7 posts
Vietnamese needs 134 letter-and-mark combinations, and almost nobody owns a keyboard that shows a single one of them. The 1920s telegraph trick that became Telex, the Californian rival that sued Microsoft, the 46 encodings that came before Unicode, the 2 KB student program now inside every iPhone, and why the marks people drop in text messages are so hard to put back.
Vietnamese has a word for "I", but polite speech rarely uses it. Most of the time speakers say "older brother", "aunt" or "grandfather" instead, and every sentence states how the two people are related. How the system works, where it differs between North and South, and how a learner can survive it.
Continue reading “No Word for "You": How Vietnamese Turns Family Terms Into Pronouns” →
Northern Vietnamese has six tones, Southern Vietnamese effectively five, and two of them are as much about a creak in the throat as about pitch. Where the tones came from, why the North and South hear them differently, and what that means for learning them.
Continue reading “Six Tones, Two Dialects: Why Vietnamese Tones Are More Than Pitch” →
Coffee, soap, cars, cheese and the tyre on your motorbike: a few hundred French words are still part of everyday Vietnamese. How they were reshaped to fit a one-syllable, six-tone language, and what that means if you are learning either one.
Continue reading “Cà Phê, Xà Phòng, Ô Tô: The French Hiding Inside Vietnamese” →
Of the countries that once wrote in Chinese characters, only Vietnam switched to the Latin alphabet. Who built that script, how a missionary tool became the national writing system, and what its history means for anyone learning to read Vietnamese.
Continue reading “Chữ Quốc Ngữ: How Vietnamese Ended Up Written in Latin Letters” →
Sino-Vietnamese words are to Vietnamese what Latin and Greek roots are to English. How big that layer really is, where it came from, and how learners can use it to multiply their vocabulary.
Continue reading “Hán-Việt: The Hidden Latin of Vietnamese” →
Why cramming vocabulary fails, what the forgetting curve actually looks like, and how to set up a spaced repetition habit that survives contact with real life.
Continue reading “Spaced Repetition: The Engine Behind Long-Term Vocabulary” →
