I took two Vietnamese classes in college, and I really enjoy learning Vietnamese. My method is to watch as many instructional Vietnamese videos as possible, ask as many questions as possible, and identify any issue that I might have with writing, speaking, or listening as soon as possible. It may come back to haunt you later on if you don't.  I always had my professor to speak with and ask questions, but if you don't have a professor then it would be great if you could find a native speaker that can also answer all of your questions. An explanation for a question has to be as clear as possible for you to understand and remember. Some people prefer native speakers of their own language to explain things to them because sometimes a native speaker of a target language doesn't have the speaking ability to explain it in someone's mother tongue. The only major problem that you may run into is when you want a non-native speaker to teach you how to pronounce something. They could be either right or wrong with their pronunciation. However, you can take grammar related help can still be reliable. 

Furthermore, memorizing vocabulary isn't too difficult for me. Once you memorize enough vocab then translating phrases to English is quite simple without knowing every last word in a phrase. Just watch out for idioms of course. The tough thing to do is translate from your mother tongue into a foreign language. Also, I find it much harder to pronounce the tones and distinguish between the tones when listening. All the words that start with "nh" and "ng" will give native English speakers pronunciation trouble because in English we have those sounds at the end of words. Lastly, as of now, I can introduce myself, order food, talk about the weather, describe my clothes...etc just basic convos. Repetition is the key. I can't talk about aliens from other planets in Vietnamese yet lol. 

So you want to learn Vietnamese. I have noticed that you are learning Korean too. That's awesome! Actually learning Vietnamese is easier than learning English or Japanese/Mandarin. The difficult things is you can't learn Vietnamese without a native speaker to correct you. There are some reasons:

- Your ears are not familiar with tone language. Maybe you think you speak correctly but actually it's wrong with us.

- please don't learn Vietnamese from textbooks. Or you can use textbooks but you must have a native speaker to tell you when it's actually used in real life. 

- Some textbooks are wrong when they try to find english words sound like Vietnamese words. 

I not advise you this just because I'm a Vietnamese teacher on Italki. You can find any Vietnamese language partner to help you.

Best regards,

Jenn

Get a Vietnamese girlfriend, thats the best way ;) haha... or live in vietnam...

The listening aspect is so difficult that I spend the most time working on that.

Hello Valencia,

I'm Tri from Vietnam. I can help you improve your Vietnamese. I hope you also help me improve my English. I'll teach how to speak Vietnamese like native speakers and increase your vocabulary. My English is not good but enough to make a simple conversation. Let's be friend.

Have a nice day!