Customer Reviews

Colloquial Vietnamese: A Complete Language Course (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I disagree with an earlier posted negative review of this material. I feel that this book and 2 CD set is excellent. I have searched for many books to help me learn to communicate with my wife's family in Vietnamese in my annual visit to Vietnam. This is by far the most useful. This material is not designed for the traveller who wants to learn a phrase or two. It is designed for someone who truly wishes to learn to communicate in Vietnamese. The book and CD force you to think and learn to listen in order to comprehend real conversational Vietnamese. In real life, Vietnamese people speak quickly. One will never learn to listen and speak this language unless you are given a strong push. That is what this material does. This book and CD set will make you work harder, but in the end will give you practical speaking and listening abilities. Expect to make a serious time investment in learning this language. As an additional comment, except for a fortunate few, learning any language likely requires real life experience coupled with this material. The material teaches terms and grammar from the north. This is the official version of the language of the country and is understood everywhere.

I should start off by saying that I already spoke Vietnamese pretty well when I picked up this course. In general, I thought the book was a pretty good introductory text (a fair amount of typos in the first half dozen chapters though).

The one comment I did want to make was on the tapes. The hardest thing about learning Vietnamese is (by far) pronunciation. Some of the earlier reviewers complained about the tapes and I think that their complaints are somewhat unjustified. It took me (literally) years to be comfortable hearing and understanding Vietnamese -- it's not quite like learning Spanish. If the expectation was that the neophite could listen to these tapes (or any VNese tapes) in the car and start picking up words, then yes, these tapes (and any tapes) are going to be disappointing. On the other hand, the tapes follow the printed material very well, are professionally produced, and use speakers with good pronunciation.

I guess my point here is that you really need to be prepared to spend a fairly considerable amount of time if you want to hear and speak VNese well. If the previous reviewers didn't find these tapes useful, I suspect there are no sets of tapes (or any other audio aids) out there that would meet their expectations.

I'm trying to learn Vietnamese and have made several attempts to use this book plus the cassette. I usually learn languages rapidly, and I'm also an ESOL teacher. I would expect a Vietnamese speaker to be able to have a simple conversation after an 18-week course. Unfortunately, this book expects an English speaker to do this in Vietnamese after two lessons!

Vietnamese is very different from English, so a slow approach is needed with plenty of repetition and simple exercises.

The book and cassette are well produced, but they do not show an understanding of how languages are learnt.

For a true beginner this course is not truly user-friendly. I have been to Viet Nam and was married to a native in Ho Chi Minh City. This series did nothing to prepare me to communicate in the language. The tonal system is not explained, practiced, or heard in the attempts given. Vietnamese without true tonal understanding is unintelligible. The audio version leaps into full conversation with little to no preparation. It was necessary to take another course in a classroom type setting to understand what this series was trying to get across. The book is fine, but one would need a native speaker to record the lessons in lieu of the audio portion.

I'm afraid "Colloquial Vietnamese" is not one of the better lessons in this series. The book is quite good in the sense that it introduces the student to basic phrases that one might use in real life situations. Unfortunately, the content on the tapes is quite minimal and their relationship to the book is rather haphazard. As a result, the student gets some Vietnamese sound practice but has to guess the sound and tones on many sections. I compensated for this by having a native speaker read parts of the text alound into a tape recorder, but if this lesson had been better designed, I would not have to do this. You can definitely learn Vietnames from this book but it is not as good as others in this series.

This book offers a lot of useful words and phrases, but for the person who has never studied Vietnamese before, these words and phrases become very hard to learn, as Vietnamese pronunciation is almost skipped over at the beginning of the book. Having skimmed through the book, it looks to have a very good content, but this is brought down by the lack of explanation of vowels and tones. For someone who has had to study both Thai and Chinese before, the lack of pronunciation provided a major barrier to this language, which in itself is not impossibly hard to learn. If you can find a good introduction to reading Vietnamese, then this book would give a solid base to learn this language well.

I have bought this book with 2 CDs and I found that this book is good if you have good ears. The people on the CDs speak too fast and it is very difficult to be able to repeat the correct pronunciations. Although it is a good book if you have more than enough time and more than enough patience to learn Vietnamese when using this book, it's not a very practical book if you want to learn just the basics when having a conversation when speaking witha Vietnamese speaker. I don't suggest buying this unless you are absolutely stranded and do not have a choice of selection.

I would discourage people from buying this book if they are interested in learning Vietnamese. Vietnamese pronunciation is not readily apparent from the spelling system and the book gives little help in explaining the sound system of Vietnamese. Without this, it is almost impossible to learn spoken Vietnamese from the tapes, since most of the sentences in the book are not recorded on the tapes. The Vietnamese book in the "Teach Yourself" series looked more plausible for self- instruction.

The "Colloquial" series looks well packaged and presented, and comes with well produced cassettes. However, the books are not based on any known language teaching principles, and I would be surprised ifanyone has ever learnt a language using them.

I teach Chinese beginners and it can take weeks of intensive practice before they are comfortable with a small number of phrases. If you look at the early chapters of the "Colloquial" series you will find they expect you to interpret complex dialogues or make hotel bookings before they have even tried to teach you any structures!

The authors clearly have no idea of how people learn language and I would strongly advise any language learners to look elsewhere.

I'm using this book and tapes/CDs under the guidance of a language instructor in a one-on-one situation and I find it woefully lacking. Both the content and the pace of introduction of new vocabulary are inappropriate. Why would one expect to be speaking with a diplomat in the second lesson of a language instruction series? There is no model for pronunciation at the start of the CD/tapes other than a very quick series of vowel sounds that are far too quickly presented and inadequately explained. I've asked my language lesson provider to find a different text to use.