Darren's Language Journey (Russian/Vietnamese)

[pained]

I'm an itinerant language learner, but I've never written down a plan. It's time to find a destination and a way to get there.

Let's start with some background:

I was born at a very young age. I got interested in Russian when I was about 10. BBC started showing "Russian: Language and People" and I found the Cyrillic alphabet, the language and the Cold War fascinating. Brezhnev was still in power and waving weakly during Red Square parades. It took me until I was in my late twenties to go to night school to take a GCSE and then an AS-level. In my early thirties, inspired to leave a safe job in the UK I spent 3 years working in Russia and travelling around all the 15 countries that were part of the Soviet Union. I got to a good B2 level - and passed the TORFL Level 2.

Then I went to live in Vietnam... Seven years later, I still haven't picked up as much Vietnamese as I would like. I'm at basic taxi/shopping level (whatever that is in CEFR - maybe A1) but would like to improve to a conversational level. In the meantime, I've started to forget some Russian words. ):

I'm now living in Ho Chi Minh City. I'm married to a Vietnamese woman, which wasn't the original plan when I moved here. (: She uses English so much at work and home that even when she's angry, she shouts at me in English, so I don't even learn angry Vietnamese with her! (: I've just finished a time-consuming year-long project, but still working 9-5 Mon-Fri. I also go to a surprisingly energetic yoga session 5-6 times a week, which I want to keep going to and adds additional time constraints to my day.

Today is a day off in Vietnam - Independence Day. A good day to reflect and make a plan! So here goes...

My target destination for Sep 2016-Dec 2017 (about 16 months):
Russian: back to B2, and on to C1
Vietnamese: get to B1/B2 level
2-3 hours/day plus a little more at weekends, alternating languages on a week by week basis.
That's about 600-700 hours for each language, which is hopefully enough!

The road I will take, plus specific goals:
Russian
Input: I'm nearly good enough to watch films/read books and understand most, but still miss some information. Build this through extensive input, with support from written text/subtitles.

• GOAL: 100 films - will do this as part of the Super Challenge 2016-17
  
• Russian films/TV, with Russian subtitles at first. I will watch classics and modern series: Bandit Petersburg, Uboynaya Sila, Master and Margarita, Kukhnya (with polydog's transcripts if needed), Last of the Magikyans, etc. Some old fave films, such as Irony of Fate, Operation Y, etc, plus a few modern films
• GOAL: read 100 books - Super Challenge 2016-17 (audio at the same time as reading)
• Russian audiobooks, with support from Russian texts and/or English translation Plan to start with Harry Potter series to ease myself in, then move on to great works (Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Dostoyevsky) to push myself a little, and some lighter, modern 'detektiv' books such as Darya Dontsova.
• GOAL: work through all the B2/C1 books I have
• Poshli Dalshe, Okno v Rossiyu 1 & 2, Let's Improve our Russian 1/2/3
• GOAL: 5000 words in Anki
• Anki, set up 10 words review per day

Output: Need the practice here. Getting very rusty!

• GOAL: Write 50,000 words
• Start up a blog. One post/week in Russian. Look at lang8 for checking, etc. Try transcribing some of the audiobooks or TV series.
• GOAL: 5,000 minutes of speaking
• Record myself reading parts of the books above, shadowing books (reading aloud at normal speed with the audiobook), etc. But need some real conversation too - so plan to use italki at the end of each study week.

Vietnamese
Daily life: luckily I'm living in Vietnam, so I need to use the resources all around me for input and output. Vietnamese are very open to chatting to people who are learning Vietnamese. I'll look at taking classes if there is something to fit my working schedule.
Input: Still need a lot of vocabulary building.

• GOAL: Complete Vietnamese Duolingo/Mondly
• GOAL: Complete Memrise: "Comprehensive Vietnamese"
• GOAL: Do all of Learn Vietnamese with Annie (youtube)
• GOAL: Complete Elementary Vietnamese coursebook
• GOAL: Complete Continuing Vietnamese coursebook
• GOAL: Complete Tieng Anh ("for non-natives") - goes to Intermediate level
• GOAL: Complete Glossika 1, 2 and 3
• Only the Northern accent at the moment. This includes listening, transcribing and speaking. GRS: 100 day repetition. Glossika 3 if there is time.
• GOAL: Read+Audio for Harry Potter in Vietnamese.
• Mirrors the Russian studies. A bit of a stretch goal.
• GOAL: 10000 words in Anki
• set up 20 words review per day

Output: A bit more modest than the Russian ones.

• GOAL: Write 10,000 words.
• Writing and a journal.
• GOAL: Record 1,000 hours
• Shadowing, reading passages, free speech, etc. (In addition to speaking in daily life.)

How to find 2-3 hours a day?
I realise that fitting in study is often the biggest challenge. So the plan:
- Do 20 minutes listening/shadowing on the commute each way (40 mins total)
- Get to work early and do 20 minutes before starting
- 60 minutes at lunchtime
- 60 minutes before my wife gets home and we go out for yoga and food
[In Vietnam, it's cheaper, quicker and easier to eat out than cook at home!]

OK - that's the plan until December 2017. Doing the Super Challenge should help focus on the Russian. Daily life will help to push the Vietnamese. I hope that this log and participating in this forum will also be a good incentive.

Like many people here, I don't want the language journey to end there. I'd love to know some more Slavic languages - Bulgarian, Polish, and Czech all interest me. I feel that it would be easy to pick up French or German. I'm also interested in something different - like Hungarian or Chinese or Korean. For some reason I'd like to learn Dutch one day. So for 2018-19, I'll dabble in a few of them and then pick 2 or 3 that I like most to study to a B1/B2 level, while maintaining my Vietnamese and Russian. A medium-term destination target, then is 5 languages at B2 or higher by December 2020.

Wishing everyone success on their own language journeys!

[pained]

Update after week 1. I studied mostly Russian this week.

I was happy with the start I made to the Super Challenge for Russian. I watched 4 episodes of Banditskiy Peterburg and read the first 6 chapters of Harry Potter along with the audio. It's interesting that the authorised translation of Harry Potter in Russian seems to have a lot of extra sentences added, as if the translator is trying too hard to explain the story and the characters' feelings. I started reading through Colloquial Russian 2 as a gentle way to jog my memory on the grammar points. I think I averaged over 2 hours/day.

I made some written notes on new/forgotten vocabulary from all these sources. I like to write the vocabulary down, but I also know that I'm not good at reviewing it. So my general plan is to review it twice during the week, and put the difficult-to-remember words into Anki to review at the end of the week.

This week will be a Vietnamese week. I'm not a total beginner, having picked up quite a bit of everyday language, but my vocabulary is pretty weak and I'm still very basic on a conversational level. Because I read Harry Potter in Russian last week, I also read and listened to the first chapter in Vietnamese. I found an audiobook in the Southern dialect. I can follow along with the words easily, but there's a lot of vocabulary work to be done. It helped with my recognition of some words, particularly the pronunciation of 'v' as a 'y' sound in Southern Vietnamese - so words like 'vâng' ̣̣(yes) and 'và' ̣(and) sound like 'yung' and 'yaa'. I could also pick out a few new wizard-type phrases such as 'áo trùm' ̣(cloak). However, it was quite challenging and will need a lot of re-reading and careful work to got through and understand more.

My goals for this week, then:

• Work through 3 chapters of Elementary Vietnamese
• Duolingo VIetnamese (as far as I have time to do)
• Practice some speaking exercises from 'Tieng Viet'
• One 'Learn Vietnamese with Annie' from youtube per day - total 7 this week
• Go back through the first chapter of Harry Potter, paragraph by paragraph, with the English version.
• Memrise Comprehensive Vietnamese (next 100 words)
• Write a paragraph about myself in Vietnamese
• Record a short talk about myself in Vietnamese
• Arrange an iTalki session to start the Russian week next Saturday

Wising a successful week to everyone!

[MamaPata]

Sounds like you are being very impressive! You achieved so much - are you happy with it all? Are you enjoying Harry Potter? How natural does the Russian seem to you? I am so used to the English that the translations seem very literal to me, but I can't decide if that's just me.

[garyb]

Good luck with your studies! I spent a couple of weeks in Vietnam earlier this year so it's interesting to see somebody learning the language and to read that the Vietnamese are happy to speak with learners. I found in most places that they just defaulted to English since I was an obvious foreigner (white and twice the size of most locals) as they understandably don't expect us to speak it. However in Ho Chi Minh City and Mekong Delta the English level was lower than in other places and I had a few people just speaking Vietnamese to me, which of course I didn't understand.

[pained]

Sounds like you are being very impressive! You achieved so much - are you happy with it all?

Thanks, MamaPata! Maybe it's human nature, but I never feel I've done as much as I could have... I guess that's one on the benefits of these language logs - to remind you how much you have actually done!

Are you enjoying Harry Potter? How natural does the Russian seem to you? I am so used to the English that the translations seem very literal to me, but I can't decide if that's just me.

Enjoying it, yes! The translation does seem quite literal, and sometimes there are extra lines, as if someone has written extra notes to explain the story and added them into the translation. Although I'm not an expert, the Russian doesn't sound very... well, Russian to me. There are apparently new translations (in the reviews on amazon.com), but I've got an old hardback version I picked up, along with a matching audio version. Still, it's all good practice, I guess

[pained]

Good luck with your studies! I spent a couple of weeks in Vietnam earlier this year so it's interesting to see somebody learning the language and to read that the Vietnamese are happy to speak with learners. I found in most places that they just defaulted to English since I was an obvious foreigner (white and twice the size of most locals) as they understandably don't expect us to speak it. However in Ho Chi Minh City and Mekong Delta the English level was lower than in other places and I had a few people just speaking Vietnamese to me, which of course I didn't understand.

Thanks, garyb! Good luck to you too! Great that you came to Viietnam for a couple of weeks. Did you enjoy it?

Yeah - a lot of Vietnamese like to practice their English too. In Russia I could get away with at least looking like a local (until I opened my mouth to speak at least!). In Vietnam, they can recognize a foreigner a little more easily - as you say

But, yeah, if you show you try to speak even a little Vietnamese they always break out in a smile. Or maybe they are laughing at my terrible accent! But then the opposite problem is when they speak a few phrases at normal speed and you can't catch any of it... To get through the initial round of questions, it helps to know what the Vietnamese generally are curious to find out about you. Usually this includes (in roughly this order):

• where are you from?
• how old are you? (because pronouns are based on relative age, e.g. anh/chị for a man/woman a little older than you, but em for a man/woman who is younger)
• how tall are you? and how much do you weigh? (they're not really sensitive about weight, or asking about it, just curious because you are so different)
• what's your job, how much do you earn? (again curious! to get out of the salary question, I usually say "bí mật!" (it's a secret!)

After that - I try to catch a few words, but find the vocabulary is often so different that it's really difficult to understand. But I'm slowly catching more and more, and going through memrise to try to broaden my vocabulary! There's quite a bit of French influence in the words, although sometimes a little hard to spot - e.g. ga (gas), phô mai/pho mát (fromage)...

[Xenops]

Interesting to see someone learning Vietnamese! I confess I've been tempted by the language because it's a tonal language with a Latin alphabet. How do you handle the tones?

I also have a friend that is intrigued by Russian, but she lives in an area where Russian courses and folk are few.

[pained]

Interesting to see someone learning Vietnamese! I confess I've been tempted by the language because it's a tonal language with a Latin alphabet. How do you handle the tones?

The Latin alphabet certainly helps with reading and learning Vietnamese. The tones still cause me difficulty though! I've found that I really need a lot of listening and to hear the word pronounced as well as reading it. There are a few courses on Memrise with the audio, for example.

Even though I know the tones now and can (mostly) pronounce them, I still notice myself going up in tone at the end of questions or, I think, when I'm trying to be polite, and getting the tone wrong. I asked some of my Vietnamese friends, and they say even they had some problems when they were young. Some said their school teachers suggested raising your eyebrows when doing a rising tone, or looking down when doing a falling tone, and that seems to work for me too. I've seen people learning tones in words and sentences by moving their hands up and down with the tones as well.

The problem is made a little more complicated because Northern ("standard") Vietnamese has 6 tones, while Southern merges 2 of the tones and so only has 5 tones. Resources are available in both dialects, but I've notice that the Memrise courses sometimes have a mixture of both.

Vietnamese is a really interesting language to learn - if you like a challenge.

I also have a friend that is intrigued by Russian, but she lives in an area where Russian courses and folk are few.

Russian was the language that I first fell in love with! I guess you can do quite a lot from books, but it did help me learning face to face with someone. I still haven't tried italki (and it wasn't there when I was first learning!), but maybe something like that is the way to go if there is nothing else nearby...

[pained]

A little late with the update for last week, and it's already nearly the end of the current week! I feel I should still do last week's update, to keep the momentum going! Maybe it's a bit late to set goals for this week now...

Anyway, here's How I did with the plan for last week:

Work through 3 chapters of Elementary Vietnamese I managed 2/3
Duolingo VIetnamese (as far as I have time to do) Didn't look at it
Practice some speaking exercises from 'Tieng Viet' Yes, practiced with a friend
One 'Learn Vietnamese with Annie' from youtube per day - total 7 this week I watched 7, but all in one day!
Go back through the first chapter of Harry Potter, paragraph by paragraph, with the English version. No
Memrise Comprehensive Vietnamese (next 100 words) Doing 20 a day now
Write a paragraph about myself in Vietnamese No...
Record a short talk about myself in Vietnamese No...
Arrange an iTalki session to start the Russian week next Saturday I did better! I was lucky to meet and talk to a Russian person face-to-face for 15 minutes - she's a teacher next door to where I work!

My big improvement this week was to really get into Memrise. I've tried and lost interest with Anki in the past. My Memrise plan:

• I set up the daily goals in Memrise this week and it has helped to push me into completing at least 20 Vietnamese and 20 Russian words per day.
• I've set a target of 10,000 words (both languages) total by the end of 2017. (I realize that you can't fine-tune the review as much as Anki, so I may have a lot to review by the end of 2017!) I think this is quite high, but need a motivation.
• Sometimes there are two words that are impossible to tell apart, so often you type the wrong answer. In this case I'll just use the ignore function on one of them.
• This week, I've also started creating a Memrise set from the Russian videos I'm watching. More on how I'm doing that in this week's update...
• While (mainly) listening to a conversation in Vietnamese, I caught 2 or 3 words that I had learned in the week, and managed to use 2 phrases that I had learned. I still didn't understand most of the conversation, but they were native speakers and not slowing down at all for me!

All in all, I'm happy with my Memrise progress last week and this week. I've got one main set for each language which I have set goals for, plus 2 or 3 other interesting sets, including the one I've created for Russian videos, which I plan just to do and review as time and the mood allows.

Hope everyone has/had a successful week!

[liddytime]

Darren,
I noticed you were considering Glossika Vietnamese. I was considering picking this up but like you said, it is in the Northern Dialect. I live on the West Coast of the US where, probably, 90% of the Vietnamese spoken in in the Southern Dialect. Do you think the dialects are close enough that one could learn one (Northern) and speak in the other (Southern)? I really love the Glossika method but don't know if this would just confuse me...