what will practicing vietnamese for 1000 hours get you?

tl;dr: enough knowledge to destroy all the confidence you build in the first 500

All tracked time is active, 100% focused on the task at hand.

Passive listening time I estimate at 500 additional hours, mostly not focused on the content. During those hours I'm usually cooking, cleaning, or running with something I already know (an episode I watched before, an audiobook of a chapter I’ve already read, etc) playing in my headphones.

Starting from: English monolingual beta

Current strategy: Consume fiction

Long-term goal: D1 fluency and a paid original fiction publication by 2040

Past updates:

• 530 hours

Current level:

• Can follow the story of most anime in the battle fantasy genre without reading the manga beforehand, or using subtitles. This is my most developed domain.
• Can enjoy basically any manga for teenagers or younger audiences, sans dictionary. Unknown words still happen all the time but for some reason they’re not the obstacle they used to be.
• Once an episode or two, understand every word of an entire scene + the vibes.
• Can navigate independently in no/low-english regions of Vietnam and succeed with confidence in high-context interactions such as paying for things, asking for directions in stores, understanding instructions when someone is asking me to lend them a hand, or small talk. In particular, I’ve hypertrophied the “why do you know Vietnamese” small talk tree, because a lot of people lead me down that one. (I don’t live in Vietnam, just visited.)
• In low-context interactions, where a native speaker can bring up any topic at any time, I’m lost. This milestone, “conversational”, is still way off. Last post, I pegged it at 1250 hours. Now, I predict it will come at 4000 hours.

Rejected Strategies:

• Apps (too boring)
• Grammar explanations (too boring)
• Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)
• Studying explanations of the sound system (invariably misleading)
• Tone perception drills (too evil)
• Content made for language learners (maximum boring)
• Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)

Reflection on last update:

The main thing I’d correct about my last update is my assessment of conversational ability. For some reason at 530 hours, I believed I was having relaxed conversations about a variety of topics with my tutor.

Today my assessment of my conversational ability is far worse. I am an ape.

Methods:

Video tour of my methods.

I’m currently gunning hard on improving comprehension, and try to keep a daily routine that provides the necessary nutrients.

But also, I get bored easily, so I have a wide variety of activities and a huge library of content and just do what I feel like that day. This is my set:

• Step through videos with whisper-ai subtitles (or (super rarely, when available) actual viet cc) and zoopdog hover dictionary in asbplayer. Satisfies: Introduces new vocab, improves listening accuracy (being skeptical of whisper-ai and listening for my own interpretation seems to help a lot; whisper is worse than my ears at this point but knows more words)
• Read ebooks with zoopdog. Satisfies: Introduces new vocab
• Listen to audio books of stuff I read already with zoopdog. Satisfies: Improves listening comprehension
• Read manga with no dictionary. Satisfies, surprisingly: Improves listening comprehension. (I find that improved reading speed transfers to improved listening comprehension speed)
• Read manga with dictionary. Satisfies: introduces new vocab
• Anki audio-only sentence cards. Satisfies: Improves listening accuracy

Time Breakdown:

I use atracker on iOS since it's got a quick interface on apple watch.

Since last post, I dug into my old im messages, calendar events, and youtube history to figure out the categories of my first hours.

• 57% listening (567h56m)
• 35% reading (352h52m)
• 7% conversation (65h56m)
• 1% anki audio sentence recognition cards (13h34m)

Pros/cons of my methods:

On the pro side:

• Vietnamese speakers are consistently shocked I can understand them well.
• Vietnamese speakers are consistently shocked they can understand me well.
• My methods are hyper-custom to my interests and I am not tired at all. I will make it to 2040.

On the con side:

• This is a breadth-first marathon approach, unfit for someone whose goals are more practical than artistic fluency, like asking in-laws whether they’re healthy during each annual visit.
• Occasionally it’s lonely to focus so much on comprehension and not have conversations using the language. Extroverts would probably suffer. I just really hate being in a conversation where the other person is accommodating me (as tutors do), and since my plan is twenty years long, I procrastinate.

Recommendations

I'm not yet fluent so I have no qualifications to give advice. My next update, which I'll write at 1500 hours, may contain different opinions.

That said, my views now are:

• All the pain is front-loaded. Every month is easier than the last because content gets more engaging.
• The written alphabet is a lie used to calm the existential anxieties of Vietnamese school children who can’t handle anarchy. There is no dialect of Vietnamese whose relationship to the written system is internally consistent. Trust only your ears.
• Tones don’t exist. Only vowels exist. ơ and ở are just different vowels.
• When listening, stay with the current word. It may be tempting to hold some word you almost made out in your auditory memory and try to recall its meaning, but 1. that’s exhausting 2. you’re missing the rest of the sentence and 3. that’s not the mental act you need to practice in order to understand speech in real time. Instead, stay with the current word and let the half-recalled words fade. Eventually, when you know the words better, full impressions of their meaning will emerge in real-time.

Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 500 more hours!

Reddit discussion.