's teaching 12 tones to non-native Cantonese learners. SIX TONES is quite enough, NOT 9 because they simply are not needed.
@@Jumpoable I'm struggling to understand how many "tone/pitch contours" Vietnamese actually has with all considered.
Like you said, In Cantonese you'd have 6 or 7, with the clipped finals distributed among the level tones contours. In Cantonese, you'd have low & high rising tones.
With this you'd have still have 8 distinct tone "contours" in Vietnamese?
This video was very helpful. It helped me decide to give up on learning Vietnamese and switch to an easier language for the time being.
don't give up just yet, Vietnamese is not easy, but it's not that difficult, watch this video of us to find out why ruclips.net/video/dRjldjs4u5M/видео.html&pp=ugMICgJ2aRABGAE%3D
Vietnamese native speaker here and I can’t help laughing at your comment. Keep pushing on. You’ll get there one day. Maybe learn some Chinese will help you expand your vocabulary faster.
I always noticed that but I'm studying all by myself and thought that it was just because I'm not a native or because of how people talk in daily life. tysm for this video
Wow through this video i learn do much more about my own language!
Thank you for making this video. I've started analyzing Vietnamese phonetics before I start learning the language, and I was wondering why they were pronouncing words differently with the same tone marks. I played them back multiple times and was scratching my head 😂 like why are they spelled with the same tone mark?!
I've studied Mandarin, Cantonese, and Thai, and Cantonese has a similar thing between soft and hard endings like sî and sîk. Thai has 5x2 tones depending on long vs short vowels. In Thai the ending also changes the tone based on the spelling, making the orthographic system rather complicated; that's on top of multiple spelling redundancies like in English! 😆 รถ รด รส, are all "rót" homophones, but spelled differently: R-Th, R-D, and R-S, like rain, rein, and reign, but even crazier cause they're all pronounced as different consonants at the beginning of a word, but as and ending they're all "T" sound, and then there isn't even a vowel in there! 🤣 Took me over 40 hours of study for Thai akson to sink in, vs Korean hangul which took about 20 minutes and Hindi devanagari which took ~40 minutes to get, but to be fair, I learned devanagari after Thai akson, so it felt like easy street!
Viet orthography looks like it's gonna be a bit tricky to learn, but after this video, things make a lot more sense. With that said, I definitely agree that there are 8 tones. There are people who say Cantonese has 9 tones, but the distinction is kinda nonexistent for 7 and 8 (sī 1 and sīk "7", si 3 and sik "8"). So I would argue that there are only 7, since sî actually has a different tone pattern from sîk, which would be the 6th and "9th" tone, but it's really more like 7th tone.
It's actually kinda funny, cause the Cantonese 6 and 7 is similar in an inverse way of the two sac tones, since Canto 6th goes from mid slightly down, and 7th is flat slightly low, starting and ending at the low end of 6th tone.
Language learning can be such an adventure 😂 esp when you go beyond the Indo-European family. Korean phonology was mind blowing after learning Japanese, how they're similar yet Korean has 8 vowels rather than 5 like in Japanese, and Korean aspirates the S, and have no F, yet they pronounce the R and Sh the same way as Japanese
Namaste
🙏🧋🌺🌈
woww cảm ơn bạn rất nhiều! thank you so much for such thorough insight
This is really interesting. What do you think of the idea that the hard/soft syllable variants of these tones could be considered allophones?
I like your approach, thank you for this! I’m learning Southern dialect (because living in the US, that’s what I’m surrounded by!) so some of the tonal issues are different. I wish someone would analyze southern tones from your angles as well.
I have often noticed that Vietnamese teachers will demonstrate a tone and then say it differently in a word, and found it confusing. So rather than try and pronounce them like I’ve been taught I “should” say them, I’m going to be listening more to what they’re actually saying, with these issues in mind.
This sort of teaching issue seems so common with native speakers hearing allophones as “the same” or hearing according to an official analysis without ever stopping to consider the inconsistencies between theory and practice.
Hey, thanks for commenting!
It's true that the hard nặng and soft nặng are in complementary distribution, so they could be considered allophones of each other. But remember that hard nặng is *also* in complementary distribution with all the other 6 tones too. So why not consider all the hard nặng words hard huyền instead? Writing 'bạt' as 'bàt' would make just as much sense, considering both hard nặng and huyền are low, smooth sounds. It could be that it's worth treating the extra 'hard' tones as seperate tonemes, in the same way we consider the english 'h' and 'ng' as seperate phonemes despite also being in complementary distribution.
Ultimately, I'm not a linguist, and I'm not the right person to draw the distinction between an allophone and a phoneme. But I do think that, allophone or not, it's worth understanding the distinction as a vietnamese learner.
@@JH-ty2cs Not a linguist? Well this right here sounds like a very linguistically grounded and sound description and statement of the analytical options! But I salute your humility. Thanks a lot for this very useful and insightful video!
I have been learning Vietnamese for 2 months now and you helped me save much time and effort with your lesson. I noticed there was something wrong with the tones since I speak mandarin chinese and I'm already used to tones. I had put it aside for a while but it was bothering me lol. Finally got it figured out. Thanks mate ! Your Vietnamese just sounds awesome to me btw :)
I'm Vietnamese person. I can teach you Vietnamese language if you teach me English. Are you agree?
So helpful, thank you
Brilliant explanation of a problem that no one has been able to explain to me after 15 years in Vietnam. Very helpful video.
Thank you for your comment! :)
Thank you so much for your excellent explanations of the tones in actual usage. It came at the right time for me, since I have been studying Vietnamese on my own. Your work is great!!
Bạn có muốn giao tiếp với người Việt chúng mình k
I actually want to make a point here, since we both integrate the "pitch" notion to Vietnamese pronunciation. "Nhấn mạnh" actually still has the first word's pitch higher than the second one (well I do some vocal training so I could say my ears are tuned more or less). But yes, it's true that we can break down the tones system in Vietnamese into pitches. From how I speak and how I hear native people speak in a normal manner, they usually go in this ascending scale: huyền - nặng - ngang - hỏi - ngã - sắc (ofc, considering only the ending sound, since "ngã" and "hỏi" are uttered with a bit of riff)
Wow first time ever hearing this topic. Great job, John!
Great video! Just some context: this concept is quite common among tonal languages, in Thai the syllables you called hard/soft are called dead/alive, depending on whether they end in a "sonorant" (i.e. a consonant which you can extend forever like n, m or l) or a non-sonorant (like t, k, p). In Thai this actually influences which tone a syllable gets! :)
wow thank you for such great insight!
actually you can divide hard sắc into two tones when considering short and long vowels, e.g. nít niết or something
Ah Ok. This is why sometimes it use ไม้ตรี (rising tone) or ไม้จัตวา (falling tone) in our language to represent the different tone for Dấu sắc. The ending consonant has a different indication. I have to change it accordingly to match the exact sound for Dấu sẵc but sometimes get lost.
Talke about Dấu Nặng, I also used to ask my VN friend who is a teacher and perfect in Thai in all areas, speak like a native + perfect writing.
Why "học" pronounce like it has พ/บ/ป (IPA - p̚) instead of letter ค/ก (IPA - k̚) in Thai when nặng comes to play?
She explained to me but I didn't get it at that time. So I use it directly instead of understand it. This is why it's intermittent lost during the learning if new words come up for me.
"ng" sound also gets me confuse since we have the letter ง to represent this sound (IPA - ŋ) where the position doesn't matter either initial or final consonant. But in Vietnamese languages, it seems change to m or ม in Thai (IPA - m) when it's final consonant e.g. "không". I have to close my mouth suddenly after pronouncing ŋ to match the final m like Vietnamese speaker. To my ears, it's weird in the first place since it's not exactly ŋ sounds that consonant ng represent. Now I just go with the flow by using "ŋm" as it said in IPA for ng final consonant.
Back to the word "học", I've learned that It pronounces like โอะ sound in our language without any tone marker for "ọ" which is quite identical and then change final consonant from C to P / ก to พ/บ/ป to represent final sound p̚. But your summary chart is far more clear to me like an advance alarm before pronouncing VN words.
The hard part of Vietnamese pronunciation for Thai people who speak only the standard one is ngã sound. But It's not the case for Sounternner Thai since we got far more tone than the central one. Need some time to familiarize then tweak a little bit. Anyway, it takes time to make it perfect like a native speaker. Otherwise, we'll speak like a robot and weird to their ears. :)
Thank you very much for your summary and the effort you've put into this clip. Really fun and enjoyable to see videos like this. It's the same idea when I try to speak English where someone said ... "How can you communicate with them if you don't talk like them".
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Side note:
Talk about example glottal stop word "BAT". Now I know why Thai people always confuse to pronounce when they talk to English native speakers. Since the way we write to represent the English language makes our own people confuse.
The way we write "Batman" is "แบทแมน" :
Literally spells : แ + บ + ท + แ + ม + น
Symbol "แ" can represent to vowel "แอ" (IPA - ɛ: ) or "แอะ" (IPA - ɛ ) in term of writing.
To represent the correct IPA sound one by one it will be:
IPA: (แ = ɛ)ː + b + t + (แ = ɛ:) + m + n
In our writing, we drop the symbol "ะ" for vowels "แ-ะ" (IPA - ɛ ).
And in English language itself also doesn't have any indication to specify. So this could lead our people to understand that it has แอ sound (IPA - ɛ:) instead of แอะ (IPA - ɛ).
This is the best vietnamese lesson ive ever seen!
YOU EXPLAIN SO WELL ABOUT PHONOLOGY OMG !!
Cảm ơn anh! He's so good right? :)
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I'm trying to learn Vietnamese. I was there for a short time many years ago, but I didn't have time to learn the language. I would like to go there again. There are a lot of videos and I'm watching them to learn. They help me a lot. I have many Vietnamese friends here and they also help me to learn. All the videos are from a few years ago. Are they still being made? Is there any new content?
Xin chao. Yes, we are still making new content! Subscribe to our channel to see the latest videos!
Hello all you guys. Thank you for sharing something interesting.
As a fluent speaker of both Vietnamese & English I find your analysis very accurate. Never realized it till now. I’ll use this new found knowledge to teach my son.
As a fluent reader of English. I find your comment very accurate
Thank you so much for the video. It has helped me a lot.
Interesting how you dfferentiate the 2 additional tones. Your prononciation is so crisp and clear. Much better than many native speakers 👌
Omg, i’m vietnamese and when I watch this video, I feel Vietnamese is difficult to learn. So I hope to find a friend who speak native English. Let’s learn together ^^
O.k. I just started. Almost 2 weeks tieng viet.
I was like: Wait... There are different kind of sắc and nặng?
P/s: I'm Vietnamese btw, don't mind the name (I'm just a big disgusting weeb shit myself )
I've been studying it for a some weeks and I'm probably much more confused than you, my friend
Me too lol
This was a super video. Thank you TVO.
That's Hanoi voice. In southern, we pronounce dấu nặng and dấu sắc just 1 way. We do not say giảo viên, we say exactly dáo viên, just like tôi muổn we say tôi muốn.
Do one on Không Dâu. My teacher says it’s the easiest, but it’s the one I struggle with the most.
flat and higher than english speaking
Không dấu is like how a American say a word without knowing anything, should be the easiest one
Some of us called it Dấu thanh
@@hoangduy9802 How is that?
I'm trying to learn.
As a vietnamese, I thing there is a way to make sure you speak the works "động" and "độc" correctly:
Try to continuously say the "động" like "độnggggggggg". If you can do that, you did it right
And with the "độc" you can't do that all
cảm ơn ônggggggggggggggggggg
But it's all dope.
Okay my favorite viet teacher on RUclips so far!😍
Exceptional video - thanks for the explanation. And I really wanted Ms Huyen to sing a song ......
It’s funny because I speak Japanese and I’m learning Thai and Taiwanese so I can hear the difference super easily and also noticed it too when I learnt a bit of Vietnamese. (I think) This is usually taught because a) teachers are teaching based on writing but also b) the writing was based off a different dialect than what’s considered standard now so the underlying -ng and -c distinction is there, it’s just that Hanoi does that distinction with tone rather than with the coda consonants
Your pronunciation is really good!
I'm Vietnamese and I practice my English listening skill by watching him teach Vietnamese @@
Almost 70-80% of the words the teacher gave as an example in this vid are of Chinese origin, which means they can all be written with Chinese characters.
I'm not sure if this teacher has learned Chinese before or is aware of the fact that not only the lexicon of Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese have this in common, but the phonetic system too.
As these are the most historically heavily Chinese influenced languages, it is very easy for a speaker of one or at least two of them
to just guess the meaning of the words when you know how to read Vietnamese.
I'm a native Korean speaker, living in China for more than 20 years, understand Japanese and Chinese enough to access academical stuff.
My wife is from Guangzhou, so I also learned how to speak Cantonese(9 tones), some Teochew(8 tones) and Hokkien(8 tones) which are widely used in Guangdong, Hokkien, Taiwan and Singapore and even in Maleysian and Indonesian Chinese expat communities.
If you understand the phonetic system and the tonal system of those Southern Chinese dialects, learning Vietnamese is just a piece of cake.
When it comes to vocab, the more easier.
Take this as an example : the official name of Vietnam goes like the following.
Cộng hòa Xã hội Chủ nghĩa Việt Nam
共 和 社 会 主 义 越 南 (Chinese)
공 화 사 회 주 의 월 남 (Korean)
きょう わ しゃ かい しゅ ぎ えつ なん (Japanese)
It's just like as a French speaker would have no big problem when trying to learn Spanish or Italian.
As for me, I was already able to speak and express basic daily needs in just about half a month after watching several RUclips videos teaching Vietnamese in Chinese or Cantonese.
The tonal system of Thai, Laotian and Burmese work the similar way with the same principles.
In fact, what this teacher explains is actually TRUE, seen from the phonetic system of Asian tonal languages.
Northern Vietnamese has 8 tones, whereas Southern Vietnames has 7 because the 'dấu ngã' and 'dấu hỏi' are merged together.
Those so-called " hard endings" the teacher is explaining are actually called 'entering sounds' or 'clipping sounds' .
These sounds are all pronounced with a glottal stop. The difference lies in the actual position of the tongue.
To exactly distinguish between these sounds is a huge difficulty to overcome for those who speak only European languages.
These phonetic phenomena actually happen in most languages, with the difference whether they are allophones or not. In English these are allophones.
7:55 you say cave "động" is at a low pitch, but 8:28 the chart says "động" has a medium pitch. Am I understanding this correctly?
anh ơi em nghĩ đây là lỗi đánh máy. Em nghĩ trong cột thứ 2 (hard) phải là "mạch"
Yep! Thanks for pointing out the mistake. I made the error of saying the low 'độc' means 'cave', when it means 'poison'. My B.
Am vietnamese native speaker here, siubd that he pronounce độc và động was similar to me. They actually sound so different. But appreciated for his hard work and explanation tho. Cheers.
I knew this for dấu sắc, but never noticed it in dấu nặng. Rất hay.
As a Vietnamese studying English , watching a foreign guy teaching Vietnamese is kinda fun. Thank you.
Thank you a lot for this video! Extremely helpful!
I am a native Vietnamese speaker. I have lived in US for almost 35 years now. I am still fluent in Vietnamese. In the beginning of the video where you spoke in Vietnamese. I could understand you about 90%. I got to glance at the subtitle a few times to catch up what you were saying. You spoke a little bit too fast and with the accent it was a little bit difficult for me to fully understand. Nonetheless, for a foreigner to speak Vietnamese like you, it is extremely good.
Anyway, as a native speaker, I have never recognized and appreciated how difficult for a foreigner to learn Vietnamese. You have done a great job breaking the learning down to make it easy. The more you talk to the native speakers, the faster you learn the language. And it goes with any language learning. For Vietnamese, if you learn from the Northern Accent, the pronunciations are more "correct". The Southern Accent has many words mispronounced but people still understand you.
thank you so much for sharing!
5:43 it sounds like Japanese "doku" which also means poison.
Really helpful! I live in Danang and i have heard friends even pronounce the dot tone as the wobbly one.... But like a low wobble (sorry i cant remember the proper tone names). This video was great though.
>even pronounce the dot tone as the wobbly one.... But like a low wobble
You're not crazy - in central and southern vietnam, the dấu nặng is often pronounced like a low version of a dấu hỏi/ngã. This can really confuse people, because nặng is always taught as a low/dropping tone, when it's actually a rising tone in the south/center,
Amazing work. Keep it up 👍
Thank you very much, John!! It’s very helpful
Born and raised in Saigon here. I don't know if the 8 tones applied to the Southern Accent. It seems making sense when you speak Northern Accent.
i always thought I was getting gas-lit when I questioned the soft sac
so... seems like it's just about glottal stop finals, or entering/clipped "tones" 入聲. Same deal with Cantonese, where you have 6 tone contours and 3 entering tones, thus 九聲六 調
Thank you very much for your lesson🙏🙏
Brilliant video and explanation!
Cảm ơn anh nhé! 🥰
7:43 as a native speaker of Southern Vietnamese, these are both "độc" for me.
Thanks for the knowledge, helpfull even for native Viets!
The thing is, this is true, especially in Standard Vietnamese and the other Northern Dialects.
My Vietnamese girlfriend also dismissed it, until I showed her more of the studies.
Now she believes me about the pitch now but still says "Thats still nặng, it just sounds different, because m and p are different"
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Absolutely agree on the tones. I can hear them even from the beginning. I noticed how tones don't really represent to the speaker how to speak proper Vietnamese.
Day 573 of quarantine, and I'm learning my native language
OMG I'm Vietnamese and i didnt realize this until i watch ur video omg
He's absolutely spot on regarding the tones. Only one caveat is this is mainly appropriate and applicable to northern accent.
In many words, Northern accent blurs the line between 2 tones: dấu sắc and dấu ngã.
Southern native speakers like me, we have more clear cut distinction between these 2 tones. However we make almost no distinction at all about 2 other tones: dấu hỏi and dấu ngã. So basically we have dấu săc, dấu huyền, dấu hỏi/ngã, dấu nặng, dấu ngang. That makes a total of 5 tones.
The native speaker cuts off the ô later in độc than in động, making the vowel sound longer in the former than in the latter. Is that a thing with my poor ears or just overall irrelevant?
Oops. Didn't watch long enough before I commented. Love the technical details. Keep it up!
So interesting, thanks so much! 😃👍 It’s worthy of a 30 minute part two with lots of examples. 😃🙏 As for nhấn mạnh though … it still seems to me that the mạnh is very slightly lower pitch than the nhấn and not higher… 🤔
8 tone can also correct, but for me I count total 9.
Cause the 9 one I called tone "ngang"
For example "Tư" and "tơ" both sound none like any other.
When you read letter "A" in Vietnamese your tone sound strike blank in medium tone. But letter "Ư" doesn't sound like "A" strike blank medium tones but in low hard medium tone. When you add another letter in like "Tư (4)" it turn into medium low tone.
I might be wrong
a ư gì tone ngang đọc giống nhau cả mà :)). Bắc trung nam đều vậy.
I’m Vietnamese. :)) And today I learn Vietnamese taught by a foreigner. He’s cool~
Super educational video. I found it really helpful
Impressive, bro. In general, when we speak fast or naturally, the pitches are softened. Those pitches can be annoying for non-tonal speakers when there are competing noises as we speak.
Crystal clear. Many thanks.
Incredible work
Mình yêu các bạn học tiếng nước mình nè 😁
Great analysis! I'm a native speaker but I'm in central Vietnam so I can't master the 8 tones. People in the northern part of Vietnam normally can speak with the 8 tones. For foreigners who want to learn Vietnamese, I highly recommended to learn with people who speak with the "Ha Noi" accent instead of other regions of Vietnam.
Thank you so much!!!❤❤❤❤
This was so helpful !!
I'm Vietnamese, but I have just learnt few things about our language that I wasn't aware of. lol
This dude is so good
i like his pronunciation,he is speaking very good standard vietnamese
Omg- You good speaking vietnamsse and i am a vietnamese
And keep it work
Thanks nha có bạn dạy tiếng Việt mik sẽ gọi bn mik học cho hiểu
Wow, tiếng Việt của bạn thật sự rất tốt đấy 😳👍👍👍
I suppose you have nothern accent,because in the south we say "giáo viên" with really clear "dấu sắc" even if it's fast conversation,"giáo" or "tất" doesn't become lower.Personally, I reckon if you don't lower "dấu sắc" ,the word will be ,like, smoother and more gentle