what will practicing vietnamese for 530 hours get you?

tl;dr: enough knowledge to enjoy further study

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

Passive listening time I estimate at 300 additional hours, mostly not focused on the content. During those hours I'm usually cooking, cleaning, or running with an episode of a show I've already watched playing in my headphones.

Starting from: English monolingual beta

Current strategy: Consume fiction

Long-term goal: D1 fluency and a paid original fiction publication in twenty years

Current level:

• Can read, understand, and enjoy Naruto manga episodes with 1-2 lookups and 2-3 backtracks
• Can understand the gist of the corresponding anime episodes, and a bit less than the gist of other shows in the fantasy battle genre (One Piece, Pokemon, The Dragon Prince)
• Rarely, can follow every word of entire scenes of episodes I've recently read
• Can get the gist of news articles
• A guess pulled from my ass re how long it'll take to get basic fluency from here: 1 year (a.k.a. 720 more hours)
• Can have un-self-conscious, relaxed conversation with a tutor about many non-specific topics (wants, desires, interests, opinions, gossip), with conversation breakdown (tutor needing to type and explain a word) about three times per half hour

Rejected Strategies:

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

2018-2022: The Dabbling Era

I had no system of practice. I downloaded and opened apps once or twice. I ordered a (physical) deck of premade vocabulary cards for kids (lmao). I inflicted psychic pain upon Vietnamese people on Tandem with my mouth sounds. I tortured myself with Pimsleur and FSI tapes.

July 2022-March 2023: The Output Era

I stumbled upon FluentIn3Months which advises Speak From Day One^TM. I booked many tutor sessions and tried reading aloud according to pronunciation guides.

This was worse than useless. It took a while to break the dumb muscle memory I built doing these things. I was both unclear to native speakers and hurting my throat.

In total I'd have spent about 100 hours engaging with Vietnamese by this point.

March 2023-June 2023: Early Input Era

As of March 2023 I could understand basically nothing, and say nothing without thinking quite hard about it. I changed my approach to focus on input.

Targeting 2 hours per day, I

• Watched vietnamese youtube videos (giang ơi, S-Channel, random videos about gardening, house tours)
• Read vietnamese books with translations available to reference (The Little Prince, Norwegian Wood, Harry Potter)
• Read vietnamese wikipedia on history topics

It was not optimal learning content. Content for beginners or even native-speaking children is sparse in vietnamese, and with my low level all of it felt equally impenetrable.

June 2023-Now: Fiction Input Era

Eventually, having acquired enough common words from dense native content, I became sensitive to difficulty differences. I noticed that some mangas for teenagers were actually readable, and that if I looped episodes of kid's shows ten times or so, I could reach ~40% comprehension.

After that, I focused all my attention on the easiest and most fun content, where I'd have massive context: long-running stories I'd consumed before, with both written and spoken forms.

• The Little Prince + audio book on Voiz
• Naruto Manga + Dubbed anime
• One Piece Manga + Dubbed anime

And for listening only, during the lazy times:

• Pokemon Dubbed anime
• The Dragon Prince
• The Sea of Love

And for the itchy times:

• Wandering around vietnamese reddit

Every monday I speak with a tutor for 30m, just free talk. I have no other output practice but my output improves every week simply as a result of what I've consumed.

Time Breakdown

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

For the latter 430 hours I have tracking in four categories. Unfortunately I didn't track specific activities during the first 100.

• 73% listening (314 hours)
• 24% reading (103 hours)
• 2% conversation practice (9 hours)
• 1% anki audio sentence recognition cards (4 hours) (prebuilt decks from LTL)

Recommendations

I'm not yet fluent so I have no qualifications to give advice. My next journal update, which I'll write at 1000 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 alphabet is pitched as "phonetic". This is true in comparison to English, but for a variety of reasons, the spelling and spoken form of words will differ. Trust your ears over your eyes.
• Don't get neurotic about the dialects. Favor internalizing one for your reading voice but let all of the others into your ears. Most media will feature several dialects.
• Don't get neurotic about tones. Just learn each word's sound individually and your unconscious will eventually pick up patterns.
• Build a library of content. Repetition is effective and when you're in the dark days it's a good confidence restorer to revisit content from a few months ago with higher comprehension.
• Find a wide variety of content. Be monogamous with the language, not any particular source of it. Let your curiosity and natural drive to engage with stuff carry you forward.

Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 470 more hours!

Reddit discussion.