Hello World! Chao Cac Ban

First post. first post. Firsts are always awkward, whatever they may be. Or maybe its just me.

Do pardon the lack of accents , I still have to figure out how to use Vietnamese keyboard.

    I have been studying Vietnamese for a few months now, I like it a lot. This blog is supposed to serve as basically a journal of sorts of my progress and also my thoughts about linguistics and the Vietnamese language.

    My first impressions can be described by the adjectives "amazed", "flabbergasted" and other synonyms of surprised and that region of emotions. My linguistic background is western so everything about Viet is new to me. Now that is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I was starting to get a little bored of learning western languages. I still love those, but learning something new is just a lot more fun, gets your brain cells flowing. Let me give a brief account of my impressions of the grammar, tones , and culture thus far. 

    Grammar is pretty straight forward, no conjugations to be found like ones Spanish and other romance languages. Verbs, tense indicators are fairly easy to understand. So, is the sentence structure. S-V-O for the most part. Classifiers are a fairly new concept. Mind you, they do exist in English, we just dont use them as often or as much. In Viet, you HAVE to know them if you dont wish for people to treat you like a child. Speaking of, use incorrect grammar anywhere in the world if you wish to appear dumb. Works like a charm. I dont think it necessarily means that one is not intelligent, but it does incite an emotional response "this guy is duuuuumb". 

     Tones, tones, tooooones. Love em or hate em. You have to live with them. I happen to love them, they almost give an impression of "discipline" but I dont think its like that. Once you learn it, it becomes easy. Anything one doesnt know, often seems difficult or insurmountable. I think I have gotten the hang of it now. Long way to go for mastery, however.

    Cultures is oh so different from what I am used to. From treating other peoples to family to emphasis on group benefit over individuality, there are a lot of things I am still trying to wrap my head around. That is a topic , I think I will leave for another post.

Thanks for reading, Cam On.

Student.