Product Description
This course is intended to help you progress quickly from the basics to understanding and writing Vietnamese with confidence. Key structures and vocabulary are covered in 18 thematic units progressing from introducing yourself and dealing with everyday situations to making a phonecall and travelling in Vietnam. The cultural aspects of Vietnamese life are also covered. The book emphasizes communication throughout, with important language structures introduced in each unit. These build up to give you a command of the essential phrases that you may need on a trip to Vietnam. Exercises are included to test your knowledge. This updated edition has an additional English-Vietnamese vocabulary and an expanded "Taking it Further" section directs the reader to further sources of Vietnamese. The cassette (0 340 86043 X )and book (0 340 86042 1) can also be purchased separately. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a beginner's course in Vietnamese, assuming no previous knowledge of the language on the part of the student. The emphasis of the course is firmly on communication skills, and the graded structure contains considerable exercise material. The course is composed of a book, with an accompanying cassette, which are available separately, or a book/cassette pack. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Very useful, but difficult
Dropped my four to three stars.
I have studied Vietnamese off and on since 1965 and own no small number of Vietnamese dictionaries, grammars, and general books. Due to my age and tone deafness (1968 was a year for very loud noises) I have never obtained more than a basic ability with spoken Vietnamese, but I can travel alone throughout Vietnam and manage to make myself understood. (My reading ability is better) Healy's book contains all the flaws noted, yet it is logically presented, forces students to engage the topic, and imparts enough basic vocabulary and grammar to aid you on your way. I continue to consider it useful as a supplement to other materials. There is no way to learn a language as difficult as Vietnamese without investing the sweat, but if you are willing to do so, Dana Healy's book is worth your money and effort. I just really wish she had bothered to include a more comprehensive glossary. A lot of time is lost looking up words that are not defined anywhere in the book. And you will run across a few that you will not find in most small and medium sized dictionaries. Maddening, but it does improve Vietnamese research skills.

ps:My bookseller also shortchanged me as it did not come with the tape.

Good for beginners, though with quite a few careless mistake
Good for beginners, though with quite a few careless mistakes. Cassette tapes use the Northern Accents and not clearly recorded so they are pretty useless. The pronunciation section at the beginning (with some mistakes again) is not clearly written so you have to find a Vietnamese firend to help you on this. The context is written in Northern Vietnamese (with almost no reference or hints of Southern Vietnamese), this can be frustrating if you're in the South. Lessons (18 in total) are quite well designed, with some cultural notes. This book is so far the most popular learning material for foreigners, and even the HCMC Publishing House (Nh?xuất bản TPHCM) got a license to produce this book (blue cover with a big Tiếng Việt, costs 28000 ?#7891;ng). You may also consider the Colloquial Vietnamese (published by Routiledge) and it seems to be better than than the TY one.

Quite good actually
Well, as mentioned the tape have its flaws, mainly in the beginning where there is just a big mess of the introduction to the pronounciations.
Before starting with the first chapter I would recomend to go to the library and borrow a simpler tape material just to go through the basic pronounciations, or have a vietnamese speaking friend teach you.

Besides this I think the material is very good;
you get a good insight into the grammar with very good excercices.
There are at least two dialogues in each chapter, clearly and simply explained grammar with plenty of excercices.
It can be very intimidating when you get to a new chapter and you hear the native speaker talk in what sounds to us very fast, but you have to keep up with it and listen-speak-and repeat, eventually you will speak (almost) as well as the people on the tape,the human voice is like any other instrument-youneed will, dedication and constant practice.
If you keep it up it is very rewarding.

A word of warning...
Make sure you get the book WITH the audio cassette.There is basically NO description of prononciation in this book.They simply say "refer to the cassette."I hear that the audio cassette is useless, though, but you absolutely NEED some type of thing to listen to, because we don't have tones in English, and they're not that easy to explain.
Otherwise, I'm sure this is a decent way to learn Vietnamese.

I agree - the tape doesn't follow the book
I agree with the previous reviewer that the tape is terrible.It infuriates me that a publisher can get away with distributing a tape that does such a terrible job following the book.If a publisher distributed a book with several chapters missing, people wouldn't stand for it.But the book/tape interface here is the equivalent - whole sections of aural instruction referred to in the book are missing from the tape.It's also worth noting fully half of the first side of 1 of 2 tapes is taken up with the basic introductions - the vocal equivalent of a title page. ... Read more

Product Description
The Vietnamese language made easy! Vietnamese for Beginners is designed for either self-study or classroom use. It teaches all four language skills - speaking, listening (when used in conjunction with the audio), reading and writing; and offers clear, easy, step-by-step instruction building on what has been previously learned. Lots of exercises and useful phrases. Very user-friendly and fun to use. There is an audio version that follows the book. Three CDs are available separately. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

modern and easy to use
This is a modern book on learning Vietnamese with well-explained grammar and large build-up of vocabulary.

I really like the structure of this book - it is very straight-forward to use, the layout is simple and uncomplicated. I wish they would have written a sequel.

Each chapter starts with a vocabulary list of about 30 words, this is followed by a grammar section, then reading dialogues, exercises, and lastly pronunciation exercises.

My only complaint about the book is that when they explain grammar they use formulae such as: "X__Y__Z", where you "insert a verb in blank space 1 and a noun in blank space 2".
This is not a problem in itself but the exercises in the book are not enough to practice these "formulae".
This means that you have to do what I did to practice them: keep glossary lists of all the words you learn and practice the "formulae" by making your own word-substitution drills. This is a very easy thing to do and does not take up much time, it is also very effective.
But still, the authors or editor should have foreseen this problem, which is why the book looses a star for me.

To return to the positives, things that I really liked about this book was:
1. it has a very good pronunciation guide for both the Southern and Northern dialects (the audio uses Northern)
2. modern vocabulary
3. the audio cd's are very good
4. the reading passages have the ideal length

To expand on my last point, before I used this package I tried using Colloquial Vietnamese, but the dialogues and texts in Colloquial were too long and complicated for a beginner of Vietnamese. In learning Vietnamese your biggest challenge is to get the tones not only correct but also to flow quite smoothly when reading a text, and therefore it is better to learn from books where the sentences are shorter.

I highly recommend this book if you are short on time but still want to get a thorough understanding of Vietnamese, it took me ~3 months to complete his material.
This book prepared me a great deal for the intermediate book Chung Ta Noi... Conversational Vietnamese: An Intermediate Text.

Very good book for learning written Vietnamese
This book is very thorough for learning written Vietnamese.You can order the accompanying CDs directly from the publisher, and they are a must to learn to speak and understand Vietnamese.The CDs don't give much time to repeat phrases and can be annoying.The sentences can be stupid (e.g. Is this a book or a pencil?), but there's not a lot out there if you want to learn Vietnamese, and this is some of the most complete information I have seen.

The english speaker speaks too much.
Every vietnamese pronunciation is repeated in English. That makes it
very hard for me to focus on the vietnamese. It is alreasy written in
English and I know what it means. Why they have to say it again in
English? The vietnamese pronunciation is very hard. The English speach
distracting me from focusing on the vietnamese part.I didn't buy these
book and CDs to learn English. Major disappointment. I tossed them
away after listening to the first few tracks.

Excellent self-study material
I have studied Vietnamese for several months now, and have tried several different materials.I find that this book, when used with the audio CDs (purchased separately), is a valuable resource.
- The text is well-structured, with appropriate vocabulary for new learners.
- Sentences and dialogs are applicable for everyday conversation.
- Both text and CD have obviously been produced by persons genuinely familiar with learning a language, ie, spacing between words is clear, timely, and without any unnecessary flourishes.

Vietnamese is a tonal language, and quite difficult to learn without audio (recordings or tutor).The publisher should consider packaging the CDs with the text.

Other helpful materials are: Pimsleur Vietnamese: Learn to Speak and Understand Vietnamese with Pimsleur Language Programsfor quickly developing a basic conversational capability; Rosetta Stone Vietnamese Level 1 Win/Mac Personal Edition [Old Version], if you are disciplined enough to work through the modules regularly, and repeat phrases out loud; Teach Yourself Teach Yourself Vietnamese Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (Teach Yourself . . . Complete Courses)for a different vocabulary/dialog approach, and; you may want to keep a phrasebook Vietnamese: Lonely Planet Phrasebook handy, so you can review a phrase or two while waiting for a friend.

Don't give up!Its a wonderful language. --C4PO

Need a tutor
This book is good, but you would need a tutor who speaks Vietnamese for it to be much help. It is impossible to know how to pronounce words in another language. It would be perfect for a classroom setting. ... Read more

Product Description

Karen Daley leads the reader into what is perhaps the first discourse study of Vietnamese classifiers to date. After presenting a summary of classifiers and their funciton in languages of the world, she challenges the validity of regarding Vietnamese classifiers as simply fitting the prototypical pattern of phrase-level numeral classifiers. In Vietnamese several of the functions attributed to classifiers imply discourse relations, despite the prevailing assumption that their use is associated with the syntactic relations of phrases.

A coherent pattern of classifier use becomes evident when they are observed in the larger syntactic environment of discourse. Daley uses discourse measurements of overall frequency, referential distance, and referential persistence and compares them with four criteria from a study of classifiers in White Hmong. The results in the present study indicate that the basic function of classifiers in Vietnamese discourse is referential to mark salience.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Preface

1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. Methodology
4. Results
5. Conclusion

Appendix A. List of Classifiers in the Data and Additional Tables
Appendix B. Four Vietnamese Narrative Texts
References

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

beautiful vietnam
yes it carries almost 7000 words. Myriads of example sentences used in real daily circumstances one may encounter when visiting this lovely country. Highly recommended both for travel and for improving Vietnamse knowledge. ... Read more

Product Description
The pictorial reference features topics which reflect the immediate language needs of beginning-level adult and secondary students of American English: contextualized vocabulary for essential survival skills; large, easy-to-read type and clearly organized pages; an index showing the pronunciation of each item; plus a large number of verbs, adjectives, and phrases as well as nouns. ... Read more

Product Description
A complete course for beginners, reflecting a multiplicity of roles. It has a slight bias towards the spoken language, with most of the course based on dialogue format, but also provides notes on relevant linguistic points on a sufficiently detailed level so that it can be used as a self-teaching material for independent learners with the help of tapes and instructions on tape. ... Read more

Product Description

It's easy to teach yourself Vietnamese!

Complete Vietnamese: A Teach Yourself Guide provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Vietnamese, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing [] with confidence.Within each of the 18 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues.You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

An excellent introduction
I felt the book provides an excellent exposure to the first time learner. The book is structured well with sections outlining the use of the language on a day to day situations, such as shopping eating out travelling etc.

The book avoids the need to learn long and tedious list of words and phrases.

I visited Indonesia shortly after recieving the book, I could travel quite independently without having concerns about communicating. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent Bahasa Language Reference Book
This is a great, compact Bahasa reference book for those visiting or living in Indonesia.Useful words and phrases.Convenient pocket size for easy travel.Highly recommended! ... Read more

Product Description
The popular and definitive bilingual visual
dictionary. Over 5000 terms identified and
illustrated by brightly coloured, state-of-the-art, computer-generated illustrations. Each illustration is clearly labelled with terminology that identifies its parts in both languages. Simply view a picture to find the correct terms for objects and their components in two languages. An essential and enjoyable bilingual resource!
(New editions in 2003! English/French & English/Portuguese)
Subjects include:
Sky, Earth, Fruits and Vegetables, Animal Kingdom, Human Being, Architecture, Clothing, School, Music, Transport, Sport
... Read more

Product Description
Ch^o Ban! is an interactive language program of introductory Vietnamese intended for use by non-native students, as well as students of Vietnamese heritage without a solid knowledge of the language. ... Read more

Product Description

It's easy to teach yourself Vietnamese!

Complete Vietnamese with Two Audio CDs: A Teach Yourself Guide provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Vietnamese, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Vietnamese with confidence.

Within each of the 18 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues.You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society.

The accompanying audio CDs include audio exercises--performed by native speakers--that reinforce communicative skills. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Appalling recordings make this set unusable
This is an appalling language course for anyone completely new to Vietnamese because it almost completely skips over pronunciation and the alphabet! Despite banging on about how fascinating Vietnamese is because it's a tonal language, the section on tones barely covers their differentiation - just a short set of sample words and that's it. When the section moves onto the alphabet, no attempt is made to describe the differences in pronunciation between the letters. Instead,again the letters are just listed with some sample words. In fact, I'm not sure the list is even complete, because it seems to miss out some very common diphthongs. Of course, this could still be saved if the CD recordings were any good, but instead they appear to have hired the world's fastest Vietnamese speakers to race through the section, so that you'd have to have your fingers permanently on the pause button if you're expecting to catch up. Of course, even if you pause it at every word (which you sort of have to) the recordings are pretty bad, so it's hard (for the non-native beginner) to really catch the difference.

Moving onto the lessons, again the recordings are bewildering. The recordings are just of the dialogues, and at a fairly speedy pace, so it's almost impossible (having just come out of the pronunciation guide) to work out what on earth is going on. There's no recording of the vocab which would at least break down the dialogue into more manageable bits. All you have is the word list in the book. But since the pronunciation guide was so poor to start with you really don't have much of a chance to work out how on earth you're meant to pronounce it all.

I bought the book because it looked comprehensive, and certainly from the point of view of grammar etc it seems like a good introduction. But it's only useful if, paradoxically, you already have some knowledge of the language already. I've used a number of Teach Yourself courses before, and am aware that they vary widely (and wildly) in quality, but I'd have to say this is one of the worst I've ever used. Or rather not used. I think I'm going to have to return it because the recordings are just pointless. In fact, I'd say on the whole that the single biggest fault in most of Teach Yourself's courses is the audio recordings that consistently let the books down. For this amount of money, Teach Yourself needs to sort this out! Instead of rebranding all your products, think about upgrading some of your recordings!

Same book with a different title
What a disappointment!I was looking forward to the publication of this new book with new materials for Vietnamese, but it is exactly the same book as the previous edition(s) of *Teach Yourself Vietnamese*! Same dialogs, same vocabulary lists (even the words missing from the glossary in the previous editions are missing in this edition!).As in the previous editions, the dialogs and recordings follow the usage in the north and there is little mention of the southern forms. Apart from the dialogs now appearing in dark gray boxes and lesson number appearing at the bottom rather than at the side, the only new feature (that I could discover) is a little summary at the end of each lesson where the main grammatical points are summarized. It is a good book to teach yourself, the vocabulary is good (although it favors the North), the grammatical sequences are well thought out and there are lots of exercises to practice (answer key included). If you want to be exposed to the southern dialect (you will need it if you're doing business in Ho Chi Minh City), try Jake Catlett's *Vietnamese for beginners*.*Complete Vietnamese* and *Vietnamese for Beginners* will prepare you to understand basic Vietnamese in the north and south. Catlett's recordings are more natural and will prepare you better for the real Vietnamese you will encounter in the south (and for the speech you will most likely encounter here in the Vietnamese communities in the US). Complete Vietnamese's recordings are not read at natural speed, but the speakers have nice voices and they modulate well. ... Read more

Product Description

Unravel the mystery of Vietnamese script

In the Your First 100 Words in Vietnamese, you learn to decipher and read a new script bylearning 100 primary words in Vietnamese.Covering the language of Vietnam, thisnew addition to the Your First 100 Words In seriescan be used as a supplement for language courses or for independent learning.

Customer Reviews (2)

review from a Vietnamese who teaches Vietnamese on Sundays
I found this book at the local library.I thought I like it because it gives me ideas how use it for my Vietnamese language class.But after I read the other review about errors, I took another look at the translation.The other review is right, in that the some of the words aren't translated correctly.

So, do not buy this if you want to learn Vietnamese.

I find it useful as a guide in ways I can teach my students.

Some words are written incorrectly - was not helpful
I am learning Vietnamese and my Vietnamese boyfriend thought that this would be a good book to learn vocabulary with.However, after receiving it, my boyfriend found that not only was it written from the Hanoi dialect, but many words were spelled incorrectly and were not the common words used in any area of Vietnam.In the end, I was not able to use the material in this book at all.I would suggest you use a dictionary or a phrase book and create your own vocabulary cards. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great historical read!Easy!insightful!
I started out researching and found this book.I ended up reading it for leisure!

Yes, it's true.How could aademic discourse be so interesting?Oh, but it is!The country of Vietnam almost becomes like a character in a novel but this entire book is non-fiction!I learned more about the evolution of the Vietnamese language from this book like I learn about the morphing of a character's personality throughout a novel.

DeFrancis does a good job in covering the different cultural influences that have helped mold the Vietnamese language but don't dare consider the langage hybrid!The language is uniquely its own but, like a character in a novel or real life, is affected by those around it and those it encounters.

The book is quite insightful.History buffs will love it.Vietnamese scholars will appreciate it.I simply loved it! ... Read more