acclimate to the vietnamese sound system

The Vietnamese sound system eats lazy learners, which is unfortunate because I'm that type. But I have found that certain high-ROI exercises are cheap penance for otherwise lazy routines.

In this post I present exercises that target weak sound perception and innacurate sound production, and content to do them with, which I think have enabled me to make progress.

Listening: transcription

I discuss my listening training in this video.

The basic idea is: Review an Anki deck that plays the audio on the front of the card on repeat. Try to transcribe it in your head. Flip it over. Grade yourself rigorously. If you get the tone, vowel, or consonant wrong, you didn't pass. Listen over and over until you can understand why you misheard.

To perform this exercise, you need an Anki deck of audio clips of native speech. Later in this post I offer decks to download, but this works best if you mine your own cards. You can find discussion of tools and sources to do this for Vietnamese in my software recommendations post.

Pronunciation: chorusing

If I become aware of a systematic error in my speech, I will chorus after some recordings that feature the sounds I produce wrong. Refold explains chorusing and its scientific basis here.

To make this activity more convenient for me I Claudeslopped a small html file that implements everything I need, and open it in Chrome.

I listen over and over to the native speaker's recording after loading it in, trim to the section I want to imitate, then record my own voice. The Compare button plays them both in alternation so I can try to hear the differences. I export the comparisons to check with a tutor later.

You can download the html file here (right-click to save it, then open it).

Content to do it with

Here are two decks, both men's voices, in northern and southern accent. The sentences are taken from highlights from books I read for my own sentence mining. Each of these voice actors sold me a license to host their recordings on my site for other Vietnamese learners to download.

• Northern man, excerpts from Lược Sử Loài Người - @hungjuniorle
• Southern man, excepts from Xứ Cát - @dai_nguyen

If in the listening exercise any sentences are too hard or broken, you can suspend or delete them from the More menu.

To use any of the audio recordings for chorusing, you can find them on your system after importing them into Anki. Use Tools > Check Media > View Files.

Best of luck to you in your Vietnamese learning!