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#1 Work and living opportunities
I want to live and work in Vietnam.
There are many beautiful cities in Vietnam that I would love to explore
Many cities in Vietnam like Saigon, Da Nang and Hanoi are quite affordable and offer an interesting experience for expats to have a good quality of live and experience a unique culture.
The food is amazing, I love Vietnamese food because it’s healthier than many other ethic cuisines and is very flavourful and diverse.
As many of you may have guessed, I love warm weather, When it’s hot, when it’s warm I’m a happy guy. I love spending time outside in nature and under the sun whether it be at the the beach or hiking through the mountains.
#2 My girlfriend is Vietnamese-Canadian
My girlfriend’s family speak Vietnamese and Cantonese. So I would like to learn some of the language to show my respect for their culture and their household traditions.
It’s also very motivating to have a heritage speaker of a language you’re learning right there and as a language enthusiast, I see it as an exciting opportunity to get to know a new culture and challenge myself.
This is also my first opportunity to learn a language in this way that is, having a partner whose language you’re learning and I think I’ll be able to learn a lot about the language learning process using this kind of natural method much like having family that speaks the language you’re learning. So I’m curious to see how it goes and I think it’s also an interesting way to deepen and spice up the relationship.
#3 My love for South East Asia and my general curiosity towards Vietnam and that region.
As a language nerd, I am always intrigued to better understand how similar or dissimilar languages in that region are to one another.
On a phonetic level, I find the sounds of Vietnamese to be very different to European languages or anything I’ve ever experienced before which makes me curious to learn more.
Plus, Plus, Vietnamese is my first Austro-asiatic language so I’m super excited to learn a language from a new language family.
How am I learning Vietnamese?
I bought a course for beginners in Vietnamese. Actually it’s the first time in a while that I’ve spent money to earn a language and I did so mainly because of the scarcity of resources and the format of this particular course that I liked a lot. It is very similar to what I do here in the sense that the content is based on listening, reading and copying a native speaker’s pronunciation which is what I always seek out when I’m learning a new language.
So I’ve been using this course along with Google Translate to analyze sentence structure which has been pretty effective so far. I’m using google translate because of the lack of quality free Vietnamese dictionaries online, something that I will probably invest in in the future.
Cultural reference: Forrest Gump is a famous movie released in 1994 that contains many interesting historical references through the life of a simple man “Forrest Gump”. I recommend you to check it out, it’s very good!
I like writing out example sentences, watching videos and listening to podcasts. Currently, I don’t have a book to learn Vietnamese, but since it is a rarer language it’s something I might consider buying as I improve, which is something that I don’t usually do with more widely spoken languages. My goals is to learn for an hour a day, I have decided to put Japanese to the side as well to concentrate my efforts on Vietnamese. I study the most common vocabulary from a book that is called most common 2500 words, my copy is in Greek and English. But you can translate the words and expressions into whatever language you have a dictionary for and practise that way.
I would love to start taking lessons in the near future, maybe on ItalkI or a platform like that. I have one friend who speaks Vietnamese plus my girlfriend so I intend to practise with them as much as possible. It’s funny actually because from day one I was able to say some things to my girlfriend and surprise her so that has been super motivating. I intend to focus the majority of my efforts on speaking, and mastering the tones especially since Southern Vietnamese has 5 tones, and I want to have a good level of comprehension. In terms of reading, to my knowledge, there is very little interesting things available in Vietnamese that aren’t available in languages I already know so I’m not going to fret too much about learning to read to a very high level. Although, being able to read will enable me to access more material and grow my vocabulary so of course I want to be able to read and pronounce words well.
Thank you for listening!
Nick Nantais