Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Vietnamese Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses)

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

 

 

With its prohibitive tone distinctions, large number of vocals and alien consonants, Vietnamese is one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world. Unfortunately, this course does a very poor job with conveying how the language is to be spoken, and similar to many other DIY language courses, the exercises at the end of each lesson are thrown in haphazardly and have little relation to the lesson they accompany.

The course begins with an introduction to the tones. They are not given names (low falling, glottal stop, mid rising, et.c.) on the cd or any explanation of their differences. In fact, at first listen they sound pretty much the same and only after rewinding the tape or skipping back on the cd hundreds of times will you eventually nail them. Next comes a list of the vietnamese vocals, consonants and diphtongs. On the CD, they are spoken in sequence (fast!) by a number of native speakers of different age and sex. This is actually a good way of getting the gist of the relative pitch of the tones, but for the actual pronounciation, just saying a bunch of morphs in sequence does little for someone without a trained ear. No examples are given of similar sounds in languages more commonly known to the average user of the course (like English, German or French).

Once (or rather, if) you have gotten past the gruelling 10-minute introduction track, you go on to the dialogues themselves. The speakers all speak in a normal conversational tempo, which in vietnamese terms means faster than you can possibly pick up the distinctions. Only by deliberate analysis of individual words using a computer and headphones will you come anywhere near learning the language. Subsequent dialogues only get worse, and sometimes use words and phrases not in the vocabulary provided for each lesson or the dictionary at the back of the book. There is a lot of background noise on the recordings, using headphones you can hear typing, muffled voices, computer fans, et.c. At the end of each dialogue, you'll be asked to answer some questions ("how did the speaker introduce Ms. Phuong?"), but the time given you to answer the questions is next to none and it is downright impossible for someone just learning the language to mimic the native speakers using the recordings provided.

The exercises at the back of each lesson seem to have been tacked on without much effort. They use little of the vocabulary of each lesson and give little insight into the grammar. The solutions for the exercises at the back of the book are poorly organized and hard to read, and sometimes don't match the exercises at all.

All in all, this was a poor purchase and I felt I gained little for the hard work I put into it. As a student of mandarin and someone fairly good at mimicking speech patterns, accents and languages, I still found it next to impossible to understand and learn Vietnamese from this course. My verdict: do not buy.

I have been living in a Vietnamese house-hold for two years now (I rent from Vietnamese people) and I have been to Vietnam two times. I had long learned the "basic" grammer structure and many useful words before I bought this book. The book _can_ be used for newbies, but I would not advise it. It is basically a crash-course in Vietnamese, cramming in valuable lessons at every-interval and leaving out some explainations that a person totally unfamiliar with vietnamese would find hard to grasp. This is a perfect book for a transition from a begginer to an intermediate student. For a Total beginner I would say it is not the book. I also did not find anything especially intriguing about the cultural notes. But if you can rememeber a lot of information really quickly, it is possible to read the entire book in about 4 hours.

I grew up speaking and hearing Vietnamese at home, but I stopped speaking when entering kindergarten to "avoid having an accent". After reading this book, I realized that I was able to recall a lot of words. I just don't know how those who have never had any Vietnamese would be able to learn this alone. A native speaker will definitely need to guide the person through.

Im not one to write reviews, but i have commited myself to learning Vietnamese and this selection looked very good, even if it lacked reviews.

I found the CD, very hard to work with. It first speaks the word in Tieng Viet, then tells the meaning, this leaves you repeating a word you dont understand, but mind you, there is little time to repeat the word anyway, as the CD moves right along.

The book is ok, and is why i gave the course 2 stars. Within it has "Cultural Information", every few pages, that i found interesting. But im unsure how anyone could really learn even the basics of the language from this course.

If you are interested in learning to speak a few phrases and very basic Vietnamese Language, i would suggest "Vietnamese:Audio CD Course(Language 30)". Its easy and kinda fun, plus the smallish phrase book is easy to carry around so you can practice while away from a cd player. Its perfect for the car ride to work, as you dont need the phrase book to follow along with the CD.

If you really want to master Tieng Viet, i think you need to spend more the $20, and maybe take a few college class's, or maybe live in Vietnam for awhile.

this actually was the first book i started with in 2000 and to be fair i would say it is a very good course. It isnt a complete course as it advertises itself to be but then again no vietnamese language course is "complete". The pronuciation section on the CD is very good like the other post said you have to go through it hundreds of times before you pick it up but the is the sacrifice you have to make towards mastery of the tones. As an introduction to the language it is good, just realize that it is supplemental and you should be getting your hands on every course you can buy borrow or find in order to study viet.

I found this book very frustrating to use. The vocabulary was not reviewed prior to the very quick paced converstions, so it was hard to work on proper pronunciation. The chapters did not have very practical topics (You are a secretary, aren't you?, Do you want to see a photograph of my family?, Do you still work in a hotel? Do you still have a temperature?). I found Vietnamese for Beginners by Jake Catlett and Huong Nguyen to be much more worthwhile. It has a lot of practical vocabulary which is slowly pronounced prior to the conversations. In addition, the chapters teach things I can actually see myself needing to know (Greetings, yes/no questions, common nouns, countries, action verbs, days of the week/month/year, food/drink, time, daily habits, clothing, colors,etc.)when we visit the country.

Having read all the less than glowing reviews of this course I was, at first, nervous about purchasing it. I'm glad however, that I did decide to buy it. Perhaps my expectations were very low and I'm therefore easily satisfied but, on many levels, this is actually a good course.
Having said that, there are some problems that are worthwhile paying attention to:
1) The pronunciation section is seriously incomplete. Not only are the sounds inadequately described in the book, it totally ignores the fact that there are three quite different pronunciations of the language. I had learned some Vietnamese years ago from Vietnamese neighbours in Australia who were from Saigon and the Ha Noi pronunciation used in this book is different enough from their accent to totally bewilder someone who was trying to understand a Southerner or Central Vietnamese speaker. Although there are no dialects as such in Vietnamese and most native speakers can understand all the accents with little difficulty, foreigners trying to learn the language don't find it anywhere near as easy. It seems almost cruel to send foreigners, already struggling to cope with the difficulties of Vietnamese pronunciation even under ideal circumstances, into a situation where they will probably only understand speakers from the North of the country. This is made worse, when one considers that most U.S. and Australian learners for example, will primarily have contact with Southerners who left after the war and, if they travel to Vietnam, are most likely to visit Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). It's a bit like teaching English to someone and only exposing them to the accent predominant in say, the U.S. state of Georgia, when you know full well that they will be living in London England for two years.
Having said that,there are, in fact, one or two Central-sounding speakers on the CD but their pronunciation is merely "slipped in" with no explanation which is bound to create confusion about why this person has such a "strange" accent. A bit like tossing a Texan or a Glaswegian randomly into an English language CD where everyone else speaks London Middle-class standard.

2) The Teach Yourself series is normally a treasure-trove of small, interesting cultural notes- not so this book. More notes on how Vietnamese language and culture are tied together would be much appreciated. Some information on varieties of pronunciation for example (assuming they didn't want to offer a comprehensive overview of Southern and Central accents for some reason) could have at least been noted in a paragraph on culture.

3) The CD is badly flawed. Unlike many of the other commentators here, I have no objection to the speed. Vietnamese is spoken quickly- get used to it as quickly as you can. There is a book and if you read along, it isn't tough to follow the speakers as they speak very clearly overall. The accent issue has already been dealt with so I won't go on about it further though it's my single, greatest complaint (despite the fact that the Northern pronunciation is the clearest, least confusing and easiest to imitate).
My basic problem with the CD is that not everything is there. It just skips whole sections and, in general, just doesn't provide enough good listening time. To learn Vietnamese I want as much aural exposure as I can get as pronunciation is one of the biggest barriers for most learners.
All in all, this course does indeed have inadequacies. On the positive side however, the book is well laid-out, logical and well-structured and, for the patient student (and let's face it, if you aren't patient you should forget even trying to learn this language right away) it's actually rather rewarding. I'm glad I decided to buy it in the end as, despite its flaws, it's still probably the best self-teaching course available (at least as far as I know).

Unfortunately, I paid good money for this book/audio CD at the bookstore to help my husband learn to speak vietnamese (I speak vietnamese). It was so intense and haphazard - he tried to work through the first few lessons - learned next to nothing. We then did what we should have done first - researched online - and found out that others thought this program was terrible as well.

Like another reviewer said, teaching tones needs more attention and practice, especially in contrasting them. I am not complaining about the audio amount in the main text but it would be advisable to have it clearer, slower and with pauses between phrases, even if Vietnamese people speak faster naturally. Alternatively, recording in 2 speeds could be provided - slow and natural. Individual vocabulary words could be read as well. As for the text, vocabulary choice and exercises, they are not bad and manageable, not always spoon-fed but the words can be found in the provided glossary. For any serious learner, a dictionary is a must, so... I give it 4 points for some flaws with audio. Perhaps, having Southern accent example would be good but this may only confuse some learners, taking into account the difficulty of the accent.

This book is now in its second edition, which should mean more than just a pretty new cover. In its favor the material in the dialogues is usually interesting, and although the speed with which they are acted out on the CDs makes them difficult to follow for a beginner, it does get easier with regular listening practice. The grammar is not difficult, but the author has given good explanations of different kinds of sentence patterns so that it isn't too hard to get a handle on Vietnamese syntax early in the game. On the other hand, the audio sections dealing with Vietnamese phonics are hard to follow, not well presented, and do not track the order of the same material in the book. Very confusing for a beginning student, and not a good start in a language with a very complex system of pronunciation (and a particularly bad beginning in a tonal language). A much more thorough treatment of pronunciation in general would be highly recommended. There is a wealth of exercises after every chapter, but there are a lot of words in the exercises whose meaning (and usage) is not given either in the lesson vocabularies or in the glossary, and many of the answers given in the answer key have these unknown soldiers as well. I'm going to be generous and give this book three stars, but I can also understand the frustrations of those reviewers who chose to give it less.