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Hello everyone and
hello (in Chinese). In the past 20 day, my channel has grown by almost
50,000 subscribers, a number that I'm really
surprised about.
So I want to thank all new subscribers as well as
everyone who's followed me for a long time.
If you just joined this community,
you may not know that before learning Vietnamese I learned Chinese for 10 years
And my Chinese is much better than my Vietnamese.
A lot of people have commented as to why I could learn Vietnamese so fast
and said it's because I already knew Chinese
In reality, how similar are Vietnamese and Chinese?
Does knowing Chinese help a learner of Vietnamese?
And for you Vietnamese viewers, is learning Chinese easier?
I'll answer that question in this video.
I will compare the two mostly by
the following 3 things.
Pronounciation, vocabulary, and usage.
I won't be talking about grammar because... the two have very similar grammar.
and really
you guys should just learn the differences according to the situation.
First is pronounciation.
Both languages have tones. But
the number and type of tones are different.
In the Hanoi accent of Vietnamese, there are 6 tones.
In Chinese there are 4 main tones and 1 soft tone.
Rather than just explaining and describing the tones
I made use of a program to analyze pitch
to show you guys a true picture of how the tones look. The y-axis is frequency
and the x-axis
represents the time it lasts.
for tones that are similar in the two languages
I will try to use words that
have similar pronounciation in both languages.
The first tone in VN is the ngang tone.
Next is the sac tone.
huyen, hoi, and nga.
The first tone in Chinese is the 1st tone.
A tone with a flat intonation. For example...
Next is the second tone, which has a rising intonation.
example...
Next is the third tone, which goes down and back up.
Something many people don't know is... when
this word is in a sentence, and there is another word behind it
the third tone is often shortened and not fully said.
For example... "". It's not, "". But ""
If you say it by itself, it would be....
But in a word like this, it's shortened....
The last part is shortened.
Next is the 4th tone.
A tone that starts high and goes down very quickly.
A common phenomenon of VN people learning Chinese
is not being able to differentiate between the 1st and 4th tones.
I don't really know the reason as to why
because when I learned Chinese
I always thought they were completely different, but I think
it may be because you guys compare the
ngang tone in VN with the 1st tone in Chinese
A lot of people say they are the same, but
in reality they are a little different.
Take a look at the picture. The Ngang tone in VN
Is somewhat inbetween the first and 4th tones of Chinese.
It's not either one, and you can see from the pic that
It's frequency isn't as high as that of the first tone in Chinese.
And also not as level. At the end of the tone,
it also drops slightly, but in Chinese
the first tone stays much much more flat.
Try looking at the Ngang tone in VN as being a tone
that doesn't exist in Chinese.
And instead, just learn through the pics I gave just now.
I have a feeling this comparison you guys make is
a big reason as to why you guys end up confusing the tones.
The last tone in Chinese
is the "soft" tone. If you look at the pic you can see it's a lot shorter than the other tones.
And the intonation is a lot lower.
Vietnamese people often make the mistake of saying this tone as
the 1st tone in Chinese. For example...
But really it should be...
Next are the consonants and vowels.
In the Hanoi accent
there are 21 consonants in total. While
in Chinese there are 25 consonants.
13 of them are the same between the 2 languages.
This is a list of all sounds Vietnamese speakers will find difficult to pronounce or distinguish in Chinese.
One characteristic of Chinese is that aspiration plays a big role in differentiating sounds.
In IPA, aspirated sounds are shown by a small letter h like these ones here.
For example the two words...
"chi" and "zhi"
in Chinese, are only different in that 1 is aspirated and the other isn't.
"Gou" and "Kou" are also the same.
This isn't really common in Vietnamese
So many VN speakers learning Chinese are often get confused
with aspirated consonants. For example...
After the consonants are the vowels.
In general, VN speakers won't find vowels
in Chinese to be too difficult, but there are some
differences that are worth mentioning.
First is the diphtong, /au/. For instance...
VN speakers will often say....
like in VN. But in Chinese
/au/ is said with the mouth slightly raised.
2nd is the sound ... which only comes after "ch" "zh" and "sh" in Pinyin.
3rd is the vowel ... which only comes after "z, s, c" in Pinyin.
This is exactly the same as the previous vowel but your tongue shouldn't be curved.
4th is the hardest vowel for most people.
Which is this sound...
Let me teach you guys a really simple method to learn how to pronounce this sound.
This is the vowel chart from IPA. When seeing it for the 1st time
everybody thinks it's really complicated and skip it.
But it's a really smart tool if you know how to use it.
All the vertical lines on the pic have a sound to the left and to the right.
2 sounds next to each other area pair
and the tongue position is exactly the same for both.
Those two sounds are only different in that the one on the left
is pronounced with unrounded lips, while the one on the right
is pronounced with rounded lips. Okay, let's go back to the sound
... in Chinese.
That's this sound. It's on the right side, so
So your lips should be rounded.
And this is the smart thing about this tool.
You may not know how to pronounce this sound.
But you guys know this sound, that's the sound
"eeee", as in "see, he, be"....
So if you start from this sound, and then
keep your tongue in the same position in your mouth,
and just round your lips, it will naturally become this sound.
Really simple, right? You guys should be very careful
don't change the position and height of your tongue while making your lips round.
If you do change your tongue position, it will become "u"
That's not right. you need to start from "ee"
change nothing in your mouth, and
just round your lips. Take a look...
I'm just changing the shape of my lips, making them round.
If you couldn't pronounce this sound before but you can now
Please comment below and let me know.
Okay, this is pronounciation. Next is vocabulary.
You guys know because of history, Vietnamese was influenced by Chinese a lot.
So there are a lot of sino-Vietnamese words in VN.
some sources say
over 30% of VN lexicon is comprised of Chinese-influenced vocabulary.
of course the two languages have developed a lot since then
and the Chinese of then and modern Mandarin are quite different.
The Chinese of that period is closer to modern Cantonese.
So you will find many VN words are more similar to their Cantonese counterparts rather than the Mandarin one.
For example this one.... just listen to the sounds :) from left to right: VN, Mandarin, Cantonese.
something you'll have to be careful about is
many of these words have different meanings in each language.
For example, just now, in VN it means doctor, but in Chinese it means a doctorate degree.
Despite this, these similarities make learning Chinese easier for VN people
or for Chinese people learning VN
It's a big advantage if you know how to use it.
For example, the word "fa" in Chinese is "phat" in VN.
And almost all words in VN will be translate in this way from Chinese.
For example....
So if there's a word you don't know
you might be able to guess how to say it from this method.
You might not be 100% correct, but you may be close enough for them to guess what you mean.
I also find this helps with memorization.
And if i forget a sino-VN word, I try to remember its counterpart in Chinese first, and that will often
help me remember the word in VN.
A big advantage, eh?
Finally I want to compare word usage between the two languages.
Because I think that's the biggest advantage when VN people learn Chinese or vice-versa.
every language has its own way of thinking.
and that's the hardest thing to learn when learning a language.
you might be good at grammar, pronounciation, etc, but you still don't speak very naturally.
because the first foreign language I learned was Chinese,
when I was beginning learning Chinese, it was really hard and took me a long time to learn how to
speak naturally. It was a really long process
and one that caused me a lot of trouble.
But when I started learning VN, I noticed that
many words in VN were used the same as in Chinese.
so it was a lot easier for me to learn to speak naturally
and if you've ever wondered why I can speak VN so well
even though of course it's still not perfect
well, this is your answer.
I also have some ways which I will share on my channel
so subscribe if you haven't
The next part is just a small discussion about the sponsor of the video... subs will end here :)
thanks for watching!