what will practicing vietnamese for 1500 hours get you?

tl;dr: entry to the fun stage of learning, and an intuition for the scale of the task

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

Passive listening time I estimate at 600 additional inattentive hours. I don't really do this anymore.

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
• 1000 hours

Current level:

• Can watch movies and television in a few genres in Vietnamese without subtitles and follow the plot and all the dialogue in 3/5 scenes. These genres are romance and fantasy war. When I don't understand a sentence, I can usually explain why. Like I know which words I didn't understand.
• Can watch lectures on topics of interest in Vietnamese and understand enough to hold my attention. In terms of word coverage it's like 70% or 80% so I'm missing a huge amount but it's still fun.
• Finished my first novel in Vietnamese with dictionary, at a comprehension level I could actually enjoy. It was Cô Nàng Cửa Hàng Tiện Ích by Sayaka Murata, translated by An Vy, which I'd read in English already.
• Can talk with tutors about non-special domains. Gossip is okay, plots of shows and books are good topics, but nothing too specific like recipes, history, economics, law, etc. This is not replicable with non-tutors.

Rejected Strategies:

• Apps (too boring)
• Grammar explanations (too boring)
• Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)
• Content made for language learners (maximum boring)
• Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)

Previously rejected strategies that became useful

• Studying explanations of the sound system: In A Vietnamese Reference Grammar, which I read the sound system chapter of, I learned that some tones (most notably dấu hỏi and dấu ngang) completely change based on their position in the sentence. dấu ngang is often described as a "flat" tone but actually it drops in pitch the fastest of any tone when it's got heavy stress at the end of a pause group, and also these pause groups are grammatically predictable, though probabalistic. This is something no tutor or native speaker I know of has ever said, but it explained a lot of anomalies I was hearing, both in my listening practice and out of my own mouth. Cheers to the linguists.
• Perception drills: in the beginning these were absolutely useless and evil, but after I got to the point where only a few stubborn vowel clusters remained which I still struggled to distinguish, a few sessions of minimal pair training provided value.

Reflection on last update:

The main thing that's different now versus at 1000 hours is how much more fun learning the language is. I can read literature and experience entire passages (rarely full pages, never full chapters) without needing to look anything up. This experience of the language is so much fuller than it was at the word level, or even the sentence level. I get the faintest hints of speakers' and writers' personalities coming through in their grammar and diction.

Interviews are harder to follow, but I think by 2000 hours I'll be able to just casually put on a Vietcetera interview with an author or translator and enjoy what they have to say.

This is, I think, the fabled "crossing over point" for first-time adult language learners where there is no more doubt.

As far as my conversational ability goes, it must be better than it was 500 hours ago, like logically that must be the case, but it continues to feel worse. My estimate of 4000 hours for being comfortably conversational is looking pretty spot on about now.

Methods:

A big change in my methods after last update is that I now follow a schedule. I used to worry every day about whether I'd have time after work to practice Vietnamese. To fix that I now put in two hours every day before work, with this routine:

• Anki audio-only sentence card review (15m): This is the best exercises for my listening ability I've found. Basically I hear the sentence, transcribe it in my head and understand the meaning, then check my transcription and understanding by flipping the card. I attribute my strong listening development to this immediate-feedback practice. It was inspired by what I read in the book Peak about efficient language learners.
• Intensive listening (30m): I step through a show with subtitles. I find lots of dubs with matching subs on Netflix (Analog Squad, Ready Set Love, Business Proposal, Our Beloved Summer, etc). If I find a sentence with ONE (exactly one) unknown word, I use asbplayer to send it to my anki deck, with original audio, with one click. An addon called Intellifiller uses gpt4 api to add an English translation on the back for me, which is almost always correct. Note about Viet subs on Netflix: there's a secret hidden Viet sub track on most dubs, that matches word for word, which you can find by setting audio to Viet, refreshing, then setting the subs to Viet.
• Extensive listening (30m): I watch a show without subtitles. This is usually a show I've studied before intensively, or one I've watched in English, or some tv soap I couldn't possibly get confused by. I often repeat dense stuff a few days in a row.
• Intensive Reading (45m): I read a novel with dictionary and repeatedly read sentences or passages as necessary to grok.

After work, if I feel like it and have time, I'll extensively read manga or extensively watch a Vietnamese show.

Time Breakdown:

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

• 58% listening (865h09m)
• 32% reading (483h50m)
• 6% conversation (91h34m)
• 4% anki audio sentence recognition cards (61h39m)

Pros/cons of my methods:

On the pro side:

• My vocab and comprehension are beefed compared to other learners (according to my tutors).
• My speech is clear enough. When I'm not understood, it's almost always because I've said ungrammatical nonsense or used the wrong words rather than pronunciation issues.

On the con side:

• If I had more output practice, chorusing practice, that kind of thing, it's possible that would improve my perception when listening and reading, improve my ability to notice what I need. But I just don't like that stuff very much and I'm content to let it arrive late.

On the idk side:

• Without explicit speech instruction, I've picked up sounds from all dialects of Vietnamese. All tutors I have spoken with have pointed this out and said it was odd, but not a problem.

Other thoughts:

In my last update, I noted as a con that my methods may not be as efficient as some hypothetical "practical" way to learn that could get someone through daily interactions. Since then, I've become skeptical that such a method exists, or that if it does it could get any mileage outside a classroom setting. The amount of hours of sustained, regular practice it took me to reliably recognize common words like "đang" as spoken by a variety of speakers suggests to me that there is no shortcut. Or I have a learning disability.

Recommendations

I'm not yet fluent so I have no qualifications to give advice. My next update, which I'll write at 2000 hours, may contain different opinions.

That said, my advice for Vietnamese learners now is:

• All the pain is front-loaded. Your early days will be the worst part of the experience. It only gets better. Long before fluency, the experience of learning can become one of the best and most rewarding parts of your daily life.
• Choose intervals to assess your progress and otherwise forget about it. Build a system of habits, and let the question of eventual fluency fade from your thoughts. The system will take care of it for you. If you practice with a good system every day, it can't not happen. That's as much a fact as that things thrown up will eventually fall down.
• Relax! Nothing that you don't understand is urgent. No error in your output is urgent. A time will come when it's productive to consult the linguists, and that time will be when you're relaxed, when you've noticed a pattern you want a hint at understanding, but can accept not understanding it if you're not ready. The patience game here has a steep learning curve. It can be hard when approaching a language with a sound system this complex (and multiple of them) to accept that after a year or whatever of study you still can mistake "hello good morning" for a totally different phrase. But it does arrive eventually.
• As a language learner, you are always a descriptive linguist. If native speakers say it that way, that's how it's said.
• Content by and for native speakers or bust. Even from the start.

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