36 replies to this topic

[garry]

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language

just know 4 hungarian words a little similar to finnish

hal kala (fish)
viz vesi (water)
eleven elävä (live)
alat alla (under)

[Dragonscloud]

But try to find the differences between the 6 different intonations of the Vietnamese word “ta”.

I'm struggling with that right now. I'm trying to learn some basic Vietnamese. In Spanish it was much easier because the pronunciation is mostly very basic and and the written aspect of the language is mostly phonetic. If I read a Spanish phrase I may not know exaclty what it means, but I can easily pronounce it in my head. With Vietnamese, I can get some visual recall of written words, but have no clue as to how to pronounce them.

The only way I've been able to learn any of the pronunciation is to ask questions of my friend's Vietnamese wife. I ask her how to pronounce something several times and she gives me feedback on whether or not I'm repeating her correctly. I've noticed that there are many vowels and dipthongs that only very loosely have English equivalents. Her name is Yen, and is pornounced similar to the name "Ian". Pretty straightforward. Her cousin's name is Thu. Somewhat of a cross betwen the English words "to" and "toe". Her husband has a problem trying to say "Thu" correctly, even though to his ears he's saying the same thing that Yen and I are. I think that I'll have to come up with my own phonetic mnemonics for this language.

On another language tanget:
I once met a women from India. She and her husband both grew up in India. They use English to communicate with each other. Across the Atlantic from the U.S., that probably isn't much a surprise. In the U.S., the concept is rather novel.

[Laszlo]

Japanese (unlike Vietnamese or Chinese) is not a tonal language. why did you need to know "high or low pitches"...?

Japanese has lexically distinguishing pitch-accents, which are more complex than just high and low pitches, but without them much spoken information is lost. This is why a roman letter phonetic transcript (like writing in hiragana or katakana) is not satisfactory.

[Dragonscloud]

@Viola

Yeah, some of it might sound a bit dain-bramaged to us, especially when a Vietnamese-speaker tries to reproduce sounds in English not native to their own language. I'm sure I sound completely retarded when trying to reproduce Vietnamese phonemes, though.
I also know that I looked idiot trying to eat with the rounded stainless-steel chopsticks. The meals were worth getting laughed at, though. :c}

I have a friend in Vietnam that I email with. Until and unless she starts asking for correction, I've made it a point not to correct her English. From her misspellings I can get a little better idea of the Vietnamese phonemes and how English words actually sound to her. "Hairdresser" becomes "haudresser" , family becomes "pamily" and "be" becomes "bi". From this I can tell that she hears the word "be" correctly but forgets which letter is a long "e" and she has trouble discerning the syllable "air".

I'll check out the wikipedia article. Thanks.