Phonology

Of all the assignments, this one was the most difficult and the most frustrating, for both of us. Even practicing, I had a great deal of difficulty pronouncing some of the letters for her to hear, and even then had to repeat fairly often. I did, however, eventually manage to confirm all the sounds noted on the GMU website.

I tried to find a few more, but she was getting rather frustrated. I went back to it another day, but also failed to find any more sounds, for which she apologized. I let her know there was no need to apologize (even aside from her having no stake in this, unlike me.) She wasn't exactly a Vietnamese teacher, and I have trouble enough finding my own language's phonemes.

(Correction: Looking at my notes again I found the Bilabial Plosive phoneme /p/. This has been added to the chart below. All of the others I found merely confirmed what the chart had.)



Like many languages, I noted that Vietnamese distinctly lacked a 'th' sound, though she had learned how to pronounce it properly. English is, in fact, taught in many Vietnamese schools, but that's for a later assignment. Vietnamese is surprisingly easy to pronounce for the most part; included below are some samples. The words blanked out are her name.