Vietnamese Resources

All about language programs, courses, websites and other learning resources
User avatar
księżycowy
Blue Belt
Posts: 655
Joined: Fri Aug 25, 2017 3:26 pm
Location: Earth
Languages: *Native*
English

*Studying*
Biblical Greek, Hebrew, German (Arabic)


*Waiting List*
Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, Italian, Modern Greek, Latin, Old English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese), Vietnamese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Aramaic, Amharic, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Cayuga
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17499
x 1488

Vietnamese Resources

Postby księżycowy » Thu Feb 14, 2019 3:32 am

Suggestions are more than welcome! :)

Resources are not in any particular order.

Assume resources are in/for the Northern dialect, unless otherwise noted.

Language
(Please note that I will be linking to publisher websites [in so far as possible], rather than sites like Amazon. See the "List of Links" section for online bookstores that may carry various titles listed below if purchasing from the publisher is not ideal for you.)
Courses
  • Colloquial Vietnamese by Bac Haoi Tran, et al [Buy]
  • Complete Vietnamese (Teach Yourself) by Dana Healy [Book OOP?|Audio]
  • Elementary Vietnamese by Binh Nhu Ngo [Buy]
  • Continuing Vietnamese by Binh Nhu Ngo [Buy]
  • Easy Vietnamese by Bac Hoai Tran [Buy] (Southern Dialect, but it should be noted that one of the prevalent speakers on the audio uses a Northern pronunciation.)
  • Vietnamese Basic Course by FSI [In the public sector, easily found through web searching] (Southern Dialect)
  • Modern Vietnamese series by Phan Van Giuong
  • Vietnamese for Beginners by Phan Van Giuong
  • Spoken Vietnamese by Robert B Jones (Southern Dialect)
  • Intermediate Spoken Vietnamese by F. Huffman & Tran Trong Hai [Buy]
  • Spoken Vietnamese for Beginners by Nguyen Long, et al. [Buy]
  • Contemporary Vietnamese by Nguyen Long, et al [Buy]
  • Contemporary Vietnamese Readings by Nguyen Long, et al. [Buy]
  • Chung ta noi . . . Conversational Vietnamese: An Intermediate Text by Le Pham Thuy-Kim and Nguyen Kim-Oanh [Buy]
  • Giáo trình tiếng việt cho người nước ngoài: Vietnamese as a Second Language Series by Nguyen Van Hue, et al. [Buy:In Vietnam] (Southern Vietnamese)
    [I highly recommend at least the first two books in this series. I was able to get them exported, but I cannot remember the name of the service that I ended up using. It was quite expensive, and I had to email quite a few book sellers in Saigon/HCMC to finally get the lead.]
  • Grundkurs Vietnamesisch by Hoang Thi Chau [OOP?]
  • Lehrbuch der vietnamesischen Sprache by Trang-Ðài Vu [Buy]
  • Cours de Vietnamien by Antoine Dauphin [Buy]
Grammar
  • A Vietnamese Reference Grammar by L. C. Thompson [Buy|PDF]
  • Vietnamese: An Essential Grammar by Binh Nhh Ngo [Buy]

Dictionaries
  • Tuttle English - Vietnamese Dictionary [Buy]
  • Tuttle Vietnamese - English Dictionary [Buy]
  • The New Vietnamese-English Dictionary by Andre Nguyen Van Chau [Buy]

Testing


Media

YouTube Channels
  • Easy Vietnamese [Link]
  • Learn Vietnamese With Anne [Link] (Southern Dialect)
  • Tieng Viet Oi [Link]
  • Slow Vietnamese [Link]

Cinema

Podcasts

Radio


Television


AudioBooks

Pronunciation/Listening


Reading
  • Vietnamese Stories for Language Learners by Tri C. Tran & Tram Le [Buy]

Newspapers

Literature/reading

Forums


Comics

Other

Lists of links
Tiếng Việt Thực Hành [Link] (A site with a lot of resources to learn the Southern dialect of the diaspora community, among other things. Can be hard to navigate, as it is all in Vietnamese. Most textbooks do have at least some English. There is no audio for any of the textbooks on the site, nor do I believe that any exists.)
Last edited by księżycowy on Thu Jan 26, 2023 9:26 am, edited 28 times in total.
15 x
Dead Log
Modern European Log
East Asian Log

DaF Kompakt A1-B1 (Klett) : 1 / 30
Modern German Pronunciation 2e (Hall) : 0 / 7
[Greek and Hebrew TBD]

peterbeischmidt
Yellow Belt
Posts: 62
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2015 8:25 am
x 105

Re: Vietnamese Resources

Postby peterbeischmidt » Thu Feb 14, 2019 10:46 am

Here are some more high-quality ones:

  • Grundkurs Vietnamesisch, 1990, Hoang Thi Chau, VEB Verlag Enzyklopaedie
  • Cours de Vietnamien, 1994, Antoine Dauphin, Asiatheque
  • A Vietnamese Reader, 1961, Laurence C. Thompson and Nguyen duc Hiep, University of Washington Press
  • Lehrbuch der vietnamesischen Sprache, Buske, comes with recordings and my tutor recorded the solutions to the translation exercises (message me if you're interested)
  • Intermediate Vietnamese, 1971, Nguyễn Đăng Liêm, Seton Hall University Press ❤
  • Intermediate Vietnamese Reader by Robert Quinn, I think it's in the public domain and a PDF can be found after some googling

There are actually quite a few newer textbooks available in German by Buske such as the "Lehrbuch der vietnamesischen Sprache" by Trang Dai Vu which is entirely different from the book with the same title above, but I haven't looked at them more closely.

I enjoy working with monolingual textbooks or readers, but for Vietnamese I've found only one thus far:

  • Quốc Văn Giáo Khoa Thư - Lớp Dự Bị (you can easily find a PDF online)
  • ... others?

It's a shame the website of the UCLA Language Materials Project is no longer available. Did anyone else here use and appreciate their catalog?
5 x

User avatar
Axon
Blue Belt
Posts: 775
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2016 12:29 am
Location: California
Languages: Native English, in order of comfort: Mandarin, German, Indonesian,
Spanish, French, Russian,
Cantonese, Vietnamese, Polish.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5086
x 3288

Re: Vietnamese Resources

Postby Axon » Fri Feb 15, 2019 12:56 am

Great work as usual, Speakeasy!

I own and adore Teach Yourself (2003) and Elementary Vietnamese (first edition, 1999).

It's true that EV is heavily oriented towards the need of a college course. Although the course content is relatively dry (perhaps more exciting than FSI, which is a low bar to clear), the chapters are really thin facades over introducing grammar and sentence structures in a way that lets people construct quite a lot of sentence types with the material they've been given. In The Classroom (lesson 9 of 14) has people talking about who is and isn't there today, describing a sequence of events in the near future, asking and answering who something belongs to, asking and answering if actions have been or will be completed soon, and using imperatives. I think the commenter's criticism of too much pronunciation practice would probably not be echoed by many members of this forum. And yes, the English grammar explanations are all recorded, but so are the myriad Vietnamese words and sentences that appear in those explanations! They even have a native Mandarin speaker for a brief section on Mandarin loanwords.

To be fair, that book does introduce vocabulary in big waves, and some of the vocabulary words are of questionable use to the self-learner or even the university student. Perhaps phrases like "language lab" and "recording tape" have been updated in newer editions.

Someone wishing to focus more on communication would do well to study Teach Yourself Vietnamese. As it's a pretty standard text I would say there's not much to specifically focus on. I do find one of the four voiceover artists rather unpleasant to listen to, but I suppose it takes all kinds.

In my opinion, a novice learner should probably run through the EV pronunciation drills first, then begin Teach Yourself. If they feel they're not learning enough, they could supplement TY with EV, or save it for later. Thorough (and I mean thorough)completion of these two texts would, I believe, give the learner a very strong foothold in the language possibly at the level of high A2/low B1.

Other resources I use:

Easy Vietnamese Street Interviews: Conducted in Ho Chi Minh City, so only a handful of people at most in each video will be from the North and thus speaking Northern Vietnamese. Follow the regular Easy Languages format.

Learn Vietnamese With Annie: The most extensive of all the YouTube courses. Southern accent.

Tieng Viet Oi: An online and brick-and-mortar language school publishes these videos that explain certain aspects of the language at different levels. A good source of listening dialogues, as the actors speak naturally and the audio is less than studio quality. One of the few courses online to be produced mainly in Northern Vietnamese, though there are a few videos with the Southern and even Central dialects.

Other notes:

I have a PDF of A Vietnamese Reader by Laurence C. Thompson and Nguyen duc Hiep (University of Washington press, Seattle, 1961). I have not used it myself. Mr. Hiep is credited with preparing the "reading texts for the army Vietnamese course." The course is designed to expand the knowledge of a student who has mainly focused on spoken Vietnamese, eventually guiding them toward reading in a more literary style. The authors recommend that the learners have a base of vocabulary equivalent to the first 19 lessons of "Introduction to Spoken Vietnamese" (Jones and Thong, American Council of Learned Societies, Washington, 1957). There is a glossary for all words in the text. No English translations for the stories are given besides a few notes.

I would put this course and Vietnamese Stories for Language Learners in the "Intermediate" section, simply because written Vietnamese uses a wider range of "literary" vocabulary that may not be present in Assimil, Teach Yourself, Routledge, etc. I would also note that Tuttle publishes all their audio recordings online for free on their website.

Glossika Vietnamese is indeed a collection of sentence pairs aimed at introducing syntactic structures and building automaticity. They also produce a Southern Vietnamese course, which at the moment lacks IPA transcription in contrast to the Northern course. The Northern course is recorded by a man at great speed, and the Southern course by a woman, slightly slower.
7 x

User avatar
Axon
Blue Belt
Posts: 775
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2016 12:29 am
Location: California
Languages: Native English, in order of comfort: Mandarin, German, Indonesian,
Spanish, French, Russian,
Cantonese, Vietnamese, Polish.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5086
x 3288

Re: Vietnamese Resources

Postby Axon » Thu Jun 20, 2019 4:07 pm

If anyone is looking for a very comprehensive analysis of Vietnamese phonology and syntax, look no further than Laurence C. Thompson's A Vietnamese Grammar (1985), freely available on the SEAlang site.

The pronunciation explanations and drills in Elementary Vietnamese are the most thorough I've ever seen in any textbook, for any language. And yet they cannot even hold a candle to the painstakingly detailed descriptions of Vietnamese phonology that appear in A Vietnamese Grammar.

Unfortunately there are no accompanying recordings, but each possible vowel and consonant combination is described with IPA transcription, an American English equivalent if available, and a verbose description of the mouth position.

Even if you feel confident about your Vietnamese pronunciation already, a glance through the first 20 pages of this grammar won't take long and may alert you to subtleties that you might have missed.
5 x

Speakeasy
x 7658

Re: Vietnamese Resources

Postby Speakeasy » Sat Feb 01, 2020 12:11 am

Asian Languages Reading Level Rated Children’s Books
Pinecone wrote:I was introduced to Let's Read: Asia's Free Digital Library for Children today. It has digital children's books in the following languages … Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) …[inserted: amongst numerous others]
Asian Languages Reading Level Rated Children’s Books
1 x

IntrepidLearner
White Belt
Posts: 39
Joined: Sat Dec 25, 2021 4:29 am
Languages: English (N), German (A2)
x 55

Re: Vietnamese Resources

Postby IntrepidLearner » Sun Dec 26, 2021 6:17 pm

A few courses, grammars, and readers can be found in the following post.
1 x

User avatar
księżycowy
Blue Belt
Posts: 655
Joined: Fri Aug 25, 2017 3:26 pm
Location: Earth
Languages: *Native*
English

*Studying*
Biblical Greek, Hebrew, German (Arabic)


*Waiting List*
Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, Italian, Modern Greek, Latin, Old English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese), Vietnamese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Aramaic, Amharic, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Cayuga
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17499
x 1488

Re: Vietnamese Resources

Postby księżycowy » Fri Aug 05, 2022 2:42 pm

I'm starting to go through and edit this posting.

I'm done editing the first post. I did not add everything that has been suggested thus far, as I found some suggestions very hard to track down, presumably because they are OOP (out of print). I also do have an odd or end to add, but most suggestions should be there.

If anyone wants to suggest anything else, please feel free to do so. :)
0 x
Dead Log
Modern European Log
East Asian Log

DaF Kompakt A1-B1 (Klett) : 1 / 30
Modern German Pronunciation 2e (Hall) : 0 / 7
[Greek and Hebrew TBD]

agamemenon
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu May 04, 2023 7:28 am
Languages: English (N), Japanese (B2), Spanish (B1), Chinese (B1), French (A2)
x 2

Re: Vietnamese Resources

Postby agamemenon » Thu May 04, 2023 8:10 am

Hey there, great compilation list! I'd like to suggest an incredibly useful textbook series that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, but which is quite easily accessible: the Tiếng Việt Mến Yêu series.

This series of four books was developed for 2nd-generation American Vietnamese heritage speakers by schoolteachers in San Jose, California, to be used over 4 years of high school, and is still used today in high school Viet classes in the US. The lessons are very comprehensive, use virtually no English (they even give grammatical explanations in Vietnamese as opposed to English), and include lots and lots of readings + exercises to build one's vocabulary. The readings are also tailored to complement and enrich the student's understanding of the 21st-century Vietnamese-American experience as the school year progresses (dig the '90s/'00s-style illustrations!), which gives the series a quaint and personal vibe. There is a slight propensity to using words that are more common in the Southern dialect, though the vocabulary used is generally broad and some Northern words are used as well.

I've gotten about halfway through the first book, and my passive vocab in the language has benefitted tremendously. The main caveat is that, as a textbook geared towards heritage speakers, it is assumed that the student has a decent passive vocabulary already. Thus, even the first book, intended for 9th graders in high school, starts off hefty with the vocab, and you may wish to have a dictionary at hand. I would consider the entire series intermediate to advanced level, and would recommend starting it after finishing the colloquial or teach yourself courses. Once you do, though, this is probably the most complete and thorough book series I have encountered so far. You'll also want to get the teacher's editions for the books, as they contain the answer keys + extra readings.
2 x


Return to “Language Programs and Resources”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests