the best vietnamese learning apps

2026-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

This is a list of the apps I've used to learn Vietnamese.

Dictionaries</h2>
Unless you're on the ALG train, you will need a dictionary.
Mobile recommendation: dictbox</a>
This app can load custom dictionaries. It'll serve you well at the beginning with the default options, and when it's time, you can load in a monolingual dictionary and also custom domain-specific dictionaries.
Browser recommendation: zoopdog</a>
While Yomitan is more customizable, I recommend zoopdog because it has fewer infuriating UI bugs and its default VNEDICT</a> is sufficient most of the time.
For slang, I suggest an LLM. The general models after 2024 have read the entire vietnamese internet and can figure it out most of the time.

Content</h2>
Of course, you need words to look up in your dictionaries! Where will they come from?
Visit my content index</a> for a detailed list of the content I used to go from zero to conversational.
The apps involved:

YouTube</a> - You can find tons of vdramas and podcasts and essays here</li>
Fonos</a> - Like Audible but in Vietnamese</li>
Voiz</a> - Like Fonos but counterculture

Elaborated: Fonos has the big titles, but Voiz often has deepcuts like Kafka's letter to his father</a>. You could listen to Kafka's letter to his father in Vietnamese!</li> </ul> </li>
Netflix</a> - Leading streaming provider for Viet dubs</li>
VieON</a> - Premium Vdrama platform</li> </ul>
Memorization & Intensive Listening</h2>
For memorization there is no alternative to Anki. For sentence mining and intensive listening, there is no alternative to ASB Player. Both of these are FOSS.
With ASB player you can press a button to trigger repeat mode whenever you don't understand a sentence, and sit back while it loops in your ear over and over until it clicks. If it doesn't click and you need to check the subtitle, mine the sentence into Anki as a card with only audio on the front! Anki will periodically challenge you to hear it again, strengthening the weak aspects of your sound perception over time.
You can find a sentence mining setup tutorial here</a>.

Anki</a></li>
ASB Player</a></li>
Subadub</a></li> </ul>
When I mine sentences (with audio!) from Netflix, it takes me literally one button press. Card creation time is near zero. At the end of a session, I'll have an LLM generate the english field using Anki Connect. The english doesn't need to be perfect, just close enough to remind me of the vietnamese meaning.

Anki Connect</a></li> </ul>
Condensed Audio</h2>
The runtime of the movie Ocean Waves</a> is 72 minutes, but only 38 of those minutes are speech. Watching or listening to the dub over and over to practice means listening to 34 minutes of non-speech every time. This can add up!
I have listened to the Vietnamese dub of Ocean Waves 24 times. When I listen, I get in more listening practice per minute by listening to a condensed version.
If you know you're going to repeat media many times, I suggest investing the time up front to condense it. Unfortunately, some technical knowledge is necessary to do this.
You can condense audio using a program called subs2cia. You need a Python environment, the audio file, and subtitles. It's via the subtitle timestamps that it knows what to cut and what to keep. The subtitles don't need to be in Vietnamese as long as the timestamps are good enough.

subs2cia</a></li> </ul>
You can get audio from Netflix dubs using a program called narr. I actually had to edit the Go code to make this work for me, so programming and debugging knowledge may be necessary.

narr</a></li> </ul>

report on 2500 hours of vietnamese practice

2026-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

tl;dr: social existence

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

Passive listening time I estimate at 950 additional inattentive hours.

Starting from: English monolingual beta

Current strategy: Consume fiction, audiobooks, chat online

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

Past updates:

530 hours</a></li>
1000 hours</a></li>
1500 hours</a></li>
2000 hours</a></li> </ul>
Current level:
I talk about this in Vietnamese in an unscripted speaking vlog here</a>.
Stuff that used to be hard and effortful study, like reading manga, reading novels, listening to audiobooks, watching Vietnamese youtube, are now relaxation activities. Dictionary is definitely still required but at a lower frequency. Instead of seeking out content that is comprehensible to me, I seek out content on topics I’m interested in and learn about it in Vietnamese. So on that front there’s definitely progress.
When I listen to nonfiction audiobooks and hear a word I don’t know, I look it up now. Looking words up from sound used to be impossible, and the amount of words I used to need to look up prohibited looking up as I listened. (With fiction or narrative nonfiction it’s still impractical most of the time.)
Hanging out with native speakers is the new frontier. I never know when I’m going to have a great conversation or fail to communicate at even a basic level.
Rejected Strategies:

Apps (too boring)</li>
Grammar explanations (too boring)</li>
Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)</li>
Content made for language learners (too boring)</li>
Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)</li> </ul>
Methods:
Since the last update, I have un-forsaken Anki. Anki and I are back together. It’s hard to replicate the efficiency of intensive listening practice that Anki provides.
My routine is as follows.
Before work:
(15m) Review Anki audio-only front cards. Try to transcribe in my head, check the result. I explain this in detail in this video</a>.</li>
(1h) Pace around my house (in the winter) or take a walk (in the warm seasons) listening to an audiobook.</li> </ol>
At lunch:

(30m) Read a novel with dictionary.</li> </ol>
Before bed:

(30m) Read manga sans dictionary.</li> </ol>
This is the minimum, and then I may do more if I’m into a show or book at that time.
For speaking, lately I socialize in Vietnamese voice rooms on discord. I’ve made a few friends who are interested in stuff I happen to know about, like software engineering. So we’ll chat about those things and even if I have to repeat myself or ask about a word, they don’t mind because I’m helping them debug their homework.
Time Breakdown:

I use atracker</code> on iOS since it's got a quick interface on apple watch.
56% listening (1393h27m)</li> 29% reading (722h09m)</li> 9% conversation (234h55m)</li> 6% anki audio sentence recognition cards (140h26m)</li> 0% writing (7h36m)</li> 0% speaking to camera (3h20m)</li>0% chorusing practice (0h30m)</li> </ul> Reflections: I have two accents in Vietnamese: one where I roleplay and one where I don’t. In the one where I don’t roleplay, there’s a heavy English accent, but many people are able to understand me anyway. The one where I do roleplay, there’s less english influence. Often the reason I activate this one is that I said something and people didn’t understand in the first accent. So I’m like, “Okay, let me start talking like a dub actor,” and that usually works. Recommendations: I'm not yet fluent so I have no qualifications to give advice. My next update, which I'll write at 3000 hours, may contain different opinions. Read Peak This book gave me an understanding of how learning works, and I've used those principles to create my routines.</li> </ul> </li> Read The Way of The Linguist Daddy Steve knows how to maintain perspective: keep stuff light, fun, adventurous.</li> </ul> </li> Explore minimalism Learning a language takes a lot of time. That's factual. In my opinion it also requires that you live a relaxed life. You can't learn while stressed! I changed jobs and simplified my life in order to commit to language learning.</li> </ul> </li> For Vietnamese learners, get deep in the sound system. I'm allergic to pretty much every form of study, but I admit the extreme importance of understanding this sound system. This sound system is a dragon.</li> Read this paper</a>. This explains the 8 tones in Vietnamese and how they are distinguished by vocal register and phonation.</li> Spend just one session putting some of the native speech recordings you struggle to understand into praat</a> to figure out what's going on, what are you mishearing. It's a powerful tool. It can render pitch contours, vowel formants, etc.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Resources: These are some resources I've created or collected that helped me learn. Minimal pair decks</a></li> Southern immersion content index</a></li> </ul> Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 500 more hours!



report on 2000 hours of vietnamese practice
2025-07-03T00:00:00+00:00
tl;dr:</strong> into the slog</p>
All tracked time is active, 100% focused on the task at hand.</p>
Passive listening time I estimate at 800 additional inattentive hours.</p>
Starting from:</em> English monolingual beta</p>
Current strategy:</em> Consume fiction, podcasts, books</p>
Long-term goal:</em> D1 fluency and a paid original fiction publication by 2040</p>
Past updates:</em></p>

530 hours</a></li>
1000 hours</a></li>
1500 hours</a></li>
</ul>
Current level:</em></p>

Can watch movies and television in several genres in Vietnamese without subtitles and follow the plot, understanding all the dialogue in 3/5 scenes. When I don't understand a sentence, I can usually identify the words I would need to know in order to complete my understanding.</li>
Can find nonfiction books meant for adults where I’m only missing 5 or so words a page.</li>
Candid demo video</a> of my current reading and listening levels.</li>
</ul>
Rejected Strategies:</em></p>

Apps (too boring)</li>
Grammar explanations (too boring)</li>
Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)</li>
Content made for language learners (too boring)</li>
Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)</li>
</ul>
Reflection on last update:</em></p>
In my 500, 1000, and 1500-hour updates, each update described a qualitatively different experience of the language. I believe this is because during the first 1500 hours, I was building an intuition for the sound system, an intuition for the internal logic of the language, and achieving first access to real, interesting content.</p>
1500 to 2000 hours has not been like that. The change has been quantitative: I know more words. I understand more of what is said to me. I can express a greater variety of ideas at a greater level of complexity.</p>
Predictions, assessed:</em></p>

From 1500 hours: “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.” → Yes, this is true. Some of it is a function of that I’m extremely used to partial understanding, so “enjoy” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.</li>
From 1000 hours: “This milestone, ‘conversational’, […] I predict it will come at 4000 hours.” → I honestly have no idea what I thought I meant by this. There are a few topics I can talk about pretty easily, but there’s a million topics.</li>
</ul>
Methods:</em></p>
Since the last update, I have forsaken Anki. I used Anki for corrected listening practice by attempting to transcribe audio on the front of cards and then checking my transcription on the back. My listening comprehension is high enough now that I don't find this intense practice more important than just watching a show with subs.</p>
Additionally, I've noticed that my ability to figure out the correct transcription of something I have heard grows with my vocabulary. Even when I am listening extensively without subs, my ability to guess at what was probably said provides constant feedback on my listening errors.</p>
My routine is as follows:</p>

(1h) I step through a show that has subtitles and make the subtitles hidden (asbplayer). When I don't know a word or I couldn't make out what was said, I will check the subtitles and repeat the line over and over until I can comfortably hear what was said.</li>
(30m) I read a novel or a book with the corresponding audiobook and a hover dictionary to look up any words that I don't know.</li>
(30m) I extensively listen to a podcast, YouTube, a show, etc.</li>
</ol>
After work, if I feel like it and have time, I'll extensively read manga or extensively watch a Vietnamese show.</p>
Time Breakdown:</em></p>
</p>
I use atracker</code> on iOS since it's got a quick interface on apple watch.</p>

58% listening (1156h03m)</li>
31% reading (616h46m)</li>
6% conversation (127h30m)</li>
5% anki audio sentence recognition cards (104h19m)</li>
0% chorusing practice (0h30m)</li>
</ul>
Pros/cons of my methods:</em></p>

My speech is clear, but: I sound weird. I've had two tutors assess and begged them to be very critical. They say my speech is clear with an occasional error, but that I sound like a dub actor or an audiobook narrator, and that this is strange and something I should consider fixing in the long term. It makes sense that I would end up sounding like this because dubs and audiobooks are my primary source of audio input.</li>
I have a large passive vocabulary, but: This doesn't always work in my favor. It helps me engage with content like books and shows, but I have a problem of activating vocabulary before I really understand what it means. For example, I recently used the word sống sót (survive, in a “last man standing” sense) in a situation where I should have used sinh tồn (survive, in a “just make it to tomorrow” sense). Compared to more common words, these words require a long baking period between entry into passive vocabulary and sufficient understanding to activate and use correctly. I have tons of words in this limbo state where I know them just well enough to reflexively pull them out but not well enough to use them right.</li>
</ul>
Recommendations:</em></p>
I'm not yet fluent so I have no qualifications to give advice. My next update, which I'll write at 2500 hours, may contain different opinions.</p>

Read Peak</em></li>
Relax</li>
Have fun</li>
</ul>
Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 500 more hours!</p>


vietnamese immersion content
2025-03-31T00:00:00+00:00
This is a list of the Vietnamese content I've learned from. My focus is on southern</em> Vietnamese. All of this content features southern speakers.</p>
beginner content</h3>

Lilian Vietnamese</a> - comprehensible input</li>
Peppa Pig</a> - brainrotting kid's cartoon</li>
Xin Chào Jadoo</a> - dub of a Korean kid's cartoon</li>
Sea of Love</a> - Thai cartoon with Viet dub on Netflix</li>
</ul>
low-budget romdroms</h3>

BigCat Drama</a> - insanely fast-paced soaps</li>
THVL1</a> - insanely slow-paced soaps</li>
</ul>
high-budget romdroms</h3>

Vì Mẹ Anh Phán Chia Tay</a> - as of 2026 th is the peak of the vdrama genre (VieOn required to finish)</li>
</ul>
subtitled shows</h3>
Most Netflix Vietnamese dubs don't have matching subtitles. But some do. In these cases there's usually two tracks: a northern sub track that doesn't match, and a hidden southern one that does. To get the southern track you can use subadub</a> and select the second option in its drop-down, or you can</p>

Turn off subs.</li>
Set the audio to Vietnamese.</li>
Refresh.</li>
Re-enable Vietnamese subs.</li>
</ol>
The following shows have matching subtitles and are available in Canada:</p>

Alice in Borderland</li>
Squid Game (season 2 only)</li>
Extraordinary Attorney Woo</li>
Our Beloved Summer</li>
Hierarchy</li>
Business Proposal</li>
3 Body Problem</li>
Glass Onion</li>
Celebrity</li>
Ready Set Love</li>
Analog Squad</li>
Pain Hustlers</li>
My Happy Marriage</li>
Genie Make a Wish</li>
</ul>
interview channels</h3>
YouTube channels with two to three speakers and clear audio.</p>

Vietcetera</a> - Vietnam's titan podcast</li>
The Khang Show</a> - celebrity interviews</li>
Ants Rich</a> - celebrity interviews</li>
Sao Star</a> - celebrity interviews and call-in radio show</li>
Plan B Podcast</a> - deepcut interview channel</li>
The Tri Way</a> - this guy calls Joe Rogan his father figure</li>
Spiderum</a> - docuvids, interviews, etc (northern)</li>
</ul>
single speaker channels</h3>
YouTube channels with a single speaker and clear audio.</p>

PH Huy</a> - quality psychology lectures</li>
CEO Lab</a> - business/career self-help</li>
Chang Doran</a> - gaming streamer</li>
Đảo Khảo Cổ</a> - history and philosophy podcast</li>
Jolly Molly</a> - self-help</li>
The Young Love</a> - sketchy dating advice</li>
Thảo Ngô</a> - voice acting career advice and social commentary</li>
Danny Tran</a> - clickbaity video essays</li>
Đọc Sách & Thảo Luận</a> - book reading and discussion</li>
Vui Lên</a> - book reviews</li>
My Xuan Pham</a> - guide to making a YouTube channel</li>
Hường Như Xuân</a> - literature discussion</li>
</ul>
video essay channels</h3>

Moonotes</a></li>
TC</a></li>
vinamuse</a> (northern)</li>
tiến nam</a> (northern)</li>
</ul>
manga and anime</h3>
You can buy manga from most book stores in Vietnam. From the Americas you can order from Viet Bookstore</a> (mostly manga) or VietCan Books</a> (more of a grab bag).</p>
Many of these animes will require a VPN to locate you in Vietnam in order to access them. For Netflix, I use a VPN to locate me in Canada.</p>

Yotsuba (No adaptations)</li>
Naruto - Pops dub on YouTube</a></li>
One Piece - Pops dub on YouTube</a>, Netflix dub, subtitles don't match</a></li>
Alice in Borderland - Netfix dub, matching subtitles</a></li>
Attack on Titan - Muse Vietnam dub</a></li>
Dr. Stone - Ani-one dub</a></li>
Frieren - TV360 dub</a></li>
Spy x Family - TV360 dub</a></li>
Jujutsu Kaisen Ani-one dub (paid)</a></li>
Yugi-Oh TV360 dub</a></li>
</ul>
forums</h3>
The Vietnamese forum sphere is not for the faint of heart, but there's a lot of content.</p>

Voz</a> - central Vietnamese forum</li>
Voz Subreddit</a> - group therapy</li>
</ul>
novels</h3>
These really become useful at intermediate level. The best form is an audiobook + ebook with hover dictionary</a> to follow along to. That way you don't have to subvocalize and can get labeled sound system input too. I demo that method here</a>.</p>
The next best method is consulting an English version of the text and rereading passages you don't understand after getting the hints.</p>
Short of that, there's dictbox</a>.</p>

Lòng Tôi Nhẹ Khi Mẹ Rời Xa (Originally English, title "I'm Glad My Mom Died") - Voiz Audiobook</a></li>
Cô Nàng Cửa Hàng Tiện Ích (Originally Japanese, English title "Convenience Store Woman")</li>
Người Truyền Ký Ức (Originally English, title "The Giver")</li>
Rừng Na Uy (Originally Japanese, English title "Norwegian Wood")</li>
Harry Potter - YouTube Readings, Books 1-3</a></li>
Có Mùa Hè Chưa Từng Lãng Quên (Originally Vietnamese, no translations)</li>
Dune - Partial YouTube Reading</a> </li>
</ul>


sayaka murata: whisperer of forsaken feeling
2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Spoilers for: Convenience Store Woman, Life Ceremony, Clean Marriage</em></p>
Thank the heavens for Ginny Tapley Takemori, without whom we English monolinguals would never know Sayaka Murata. I knew my bookshelf was about to change when in those first few pages of Convenience Store Woman the narrator recounted a childhood memory in which she’d found a dead bird:</p>

There was the time when I was in nursery school, for example, when I saw a dead bird in the park. It was small, a pretty blue, and must have been someone's pet. It lay there with its neck twisted and eyes closed, and the other children were all standing around it crying. One girl started to ask: "What should we—" But before she could finish I snatched it up and ran over to the bench where my mother was chatting with the other mothers.</p>
</blockquote>

"What's up, Keiko? Oh! A little bird ... where did it come from I wonder?" she said gently, stroking my hair. "The poor thing. Shall we make a grave for it?"</p>
</blockquote>

"Let's eat it!" I said.</p>
</blockquote>

"What?"</p>
</blockquote>
The adults glitch in response, as if the narrator’s idea is incomprehensible, but all she’s done is follow the ambient social logic to its natural conclusion: they eat some animals, so it’s okay to eat all animals. The complex rules of sorting animals into type 1: object (food) and type 2: independent entities deserving burial hadn’t taken root in the narrator as it had in the other children.</p>
Later, when her teacher asks someone to stop two classmates from fighting, the narrator reaches for a shovel. Her first instinct is to use force, the same tool adults typically use against children. The complex rules of sorting humans into type 1: object whose behavior should be modified by physical force (children, in the norms of most cultures) and type 2: independent entity who should be treated as both a mind and body, spoken to with words, entreated with arguments, permitted time and space to nurture intrinsic motivation to change (superiors and peers, in the norms of most cultures) hadn’t taken root in the narrator. She’d internalized one of the two logically consistent interpretations of the childhood experience of needing to address adults with words while adults use discipline (pain or coercion) to address children: that it’s okay to address everyone with pain and coercion, including peers, or that it’s okay for anyone to address children with pain and coercion, even a peer.</p>
Throughout the novel the mechanisms of the narrator’s thinking remain consistent, even when the conclusions disturb:</p>

The baby started to cry. My sister hurriedly picked him up and tried to soothe him. What a lot of hassle I thought. I looked at the small knife we'd used to cut the cake still lying there on the table: if it was just a matter of making him quiet, it would be easy enough.</p>
</blockquote>
Murata has said in interview</a> that she depicts a world without anger, and further that she lives a life without access to anger. But I find that while nothing on the surface of the rising action suggests a moment of anger (her considering infanticide was, in the moment, neither caused by, accompanied by, nor followed by a change in affect; it was matter-of-fact problem solving), anger is the engine of the novel, and many of her other stories. As soon as the narrator’s anger rises to consciousness and she chooses her own life path as a Convenience Store Woman Animal, rejecting both Shiraha and the cultural expectations to which he (and she, until that moment) was slave, the story ends, having lost its engine.</p>
In her near-future short story Life Ceremony, a woman who grew up in our present time realizes culture has moved on without her. Due to rapid population decline, values have shifted to embrace whatever makes more babies. Sex with strangers with the goal of pregnancy, in public places, is common. Women can keep their infants, or entrust them to a municipal rearing center. Either way, their coworkers greet them on Monday with a "Thank you for your service.”</p>
The public sex was an interesting move. Without it, a society that recognizes the fact that women birthing children is a public service, and that raising them to renew society is society’s shared responsibility rather than an “inborn dream” or “natural vocation” for women (an idea imperial, patriarchal nation states elevate to scripture in order to repress the knowledge that if women organized, they could refuse to produce the next generation until the existing society guaranteed good conditions for mothers and children) risks landing as allegory, or an idealization of historical matriarchal values. Public sex introduces irrationality and exuberance to the future culture, which is necessary to make a culture plausible. A culture without unconscious contradictions would be psychotic. People would walk around saying shit like, “We imprison and forcibly impregnate pigs to have enough to eat—their intergenerational suffering be what it may—but we would never do that to dogs, because our investment in them on a personal level yields returns for our overall reproductive fitness.”</p>
Murata’s management of internal inconsistency extends to the individual. While the narrator carries the expected nostalgia for an era that made more sense to her, and a gut reaction against the new status quo, her desire to connect with those around her threatens to shift her values anyway.</p>
At first the narrator understandably refuses to eat human flesh (cooking the deceased is a new funeral tradition), even though all of her coworkers do it. But then, later, she not only eats it—she cooks it! This is a wild political transition, and she doesn't undergo it because she read an articulate manifesto of the new order, or a shaming polemic against the values of her childhood. (These come from the plane of consciousness and amount to white noise.) What sparks the change is when a close friend leaves a recipe in his will, explaining how he wants to be eaten. Because of their mutual respect, cooking him and inviting people over to get pregnant at his funeral</del> life ceremony became a concrete relational act, exiting the dissociated plane of ideas, where change is impossible, and entering the realm of action, where change is</em> possible.</p>
Murata respects the supremacy of subjectivity. Humans are born with a wide range of instincts, for cooperation or brutality, for honesty or deceit, etc, so that we have the tools necessary to survive and achieve reproductive fitness in a wide range of situations, and reproductive fitness usually means belonging to and having sexual status within a group or culture. The most effective way for the brain to prevent the body from acting in a way that would get it expelled from the group is by occluding the possibility from consciousness and surrounding the action with a fence of shame or disgust. Murata can see that judgements like "eating human flesh is a disturbed behavior" is just the way the human tongue moves when its owner counts itself among a cultural group that employs cannibalism as a boundary issue: if you do that, you’re out. There’s nothing much different, morally, about eating a human being versus eating another sentient animal with the same emotional equipment. A pig can’t speak or do calculus, but it’s got a limbic system, and therefore the experience of both love and fear. Plenty of cultures eat people, and if you eat animals, you already demonstrate the repressive capacity to mute whatever concern you’d have for the human who becomes food. And that’s adaptive!</p>
Hand a lesser writer the premise of Life Ceremony</em> and you'd get a story in which characters argue about the pros and cons of this near-future culture. A lesser writer, less in touch with the heart, would get lost in the realm of logic and symbols, but logic isn’t the substrate of human life.</p>
Most disturbing among her stories is not the notorious Earthlings, which has a cumulative numbing effect, but Clean Marriage, published in Granta in 2014.</p>
The A plot is that a married couple which has very intentionally never introduced sex to their relationship wants a child. A service and technology called Clean Breeder promises to help them conceive without sex. The wife and narrator prefers it because the artificial insemination process would be harder on her body, and the husband, in spite of hesitations relating to the vague marketing speak and a strong aversion to any sexual contact or sexual vibes of any kind with the narrator, agrees. But it turns out Clean Breeder is just some nurses jacking her husband off with a fleshlight and sticking his dick in her at the last second. Afterward, the couple floats in a daze, and we conclude on a reference to the B plot which offers a clue to interpret that daze.</p>
In the B plot, the narrator’s husband’s lover harasses her by sending her pictures of the two having sex, under the mistaken impression the content will anger or hurt the narrator. This does a lot of craft work, in a story-telling sense. That the lover can’t understand the asexuality of the marriage situates the couple against the norms of the story world. It tells us they’re still an uncommon type, even if their type is big enough to constitute a market for Clean Breeder. Further, the content of the photos (age play, in which the husband plays baby), suggest a reason for his desire to be free of sexuality at home: his sexuality is of a kind he needs distance from most of the time. It’s emotionally complex.</p>
Both the narrator and husband want to compartmentalize their sexuality. Another person’s sexuality influencing when or how they have to enter the mood unsettles them:</p>

My husband wanted to ban all sex from our home. That was fine by me.</p>
</blockquote>

‘As far as I’m concerned, sex is an act you indulge in alone in your own room, or deal with outside. In some homes the partners come home tired from work and have sex together, but I am completely averse to this,’ he said.</p>
</blockquote>

‘So am I,’ I said. ‘Sex is fine during the early stages of a love affair, but as time goes on and you’re living together, it’s horrible when your partner feels you up when you’re asleep, or he suddenly comes on to you when you’re relaxing. I want to be able to turn my sexual desires on and off when I please, and to keep the switch off at home.’</p>
</blockquote>

‘That’s precisely what I think. I’m relieved to know I’m not the only one who’s abnormal.’</p>
</blockquote>
It’s only because of that B plot adding some depth to the sexuality her husband needs to keep in a lockbox that the reference at the end—the young girl shouting for her mom, like he himself did in the videos sent to the narrator by his lover—drags the whole thing into the light. The Clean Breeder followed by the reminder of his age play (whether he knows his wife knows or not) destroys the boundary he erected between his two faces. Now when in the company of his wife, he cannot inhabit his comfortable, sexually dissociated identity to the exclusion of all others. She’s seen this other side of him, so when he performs the natural mental act of intuiting how she sees him, these two sides that can’t be reconciled emerge in the conscious fore at the same time. He vomits.</p>


brave art
2024-12-26T00:00:00+00:00
When an artist poses beside a technically impressive work, one few peers in their medium reflexively dismiss (as dribble, slop, unpracticed, etc), I’m just not that impressed. Technical achievement testifies to something, but that something is only circumstantially related to the process of art.</p>
Compare Ted Chiang</a>’s short stories with the novelettes of Cesar Aira</a>.</p>
Chiang’s every sentence feels like the beginning of a carefully tended thread, a thread Chiang babysits until it can tie into the end’s final knot. His stories are hermetic systems with as few elements as possible. No details do only soft “vibe” work; all of them participate in the causal chain. Reading his work sometimes feels less like reading fiction than reading a pruned mathematical proof. All of this is praise, by the way. Read the interview linked in his name above and you’ll realize that’s sort of what he’s going for.</p>
Aira might respect this. His philosophy re art is, basically, that an artist’s work is irrelevant. Some of the greatest novelists, he’s said, never write any fiction at all. The real duty of an artist is to create a process. Executing the process is optional. Maybe the reason he writes so much (he’ll hit a hundred books by the time you read this, maybe) is just to collect data to iterate on his process. Or it could just be to reaffirm his commitment, as in prayer.</p>
Aira’s process could not be further from Chiang’s. Chiang takes a decade to go from start to finish on a story. He takes notes in advance, and writes the end first. Then the beginning, the middle, and finally, the transitions. His process is an altar to the obsessive-neurotic Lacanian subtype. In contrast Aira only ever writes forward</a>. The ways out of the corners he writes himself into are to be found in what he’s already written. Not revisions.</p>
I first encountered something similar to Aira’s flight forward from Dean Wesley’s Write Into the Dark</a>, but Aira is much more convincing for two reasons. First, Wesley’s process still allows for the possibility of moving backward and writing forward again from an earlier page in the draft if you write yourself into a corner. This leaves the potential for infinite loops and ten-year short story processes when implemented by certain personality types (among which you’d find mine). Second, Wesley’s prose is a persuasive counterpoint to his philosophy. Writing forward without revision sounded fantastic to me until I tried to finish the first page of one of his books. He resides in and evangelizes for a different region of the conceptual terrain of prose fiction than I want to live in or even really visit.</p>
Meanwhile, Aira has the bravery to commit to absolutes (only</em> forward) and his novelettes are some of the most memorable and inventive and immersive texts I’ve ever encountered. So it’s proof. It’s proof that if he can write in that way and produce beauty; the process is no limitation on the heights of artistic output. It remains to be known, however, what other ingredients in Aira’s person contribute to the “real” process. The process not as described or conceived of but as actually executed, which  would necessarily in a thorough analysis be revealed to enlist into action factors from Aira’s mind and history of which even he is unconscious.</p>
The thing that impresses me from an artist, the act I think I and society at large want and need them to do, even if we can’t articulate it as such most of the time, is to play psychonaut and go feel something and shed some light in some long-neglected corner of the psychic space so that we, who are afraid of the dark, can also go there. This may sound profound but my point is actually very mechanical and not profound at all except in that way boring things like sipping water can be intense and revelatory in the right mood (e.g. when very thirsty). This explanation applies just as well to those brave and generous online nobles who compile short clips of kittens being curious about kitchenware as it does to Proust. It takes a certain bravery, a certain fearlessness, to sit down and really get into cat videos, to understand the emotions they stir inside yourself, get a sense of which ones will land and make emotional contact with the viewer, and then package that emotional experience for others.</p>
Always the question to the artist is posed: what do you feel?</a> The better an artist can know this, the better an artist can associate stimuli to it, the more they can discover. But you can find artists who spend their whole lives shunning this idea, pursuing technical prowess as an end to itself and only coincidentally, serendipitously, if at all, engaging in the process of art.</p>
But there’s a danger. Knowing what you feel means facing a choice of what to do with it. If on Tuesday while continuing to draft your novel you introduce a sudden shift in tone, because it felt right, because it felt like, for a reader with the right attitude, a reader for whom all that’s come before has landed, that was the right move to keep the experience interesting, will you, on Wednesday, delete it because of fear that people will think you did it by accident, like someone clumsy with the medium? Will difficult memories of harsh remarks from peers in your MFA writer’s workshop shy you away from violating convention? The important point isn’t whether to do the standard thing or the avante garde thing. Rather, it’s how that decision is made. If you’re committed to a process of creating airtight mathematical stories, and you delete it to stay airtight, you’re an artist. If you’re committed to moving forward and only forward, and you don’t delete it, you’re an artist. But if you make a decision out of fear and betray your process and the feelings it stirs and entrusts to you, you are a fraud.</p>


report on 1500 hours of vietnamese practice
2024-11-13T00:00:00+00:00
tl;dr:</strong> entry to the fun stage of learning, and an intuition for the scale of the task</p>
All tracked time is active, 100% focused on the task at hand.</p>
Passive listening time I estimate at 600 additional inattentive hours. I don't really do this anymore.</p>
Starting from:</em> English monolingual beta</p>
Current strategy:</em> Consume fiction</p>
Long-term goal:</em> D1 fluency and a paid original fiction publication by 2040</p>
Past updates:</em></p>

530 hours</a></li>
1000 hours</a></li>
</ul>
Current level:</em></p>

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.</li>
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.</li>
Finished</em> 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.</li>
Can talk with tutors</em>  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. </li>
</ul>
Rejected Strategies:</em></p>

Apps (too boring)</li>
Grammar explanations (too boring)</li>
Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)</li>
Content made for language learners (maximum boring)</li>
Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)</li>
</ul>
Previously rejected strategies that became useful</em></p>

Studying explanations of the sound system: In A Vietnamese Reference Grammar</em>, 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.</li>
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</a> provided value.</li>
</ul>
Reflection on last update:</em></p>
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.</p>
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.</p>
This is, I think, the fabled "crossing over point" for first-time adult language learners where there is no more doubt.</p>
As far as my conversational ability goes, it must</em> 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.</p>
Methods:</em></p>
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:</p>

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</em> about efficient language learners.</li>
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</em> setting the subs to Viet.</li>
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.</li>
Intensive Reading (45m): I read a novel with dictionary and repeatedly read sentences or passages as necessary to grok.</li>
</ul>
After work, if I feel like it and have time, I'll extensively read manga or extensively watch a Vietnamese show.</p>
Time Breakdown:</em></p>
</p>
I use atracker</code> on iOS since it's got a quick interface on apple watch.</p>

58% listening (865h09m)</li>
32% reading (483h50m)</li>
6% conversation (91h34m)</li>
4% anki audio sentence recognition cards (61h39m)</li>
</ul>
Pros/cons of my methods:</em></p>
On the pro side:</p>

My vocab and comprehension are beefed compared to other learners (according to my tutors).</li>
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.</li>
</ul>
On the con side:</p>

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.</li>
</ul>
On the idk side:</p>

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.</li>
</ul>
Other thoughts:</p>
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.</p>
Recommendations:</em></p>
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.</p>
That said, my advice for Vietnamese learners now is:</p>

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.</li>
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.</li>
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</em> eventually.</li>
As a language learner, you are always a descriptive linguist. If native speakers say it that way, that's how it's said.</li>
Content by and for native speakers or bust. Even from the start.</li>
</ul>
Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 500 more hours!</p>


vietnamese minimal pair training
2024-07-04T00:00:00+00:00
A little after my 1000 hours update, I became impatient with a few sound pairs, such as between a and ă, that I still couldn’t distinguish in new words.</p>
After reading about minimal pair training, a technique Japanese-speaking learners of English use to distinguish L and R, I wanted to try it myself. In the training, the learner sees a pair of words like “rock” and “lock” and tries to guess which one they just heard a native speaker say. Then they get immediate feedback about whether they were right. Apparently their accuracy after three 20 minute sessions jumped from random to 80%.</p>
I tried something similar in the beginning of my Vietnamese learning, using the infamous FSI tapes, but found them evil. For a beginner, I still wouldn’t recommend them. But today I can watch tv dramas and have some conversation in Vietnamese, so I find it much less painful to target specific weak areas.</p>
In case any other learners might benefit, I’ve uploaded the anki decks I created for my own training (southern vietnamese, azure tts):</p>

a vs ă</a></li>
âu vs ô</a></li>
au vs ao</a></li>
</ul>
Plus more added by request:</p>

â vs ơ</a></li>
a vs e</a></li>
e vs ê</a></li>
rising vs low-broken tone</a></li>
flat vs question tone</a></li>
ây vs ơi</a></li>
ay vs ai</a></li>
</ul>
</p>


report on 1000 hours of vietnamese practice
2024-04-07T00:00:00+00:00
tl;dr:</strong> enough knowledge to destroy all the confidence you build in the first 500 hours</p>
All tracked time is active, 100% focused on the task at hand.</p>
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.</p>
Starting from:</em> English monolingual beta</p>
Current strategy:</em> Consume fiction</p>
Long-term goal:</em> D1 fluency and a paid original fiction publication by 2040</p>
Past updates:</em></p>

530 hours</a></li>
</ul>
Current level:</em></p>

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.</li>
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.</li>
Once an episode or two, understand every word of an entire scene + the vibes.</li>
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.)</li>
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.</li>
</ul>
Rejected Strategies:</em></p>

Apps (too boring)</li>
Grammar explanations (too boring)</li>
Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)</li>
Studying explanations of the sound system (invariably misleading)</li>
Tone perception drills (too evil)</li>
Content made for language learners (maximum boring)</li>
Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)</li>
</ul>
Reflection on last update:</em></p>
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.</p>
Today my assessment of my conversational ability is far worse. I am an ape.</p>
Methods:</em></p>
Video tour of my methods.</a></p>
I’m currently gunning hard on improving comprehension, and try to keep a daily routine that provides the necessary nutrients.</p>
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:</p>

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)</li>
Read ebooks with zoopdog. Satisfies: Introduces new vocab</li>
Listen to audio books of stuff I read already with zoopdog. Satisfies: Improves listening comprehension</li>
Read manga with no dictionary. Satisfies, surprisingly: Improves listening comprehension. (I find that improved reading speed transfers to improved listening comprehension speed)</li>
Read manga with dictionary. Satisfies: introduces new vocab</li>
Anki audio-only sentence cards. Satisfies: Improves listening accuracy</li>
</ul>
Time Breakdown:</em></p>
I use atracker</code> on iOS since it's got a quick interface on apple watch.</p>
Since last post, I dug into my old im messages, calendar events, and youtube history to figure out the categories of my first hours.</p>

57% listening (567h56m)</li>
35% reading (352h52m)</li>
7% conversation (65h56m)</li>
1% anki audio sentence recognition cards (13h34m)</li>
</ul>
Pros/cons of my methods:</em></p>
On the pro side:</p>

Vietnamese speakers are consistently shocked I can understand them well.</li>
Vietnamese speakers are consistently shocked they can understand me well.</li>
My methods are hyper-custom to my interests and I am not tired at all. I will make it to 2040.</li>
</ul>
On the con side:</p>

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.</li>
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.</li>
</ul>
Recommendations:</em></p>
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.</p>
That said, my views now are:</p>

All the pain is front-loaded. Every month is easier than the last because content gets more engaging.</li>
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.</em></li>
Tones don’t exist. Only vowels exist. ơ and ở are just different vowels.</li>
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.</li>
</ul>
Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 500 more hours!</p>

Reddit discussion.</a></p>


report on 530 hours of vietnamese practice
2023-09-24T00:00:00+00:00
tl;dr:</strong> enough knowledge to enjoy further study</p>
All tracked time is active, 100% focused on the task at hand.</p>
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.</p>
Starting from:</em> English monolingual beta</p>
Current strategy:</em> Consume fiction</p>
Long-term goal:</em> D1 fluency and a paid original fiction publication in twenty years</p>
Current level:</em></p>

Can read, understand, and enjoy</strong> Naruto manga episodes with 1-2 lookups and 2-3 backtracks</li>
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)</li>
Rarely, can follow every word of entire scenes of episodes I've recently read</li>
Can get the gist of news articles</li>
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)</strong></li>
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</li>
</ul>
Rejected Strategies:</em></p>

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

2018-2022: The Dabbling Era</em></p>
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.</p>
July 2022-March 2023: The Output Era</em></p>
I stumbled upon FluentIn3Months which advises Speak From Day One^TM. I booked many tutor sessions and tried reading aloud according to pronunciation guides.</p>
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.</p>
In total I'd have spent about 100 hours engaging with Vietnamese by this point.</p>
March 2023-June 2023: Early Input Era</em></p>
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.</p>
Targeting 2 hours per day, I</p>

Watched vietnamese youtube videos (giang ơi, S-Channel, random videos about gardening, house tours)</li>
Read vietnamese books with translations available to reference (The Little Prince, Norwegian Wood, Harry Potter)</li>
Read vietnamese wikipedia on history topics</li>
</ul>
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.</p>
June 2023-Now: Fiction Input Era</em></p>
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.</p>
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.</p>

The Little Prince + audio book on Voiz</li>
Naruto Manga + Dubbed anime</li>
One Piece Manga + Dubbed anime</li>
</ul>
And for listening only, during the lazy times:</p>

Pokemon Dubbed anime</li>
The Dragon Prince</li>
The Sea of Love</li>
</ul>
And for the itchy times:</p>

Wandering around vietnamese reddit</li>
</ul>
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.</p>
Time Breakdown</em></p>
I use atracker</code> on iOS since it's got a quick interface on the apple watch.</p>
For the latter 430 hours I have tracking in four categories. Unfortunately I didn't track specific activities during the first 100.</p>

73% listening (314 hours)</li>
24% reading (103 hours)</li>
2% conversation practice (9 hours)</li>
1% anki audio sentence recognition cards (4 hours) (prebuilt decks from LTL) </li>
</ul>
Recommendations:</em></p>
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.</p>
That said, my views now are:</p>

All the pain is front-loaded. Every month is easier than the last because content gets more engaging.</li>
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.</li>
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.</li>
Don't get neurotic about tones. Just learn each word's sound individually and your unconscious will eventually pick up patterns.</li>
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.</li>
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.</li>
</ul>
Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 470 more hours!</p>

Reddit discussion.</a></p>


the sea of fertility
2021-06-28T00:00:00+00:00
Spoilers for: The Sea of Fertility</em></p>
The virtuous die young, or cling to life and putrefy. This is the philosophy that undergirds The Sea of Fertility</em>, the master work of Japanese playwright and novelist Yukio Mishima.</p>
Classical Japanese literature in general has a “thing” for noble, gory deaths in young adulthood, but Mishima is the canonical example. In WWII he worked in a factory that manufactured equipment for kamikaze planesa</a></sup>, and wrote to friends about how much he admired the pilotsb</a></sup>. After that he wrote plays and novels that conflated beauty, moral integrity, and suicide into one messy idea. Finally, in a thematically consistent end, he committed politically motivated seppukuc</a></sup> in healthy middle age, leaving behind a fit, toned corpse.</p>
The Sea of Fertility</em> consists of four novels, following Shigekuni Honda from youth to senescence. Starring alongside him in each book are his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsuge and his reincarnations. While Honda spends his life making safe choices, studying law, entering a passionless marriage with a submissive, long-suffering spouse (pour one out for Rié), and otherwise dissociating from strong emotions as best he can, Kiyo and his reincarnations make enemies of caution and pragmatism.</p>
When Kiyo learns his crush/adopted sister Satoko (it's complicated) is engaged to someone else:</p>

Long ago he [Kiyo] had resolved to recognize his emotions as his only guiding truth and to live his life accordingly, even if this meant a deliberate aimlessness. That principle had now brought him to his present sinister feelings of joy, which seemed to be the brink of a racing, plunging whirlpool. There seemed to be nothing left but to throw himself into it. (Spring Snow, p. 185)</p>
</blockquote>
Unfortunately for Kiyo, Satoko’s fiancee is the imperial prince, and the trysts they arrange eventually get Satoko committed to a nunnery and Kiyo dead.</p>
But in his next life he's no more cautious. As a young and impetuous Isao Linuma, he knows the right thing to do is assassinate the baron. He struggles against Honda’s admonitions and society’s obstacles, almost doubts himself, then follows through and seppukus.</p>
Meanwhile, at every fork in the road, Honda bends the knee to his environment, denies his internal life to better satisfy the expectations of some abstract other (society?). By the time he reaches old age, there is scarcely a person left inside. He is merely a substrate for Japan at large to compute itself on.</p>
In the third novel, Honda’s coping mechanism of watching other people live takes a turn for the literal. When Kiyo reincarnates again as a Siamese princess named Ying Chan, Honda devises an elaborate plan to watch her have sex through a peep-hole. He recruits a suitor to seduce her, invites them both up to his Villa (which he may or may not have built for just this purpose), and stands at the ready in front of a small hole in the wall separating the guest room from his office.</p>
I think in Yukio's view, this is simply what to expect from those who live carefully, and live long. The world corrupts them. If they are old, they are perverse. QED.</p>
But if the only alternatives to protecting idealism like Yukio's are suicide and terrorism, what is it worth? I can't escape the sense that Yukio is all yang. His masculinity forbids letting the world in. It’s the world that needs to bend, and if it won’t, he rejects the world.</p>
In Honda's moribund days, he visits Satoko, who long after the tribulations of the first novel has become abbess of the nunnery. By this point Honda, widowed and isolated, has nothing left to do but wander around in a malaise, the lone survivor of his past, save Satoko.</p>
After devoting his entire life to Kiyo and Kiyo’s reincarnations, even adopting the fourth, Honda wanted to reminisce one last time with the only other person who loved Kiyo as much as he did. But when they meet, he doesn't find the validation of the way he's spent his life that he was looking for.</p>

The Abbess laughed and seemed to sway gently. “Your interesting letter seemed almost too earnest.” Like the steward, she spoke the West Country dialect. “I thought there must be some holy bond between us.”</p>
The last drops of youth leaped up within Honda. He had returned to that day sixty years before, when he had pleaded youthful ardor to the Abbess’s predecessor. He discarded his reserve.</p>
“Your revered predecessor would not let me see you when I came with Kiyoaki’s last request. It had to be so, but I was angry. Kiyoaki Matsugae was after all my dearest friend.”</p>
“Kiyoaki Matsugae. Who might he have been?”</p>
Honda looked at her in astonishment.</p>
She might be hard of hearing, but she could not have failed to hear him. Yet her words were so wide of the mark that he could only believe he had been misunderstood.</p>
“I beg your pardon?” He wanted her to say it again.</p>
There was no trace of dissimulation as she repeated the words. There was instead a sort of girlish curiosity in her eyes, and below them a quiet smile. “Who might he have been?” (Decay of The Angel, p. 214)</p>
</blockquote>


k-drama is the frontier of romantic fiction
2021-06-12T00:00:00+00:00
When I was ten, I watched my my first romcom: Just Like Heaven</em>. Reese Witherspoon played a doctor trapped in a coma, her spirit wandering around as a wraith. Mark Ruffalo played a lonely man who could, by some kind of plot magic, see and speak with Witherspoon’s wraith form. I watched this movie every day after school for a week. I invited friends over to watch it with me, who were confused by my interest in it.</p>
In scifi there’s a saying, “The golden age of scifi is twelve.” As in, the first few you read, before you know all the tropes, are the best. Something like that was at play in my appreciation for Just Like Heaven</em>, and when combined with being ten and having underdeveloped tastes in general, I was defenseless against this middling film.</p>
But whatever its quality, it revealed a path, a path I have followed. In my search for romantic drama, I have gone through phases obsessively consuming American chic flics, French arthouse films, Malaysian web serials, silent monochrome Spanish films, 600-episode Bollywood serials, Meiji-era Japanese literature, and other fiction clusters that aren’t coming to mind. At first I thought I was simply wandering, aimless, but in retrospect I see the path was leading somewhere all this time.</p>
Where?</p>
Joongang Tongyang’s channel, Tuesdays at 9:30PM Korean Standard Time.</p>
There are many kinds of romantic story, but the mother of them all is the rivals-to-lovers love triangle. It emerges as the dominant plot shape in every culture, in every time period, and looks like this:</p>

The protagonist is a beautiful woman short on resources, attempting to solve a problem in her life. Most often it’s paying a debt, sating career ambition, or finding somewhere to live.</li>
The woman has two close friends, one of whom urges her to take risks and one of whom urges her to exercise caution. In their degenerate form, these characters are mere props that render the protagonist’s own indecision as dialogue.</li>
The are two man leads. First man lead is well-resourced in whatever way will solve the protagonist’s problem, stoic, has some kind of intense childhood trauma which is not abuse (often a car wreck or house fire or something), and frustrates the protagonist. Second man lead is easygoing, caring, attentive to the needs of the protagonist, but not well-resourced.</li>
Both men leads are suitors to the protagonist.</li>
First man lead always wins</em>. It’s the basic law of the genre, which no writer ever defies.</li>
</ul>
Because rivals-to-lovers love triangle plots always progress from meet cute to the establishment of the protagonist and first man lead as a couple (happily ever after), their relationship cannot develop smoothly. Otherwise, what tension would the story have?</p>
There are three basic solutions to this, to keep tension high while the relationship develops.</p>

Subordinate the relationship plot. e.g. the protagonist and first man lead are coworkers on a legal team and every episode gets a new case and story external to the relationship to hold the tension, meanwhile their intimacy develops in a healthy way.</li>
Make the relationship very messy indeed. e.g. Colleen Hoover.</li>
Give the relationship an antagonist. e.g. set it in an oppressive, patriarchal culture where everyone gossips and even small displays of affection threaten great consequences to reputation.</li>
</ol>
Mode 1 can be cozy and fun, and have rewatch value. Mode 2 usually just disturbs. It’s only mode 3 that has a chance at reaching peak romantic tension</em>. The focus remains on the relationship, but the writers don’t need to introduce abuse or hot/cold behavior to create tension.</p>
A friend of mine, who is now married, told me it’s best to do all dating under a quasi-religious conviction that you will never</em> marry. That way, if you do make the decision to marry, it will have overcome that barrier of conviction with a tidal wave of certainty.</p>
Growing a romance in an oppressive social system is similar. When it’s taboo for a woman to have had a boyfriend in the past, when that mere fact will make her future romantic life harder, what does it take to hold hands? What does it take to kiss? A tidal wave of certainty.</p>
And of course, tidal waves don’t come out of nowhere. A feeling would arise first, followed by a suppression response. You’d say to your heart: “No, let’s not fall in love him please. That would incur costs both in lifestyle and reputation.” And push the feeling down. See if it can fight back. See if it’s got hands.</p>
It’s because this internal strife is such a strong drama engine that romances so often star noble women in patriarchal cultures. This is the common thread between European period dramas, The Sea of Fertility, and k-drama.</p>
If Americans remade a k-drama shot-for-shot in Seattle it wouldn’t make sense. West coast Americans do not hold their tongues on issues of love and sex. Try, just try, to imagine two American adults who are single, thirsty, and hot for each other and everyone knows it, but for years they do nothing while the tension builds until it consumes both of their lives.</p>
It’s hard to imagine, because in America no one cares what you do. Most American adults don’t even have five friends, let alone a social network to gossip about them. Everyone is alienated from everyone else so there are no social stakes. You need the repressive patriarchy to make the story work.</p>
But period dramas have this already, and both western countries and China produce those in mass quantity every day. So why is k-drama the frontier?</p>
Most k-dramas aren’t worth five minutes of your time. Most of those that are still aren’t worth a full episode. Most of those</em> aren’t worth a second episode.</p>
But for the sake of my argument I want to conceive of k-drama not as a set of films and shows, but rather as a giant factory. A huge media enterprise, where thousands of people spend their whole careers, devoted to a single plot type</em>: the rivals-to-lovers love triangle.</p>
Never in history have we have so much of humanity’s resources devoted to perfecting a single plot type in a single format. While 99/100 attempts fail, the 1/100 that doesn’t is incredible, riveting, far beyond what would have been possible if only 10 scripts were written, in writers rooms afraid to fail. Then, in the next generation, not only do all 100 writers learn from the 1 success, the viewers remember the success too, so writers can use those expectations.</p>
By now, it’s common to see the rivals-to-lovers plot as the base, and heaps of other plots resting on top of it. Mr. Queen</a> is a rivals-to-lovers time-travel comedy political thriller period piece. Marry My Husband</a> is a meta plot where a character who already lived through their rivals-to-lovers story is isekai’d back to the past and chooses the other man. These dramas assume viewers posses deep knowledge of the genre tropes and can use them as shorthand to tell a bigger, more complex story.</p>
I am reminded of Donald Barthelme’s stories, the way they tell jokes for people who have read too many books, by referencing patterns they’ll be able to predict. It’s through this self-digestion that genres evolve, and the scale at which it’s occurring in Korea at 9:30 PM on Tuesdays is unmatched.</p>

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