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Repetitive Movie Watching for Language Learning
One of my strategies for language learning is to pick a movie in each language that I’m working on and to watch it on repeat for a while until I get the phrases down. For my Spanish language film, I think I’m going with The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta) (2004) because I love it and it has lots of dialogue and beautiful scenery all the way through. For my Vietnamese film, at the risk of burnout I’m also picking a favorite, The Vertical Ray of the Sun (Mùa hè chiều thẳng đứng) from 2000, because it also has a lot of dialogue to focus on, as well as gorgeous,…
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The Vietnamese Alphabet
Did you know that the modern Vietnamese alphabet, chữ Quốc ngữ, was developed as recently as the 17th century and is based on a Latinized script of Vietnamese created by a Portuguese Jesuit priest named Francisco de Pina and other Jesuit missionaries? It was later refined by the French during the French colonial period in Vietnam, resulting in the alphabet we have today, which has Portuguese, French, and Italian influences. In 1867, Vietnamese scholar Trương Vĩnh Ký dubbed this Latinized Vietnamese script “chữ Quốc ngữ” in one of his grammar books, Mẹo luật dạy học tiếng pha-lang-sa (Tips to teach and learn French). Before the Vietnamese language was Latinized, it was based on Chinese characters…
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Delightful and Challenging Language Learning
This week in language learning, I continued my Pimsleur, Innovative Language, Fluent Fiction, and Duolingo, and also enjoyed watching some foreign language films in Spanish, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Watching language films while learning them is definitely a delightful and enriching experience, but for me, it’s a very humbling one to see how little I actually know at this point, especially in Japanese and Vietnamese, which I just started in the fall. But knowing that also gives me a sense of excitement that there’s so much more to unravel. The most challenging aspect so far is learning Hiragana, but I also think that the characters are so beautiful that I’d like…
