Over break, other than verbally communicating with my family as well as coworkers, some (albeit light) reading, and the occasional YouTube video binge, I had very few use of Vietnamese. As a result, the past two weeks were spent reviewing basic grammar as well as conducting Vietnamese drills as a means to review vocabulary. My language partner and I are also drawing up a rough learning plan and goals for this semester.
We reviewed basic grammar such as basic sentence structure, measured words (classifiers), conjunction, and tenses. Vietnamese and English share similar sentence structure in that they both utilize the SVO structure; that is, subject + verb + object. Vietnamese conjunctions uses và (“and”), nhưng (“but”), hay (“or”), hoặc (“either … or”) similarly to the way conjunctions are used in English.
Vietnamese also utilizes adjectives much like English, however, unlike English, Vietnamese adjectives are always placed after the nouns they modify. Another dissimilarity between the two languages lies in that there are also no word forms (i.e inflection) in Vietnamese. Additional words are used to indicate additional or altered meanings as well as tenses. For Vietnamese, the only major verb tenses are:
- present simple -> uses only the verb, just like in English
- present continuous -> indicated using đang - the equivalent of the verb -ing form in English - before the verb
- past simple -> indicated using đã (“already”) before the verb or rồi (“already”) at the end of the sentence.
- future simple -> indicated using sẽ (“will”) before the verb
In comparison, English utilizes twelve verb tenses:
- simple present
- E.g. They run home.
- simple past
- E.g. They ran home.
- simple future
- E.g. They will run home.
- Present Continuous
- E.g. They are running home.
- Past Continuous
- E.g. They were running home when they came across the cat.
- Future continuous
- E.g. They will be running home.
- Present perfect
- E.g. They have lived here since last year.
- Past perfect
- E.g. They had been here before.
- Future perfect
- E.g. They will have been here by now.
- Present perfect continuous
- E.g. They are running.
- Past perfect continuous
- E.g. They were running.
- Future perfect continuous
- E.g. They will be running.
For the drill, my partner and I decided to talk about our activities over the break. I talked about how I’ve been working for the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) as well as helping at my family’s friend’s Vietnamese restaurant. Since it’s a family owned business, most of the people who work there are also Vietnamese. Many of them are Vietnam war immigrants or first generation Vietnamese Americans (which we all often jokingly refers to as Việt kiều which means “overseas Vietnamese” or “Vietnamese diasapora”). It was surprisingly easy to communicate with them despite my barely intermediate level of Vietnamese, but since most of them are Vietnam War refugees, we speak a common accent from the south so that could have also aided in my comprehension. However, I was told that I don’t carry the typical Vietnamese-American accent that their children or themselves carry when they speak in Vietnamese or English.
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