For the past weeks, I have continued to work on two things: reading comprehension and verbal communication. With the holidays quickly approaching and given my family’s tendency to get together during festive times, I thought that it would be a good idea to focus on practice conversations about my school work and future plans for the inevitable awkward interrogation that I will soon be subjected to. My partner would ask me a series of questions in Vietnamese such as:
- How are your studies going? Học hành của con sao rồi?
- What are you learning right now? Con đang học cái gì?
- What are you studying? Con học về ngành gì?
- What are you going to do after graduation? Tốt nghiệp xong con làm gì?
- Have you thought about graduate school? Con có đi học cao học không?
And I would try to answer as many questions as fluently as I can. As expected, even with a peer, answering these personal questions are somewhat difficult to answer since I’ve never really articulated them in Vietnamese. Like before, I would switch to English to make myself more comfortable when it gets too difficult, but we would go over my answers together to make them more coherence and consistent. We found that I have a bad habit of translating English to Vietnamese while answering, and as a result, the answers can sometimes get lost in translation. I also translate questions from Vietnamese to English, which can sometimes dilute the meaning of the question if I mistranslate and I would end up answering a completely different question. I believe that the main reason I am having so much trouble with answering these simple questions is because I lack the vocabulary knowledge to not only answer but also to just comprehend the question. So, in order to fix that, my partner and I are working together to create flashcards of relevant vocabularies such as:
- Cao học – postgraduate
- Ngành – branch/department
- Tốt nghiệp – graduation
We are going to continue to conduct these interview-style conversations to make myself more comfortable with answering questions and make sure I comprehend the Vietnamese language rather than translating it to English and back. We will also add onto the list of relevant vocabularies as they come up.
At the same time, in my own time, I have been working on improving my reading skills. The book I have decided to read was Tây Du Ký (Monkey King: Journey to the West) by Ngô Thừa Ân (Wu Cheng'en). It is a tiểu thuyết Trung Quốc (Chinese novel), so it contains a lot of Hán Việt ngữ or Chữ Nôm (Sino-Vietnamese) vocabularies, which I am definitely not familiar with. As a result, my reading progress has been excruciatingly slow as I have to continuous stop and look up words and phrases every other sentences. I think the most pages I have gotten through in one day was 4 pages after hours of constant back and forth. However, I have found some success in remembering some Chữ Nôm through mnemonics, similar to what I use to memorize Japanese Kanji and Chinese logographic characters. It takes a while as I have to convert the Latin-scripted words into Chữ Nôm logographic characters, but I quite enjoy being able to apply my learning style from one language to another.
Comments
Do you feel that reading Vietnamese is the most difficult part of learning the language?