This is the 1st volume (of 2) of the FSI Vietnamese Basic course. It contains units 1-10 of the course. The purpose of the Guide to Pronunciation is to familiarize a student with the pronunciation of Southern Vietnamese to the point where he can recognize and reproduce with facility all its commonly occurring sounds and sequences of sounds.
The method underlying the presentation involves listening, contrasting, recognizing, and imitating. The material has been presented as simply as possible, always with the beginning student, rather than the professional linguist, in mind. While some technical phonetic descriptions are included for those who understand them, they can be ignored by the student with limited linguistic background.
This guide should be used in conjunction with the accompanying tape recordings. To try to learn Vietnamese pronunciation by reading the text without reference to the recordings would be as useless as trying to learn to play the piano by reading music without ever touching a keyboard.
The student's ability to use this guide effectively will be determined largely by his willingness to follow the specific instructions provided at each step. He must also be careful never to move ahead until he has thoroughly mastered what has already been introduced, by going over each section as many times as he requires.
A word of caution: While this guide uses conventional Vietnamese spelling, it aims primarily at teaching a student how to pronounce - not how to read - Vietnamese. Accordingly, all drills should be practiced first with the book closed. Those students who are also interested in developing a reading skill can use the guide to practice reading in addition to - but not in place of - pronunciation practice. AFTER mastering the pronunciation, such students can use the Familiarization Drills and Mimicry Drills for reading practice: by reading each item in these drills BEFORE it occurs on the tape, their reading can be confirmed (or corrected) by the tape.
You can find the other volume of the FSI Vietnamese Basic Course here:
FSI - Vietnamese Basic Course (Volume 2)
Vietnamese is the national, official language of Vietnam. It is the native language of Vietnamese people (Kinh), and of about three million Vietnamese residing elsewhere. It also is spoken as a first or second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austroasiatic language family of which it has, by far, the most speakers (several times that of the other Austroasiatic languages combined). Much of Vietnamese vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese, and it formerly used a modified set of Chinese characters called Chữ Nôm given vernacular pronunciation. As a byproduct of French colonial rule, Vietnamese was influenced by the French language; the Vietnamese alphabet in use today is a Latin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones, and certain letters.
Vietnamese is spoken in: Vietnam
Vietnamese is also called: nnamese, Ching, Gin, Jing, Kinh, Viet
