Dear best precious friends,

Do you know how we native Vietnamese people learn our own language? 

Knowing how to begin studying a new language is very important. It is very helpful for you and can lead you into an easy, effective way of learning. But how to start, it is a very big question and not easy to answer.

How to start? It depends on each ocassion of each body and each circumstance. But is not too uneasy like that, we can begin our journey of studying a new language by watching how the children study a new language. Here I would like to tell how we study our own language as an toned language  at the first time of our life. 

It is funny, but it is really true. We begin to learn our own language by copying the sound of the animals. For example, with the sound of vowel O and the first four accents ( Vietnamese language has six tones, including : going up high, going down, up and down together, long and stronger down and up, falling down and neutral accents ), we will study by immitating the singing of the cocks: Ò Ó O O ; Ò Ó O O ; Ò Ó O O ; Ò Ó  O O...And for the vowel E, we copy the sound of a goat: BE BE BE BE BE.

Besides that, we start to learn to listen and to speak first through the poems. Vietnamese has a large stocks of poems and tradional storries, some kinds of traditional songs. They all share the most important features, which are easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to go deep into the children mind. I can give here one example:

Bé bé bồng bông                      Dear little little babbies

Hai má hồng hồng                    With two pink cheeks

Bố đi sơ tán                             Fathers evacuate from the war

Bế em đi cùng                         And take you along

Mẹ mua xe gỗ                          Mothers buy for you a wooden chair bike

Cho bé ngồi chơi                      So you can sit and play

Bao giờ bé lớn                          Still you grow up

Bố đưa bé về phố đông             Fathers will take you back to homeland

So you can see,  all the children  in Viet nam know this song before they go to school and get to know some alphabets or some grammatical sentences. So what this means for you to start learning a new language easily and interestingly?

Firstly, in my own idea, you can begin to learn Vietnamese with a really original Vietnamese and that teacher is living in the native country, so the teacher can transfer to you well the modern cultural and language. I do not mean that the Vietnamese teachers who live overseas are not good, but in my experience, the teachers in Vietnamese are having more up-to-date knowledge , as you know the language is changing over and over the time, young people seem to create so many new words and sentence structures which we did not have before. And of course, it is hard for Vietnamese teachers living overseas to update these knowledges.

Secondly, you can begin leanring Vietnamese language with simple poems or songs so you can practice the tones. I have worked with many foreigners who learn Vietnamese and they seem to know too much about sentence structures and vocabularies but they cannot make the understandable sentences. So people cannot understand what they say. And Vietnamese language is difficult for its tones, not the structures. So, get well with the accents first before doing any  harder and deeper lessons. You should have an idea that people like to speak and to hear every day simple sentences. 

With this strategy of learning, I have helped many foreigners travelling to Vietnamese and they can make conversations with local people very well, these conversations make their trips more meaningful and enjoyable. Some of them even have made some kind of self travels into the ethnic groups in the highland of Vietnam and challenge themselves with adventurous and new experiences.

So how about you? I hope I would give you some ideas through this writings. Please contact me if you have any further question.

Best wishes from Vietnam,

Nguyen The Vu