Vietnamese. 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.
According to FSI, the Foreign Service Institute, Vietnamese is categorized as Category IV of languages. The difficulty is just below learning Arabic, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese. It normally takes 44 weeks or 1100 class hours to reach fluency.
Vietnamese is considered to be a hard language, for English speakers because it has significant linguistic differences. Vietnamese is a tonal language, and although it uses the Latin script there are different characters that don't appear in the English language.
Learning English is a problem as Vietnamese is a tonal language. Vietnamese is a tonal language and students battle to speak English with the correct intonation and rhythms. This is why when Vietnamese students speak English, it can often be unintelligible to native English speakers.
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.
Fluency in Vietnamese usually takes 44 weeks or 1100 class hours. If you study Vietnamese for 1 hour every day, seven days a week, you will be fluent after 40 months (about three years).
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.
Learning Vietnamese is worthwhile if you plan to travel to Vietnam or stay there for a while. This is because few Vietnamese people can speak English in Vietnam.
Since ancient times, Thai and Vietnamese have been affecting each other. Both the languages have been heavily influenced by Chinese vocabulary so they may sound similar. Their shared history is why the two languages seem identical to most people.
This is actually just one example of a wider point: Vietnamese grammar is incredibly simple. Most of the time, you can just say the minimum amount of words needed to get your point across and the result is grammatically correct Vietnamese, no matter how “broken” it would sound in English.
Vietnamese cuisine is one of the healthiest cuisines in the world. Vietnamese people have some of the lowest obesity rates in the world. Most of the dishes in Vietnamese cooking consist of a protein marinated in condiments that are very flavorful and low in calories, such as lemongrass, fish sauce, and garlic.
“Hello” in Vietnamese – Xin chào
It's easy to remember because chào sounds just like the Italian greeting “ciao”, which is often used in English. The accent on chào tells you that it's pronounced using the “falling tone”.
Vietnamese is one of a few languages in Asia that uses Latin alphabet instead of symbol. This makes it a lot easier to interpret street signs and even to learn to speak. The modern Vietnamese was created by a Spanish Missionary to facilitate the process of French colonization.
Vietnamese learners have problems pronouncing a final consonant sound, such as /z/, /s/, /t/, /v/, /ks/, /ʤ/ – for example, mice, right, manage. Instead, they leave them out. These same sounds cause difficulties when they are in the middle of words too – for example, never, president.
Many Vietnamese customs and values are rooted in both the Confucian respect for education, family, and elders, and the Taoist desire to avoid conflict. Vietnamese tend to be very polite, avoid talking about feelings, and are stoic. Thua (meaning please) is added in front of an honorific name to show respect to elders.
When greeting someone, say “xin chao” (seen chow) + given name + title. The Vietnamese are delighted if a Westerner can properly say “xin chao” (because Vietnamese is a tonal language, “xin chao” can have six different meanings, only one of which is "Hello").
In Vietnam, Modern Talking is like an unforgettable memory to those who spent their childhood and youth in the 1980s and 1990s. A nostalgic space in an old community home , alongside a cassette player or VHS video tapes with Modern Talking music that evokes a familiar image of the past.
According to statistics, more than 50% of Vietnamese people speak English. This percentage is much higher if we talk about the most tourist places.
As a percentage of the total population, the largest share of around 87 percent is in Vietnam. A total of about 86.5 million people worldwide speak Vietnamese as their mother tongue.
Only 1% of the Vietnamese population can hold a proper conversation in English. Most people can understand the language and communicate through it. Overall, 53.8% of the overall population can speak English.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.