As part of homework and classwork for my Japanese class, I have to read the news often so I can discuss about current events in class. Until now, I have been reading Japanese and English news, but I recently had an idea of integrating Vietnamese into my preparation, so I would not only improve my Vietnamese to English comprehension but also my Vietnamese to Japanese comprehension, and vice versa. I imagined it would be something like killing two birds with one stone. So, for the past week, I have attempted to follow Vietnamese news articles more often and translate them into English and Japanese.
Initially, this turns out to be much more difficult than I originally thought it was going to be. My reading comprehension is much much worse than I thought it was. A quick 300 - 600 words article from https://dantri.com.vn/ would often takes me anywhere from 1 to 3 hours to fully comprehend, and then it would take another 1 to 2 hours to fully translate and fix any errors. I think most of it was because I had to stop a lot to look up unfamiliar words – which there are often a lot of when I read political news. On top of that, there aren’t very many Vietnamese-English resources that I can find online, so as a result, this process was extremely time consuming. However, as I do it more often, the amount of time I need to fully comprehend most articles is now around 1 to 1.5 hours. It’s still time consuming, but not as much as it previously was. Unfortunately, the amount of time it takes for me to translate the articles still haven’t changed significantly.
Additionally, I have found that I have a lot of trouble with distinguishing between two particular tonal indicators: dấu hỏi (the hook) and dấu ngã (the tilde). I remember that dấu ngã indicates a high rising pitch while dấu hỏi indicates a mid or low dropping pitch. Additionally, when using dấu ngã, one would usually extend or stress the vowel into a long one. However, as I recently learned from my language partner and my family, the southern dialect, unlike the central and northern dialect, does not make a clear, distinct extended vowel sound when using dấu ngã. While this does not pose a problem for me in terms of listening comprehension as I can still understand the things that are being said, in terms of dictation, however, I mix up the two more often than not. Other than words that I had previously explicitly learned to write as I was a child, I can only guess the distinction between when to use the dấu ngã or the dấu hỏi.
In order to fix this problem, I have started to look into the rules of when the two are typically used. One of the rules I have come across is that in a pair, one must pay attention to the tone mark of the other one. Some examples are:
- Vui vẻ (jolly, cheery): Vui doesn’t have a tonal indicator so vẻ will use dấu hỏi.
- Vớ vẩn (nonsense): Vớ has an acute tonal indicator (high pitch), so vẩn will use dấu hỏi.
- Sẵn sàng (ready): Sàng has a grave tonal indicator (low pitch), so sẵn will use dấu ngã.
- Mạnh mẽ (strong, independent): Mạnh has an underdot tonal indicator (low drop), so mẽ uses dấu ngã.
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