How does Vietnamese sound like to foreigners?
Vietnamese has often been described as sounding like birdsong because of its expressive flourishes and the way it seems to flutter along like the wings of a hummingbird. For foreigners who are just starting to learn the language, it sounds like a hopelessly incomprehensible stream of emotionally-charged music.
Vietnamese took the top spot as the world's least attractive language, with the site claiming (rather harshly) that it “sounds like a duck being brutalized.” Somali came next, followed by Chinese and Turkish (apparently due to its lack of melody and monotonic sound).
Dialect characteristics
Vietnamese French is based on standard French, but contains words that have been influenced not only by Vietnamese but also by Chinese and English, the latter due to U.S. presence in the south during the Vietnam War.
The biggest reason people think Thai and Vietnamese are related is the fact that they sound similar to nonnatives. Especially the vowels of the two languages can sound very similar. The overall sound and tone of both languages are also very similar.
Learning Vietnamese is neither hard nor easy. As we will see, many more aspects of Vietnamese grammar are dễ rather than khó. Realistically, it is more accurate to say that Vietnamese is mostly "an easy language" rather than "a hard language." However, one aspect of Vietnamese, the pronunciation, is quite difficult.
Vietnamese is easier than Thai. The use of the Latin alphabet is easier to learn and start reading. The pronunciation and grammar are similar and take an equal amount of time to learn. The Thai alphabet has a more significant learning curve and therefore takes longer.
What makes Vietnam different from other Southeast Asian countries: Religions. Vietnamese spiritual life is influenced by three main religions: Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddism. However, besides the many ancient pagodas and temples, there are also quite a few aged churches that were built in the French colonial period.
Why it's hard: Vietnamese is a tonal language with six different tones that dictate the meaning of a word. The high number of vowel sounds also prove difficult for English speakers to nail down.
'Viet people') or Kinh people (Vietnamese: người Kinh) are a Southeast Asian ethnic group originally native to modern-day Northern Vietnam and Southern China.
The full list of Romance languages is pretty long: Aragonese, Aromanian, Asturian, Arpitan, Catalan, Corsican, Emilian, Extremaduran, Fala, French, Cajun French, Friulian, Galician, Istriot, Italian, Jèrriais, Judeo-Italian, Ladin, Ladino, Ligurian, Lombard, Minderico, Mirandese, Napoletano-Calabrese, Occitan, Picard, ...
What is the hardest language to learn?
1. Mandarin Chinese. Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons.
Once known as Annamese, Vietnamese is part of the huge Austro-Asiatic language tree. That means it comes from similar roots as Khmer in Cambodia and several other languages spoken by minority groups in the surrounding regions.
A person who knows Cantonese will be struck by the many Vietnamese words that sound similar, such as nguyen lieu (“raw materials”, yuen liu in Cantonese) and dac biet (“special”, dac beet in Cantonese).
Chinese is by far the most widely spoken tonal language, though perhaps it should be noted that Chinese itself subdivides into hundreds of local languages and dialects, not all of which (e.g. Shanghainese) are as tonal as “Standard” Chinese (Mandarin), which has four tones—though some, such as Cantonese, have more ...
