Tieng Viet lovers club

[jackbl]

BARS
====


Do you serve alcohol?
Có rượu ở đây không?
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A beer/two beers, please.
Xin một/hai ly rượu.
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A glass of red/white wine, please.
Xin một ly rượu đỏ/trắng.
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A bottle, please.
Xin một chai.
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water
nước (neu-uhck)
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soda pop
nước ngọt (neu-uhck ngawt)
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orange juice
nước cam (neu-uhck gam)
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Coke (soda)
Côcá-Côla (koh-kah koh-la)
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One more, please.
Xin một ly/chai nữa.
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When is closing time?
Bao giờ đóng cửa?
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[ramses2410]

hahaha so fun (vui nhi)

[Sha_Gua75]

Originally Posted by KangTuo

bro thanks for the previous translation.... but hor, u learn/read from which book or where.... I learn quite abit but still cannot understand some wordings.

Especially those where 2 words or more make up a meaning. i.e khac roi, giu gin suc khow...

ask or find from dictionary...then remember by heart...
btw Jackbl already translate for u those words in orange u doesnt know. meaning around there. But then I also asked "someone", she mention that the girl must be from countryside as no one speak that way...some words is redudant and wrong spelling

[jackbl]

SHOPPING
========


How much (money) is this?
Bao nhiêu (tiền)? (bahw nyee-oh thee-uhn)
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That's too expensive.
Đắt quá.
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Would you take _____?
Lấy _____ được không? (ley _____ deu'uhk kohng)
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expensive
đắt (dah!)
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cheap
rẻ (reah...uh)
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I can't afford it.
Tôi không có đủ tiền mua.
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I don't want it.
Tôi không muốn. (thoh-ee kohng moo-uhn)
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Can I have a bag?
Có bao không? (kaw bahw kohng)
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Do you ship (overseas)?
Có thể gởi đồ (ngoài nước) không?
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I need...
Tôi cần... (thoh-ee cuhn)
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...toothpaste.
...kem đánh răng. (keahm dayng rahng)
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...a toothbrush.
...bàn chải đánh răng.
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...soap.
...xà bông. (sah bohng)
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...shampoo.
...dầu gội.
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...pain reliever. (e.g., aspirin or ibuprofen)
...thuốc giảm đau.
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...cold medicine.
...thuốc cảm.
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...stomach medicine.
...thuốc đau bụng.
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...a razor.
...dao cạo râu. (yahw kah'oh ruh-oo)
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...an umbrella.
...dù. (you)
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...a postcard.
...bưu thiếp.
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...postage stamps.
...tem. (tham)
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...batteries.
...pin. (bean)
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...writing paper.
...giấy. (yay)
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...a pen.
...bút mực. (boot)
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...a pencil.
...bút chì. (boot chee)
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...English-language books.
...sách Anh ngữ.
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...English-language magazines.
...tạp chí Anh ngữ. (thuh'p chee ayng-eu'eu)
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...an English-language newspaper.
...báo Anh ngữ. (bahw ayng-eu'eu)
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...an English-English dictionary.
...từ điển Anh-Anh. (theu dee-n ayng-ayng)

[jackbl]

DRIVING
======


I want to rent a car.
Tôi muốn mượn xe. (thoh-ee moo-uhn meu'n seah)
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Can I get insurance?
Có bảo hiểm cho tôi không?
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stop (on a street sign)
ngừng
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one way
một chiều
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no parking
đừng đậu xe
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gas (petrol) station
cây xăng (keh-ee sahng!)
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petrol
xăng (sahng)

[jackbl]

AUTHORITY
========


I haven't done anything wrong.
Tôi chưa phạm pháp.
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It was a misunderstanding.
Chỉ là hiểu lầm thôi.
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Where are you taking me?
Ông đang dẫn tôi đi đâu?
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Am I under arrest?
Có phải tôi bị bắt giữ?
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I am an American/Australian/British/Canadian citizen.
Tôi là công dân Mỹ/Australia/Anh/Canada.
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I want to talk to the (American/Australian/British/Canadian) (embassy/consulate).
Tôi cần phải nói chuyện với (đại sứ quán/lãnh sự) (Mỹ/Australia/Anh/Canada).
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I want to talk to a lawyer.
Tôi muốn nói chuyện với luật sư.
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Can I just pay a fine now?
Tôi chỉ trả tiền phạt thôi được không?

[ekemono]

just found something on the net offering free basic vietnamese language training download programs.
I have tested it, no spyware or virus of any sort.
The training is based on flashcard with assisted pronociation.

Quite good to start off with but dun expect words of i love u, do you want to go hotel??

Screen shot:
http://i38.tinypic.com/a9mdyu.jpg

Download:
Learn Spanish, French, Italian, German and 60 other languages with BYKI software.

they will send a comfirmation download to a valid email address. No spam

[Hurricane88]

Originally Posted by ekemono

just found something on the net offering free basic vietnamese language training download programs.
I have tested it, no spyware or virus of any sort.
The training is based on flashcard with assisted pronociation.

Quite good to start off with but dun expect words of i love u, do you want to go hotel??

Screen shot:
http://i38.tinypic.com/a9mdyu.jpg

Download:
Learn Spanish, French, Italian, German and 60 other languages with BYKI software.

they will send a comfirmation download to a valid email address. No spam

Dun seem to work lei.....i shall try again..

[ekemono]

Originally Posted by Hurricane88

Dun seem to work lei.....i shall try again..

can work lei.

In fact after you enter a valid email address, they will take you to the next page where you can click on the link to download a small applet. Just remember to choose the correct link of Window or Mac.

This small applet (something like installing Java runtime) when launch will help you to download the list of vietnamese language modules.

Pls try again

[jackbl]

Some info of Vietnamese language:


Vietnamese (tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ), formerly known under the French colonization as Annamite (see Annam) is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people (người Việt or người Kinh), who constitute between 88% and 90% of Vietnam's population and of about three million overseas Vietnamese, including more than a million individuals of Vietnamese heritage in the United States. It is also spoken as a second language by some ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austroasiatic language family, of which it has the most speakers by a significant margin (three to four times the number of speakers of Khmer, the second most spoken Austroasiatic language). However, it contains much vocabulary borrowed from Chinese and was originally written using the Chinese writing system. The predominant Vietnamese writing system in use today is an adapted version of the Latin alphabet, though the Chu Nom system, based on Chinese characters, was also formerly employed.

[jackbl]

As the national language of the majority ethnic group, Vietnamese is spoken throughout Vietnam by the Vietnamese people as well as by ethnic minorities. It is also spoken in overseas Vietnamese communities, most notably in the United States, where it has more than one million speakers and is the seventh most-spoken language.
According to the Ethnologue, Vietnamese is also spoken in Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Côte d'Ivoire, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Laos, Martinique, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Senegal, Thailand, United Kingdom, and Vanuatu.

Official Status
==========

While spoken for millennia, Vietnamese did not officially become the literatural official language of Vietnam until the 20th century. For most of its history, the entity now known as Vietnam used Chinese for administration. Vietnamese in the form of chữ nôm was used for administrative purposes during the brief Tay Son Dynasty. During French colonialism, French superseded Chinese in administration. It wasn't until independence from France that Vietnamese was used officially. It is the language of instruction in schools and universities and is the language for official businesses.

[jackbl]

CLASSIFICATION
============

Vietnamese is generally said to be part of the Viet-Muong (or Vietic) grouping of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family, a family that also includes Khmer, spoken in Cambodia, as well as various tribal and regional languages, such as the Munda languages, spoken in northeastern India, and others in southern China. Other linguists believe that Viet-Muong is a language isolate.

[jackbl]

HISTORY
=======

It seems likely that in the distant past Vietnamese shared more characteristics common to other languages in the Austroasiatic family, such as an inflectional morphology and a richer set of consonant clusters, which have subsequently disappeared from the language. However, Vietnamese appears to have been heavily influenced by its location in the Southeast Asian sprachbund—with the result that it has acquired or converged toward characteristics such as isolating morphology and tonogenesis. These characteristics, which may or may not have been part of proto-Austroasiatic, nonetheless have become part of many of the philologically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia—for example, Thai (one of the Tai-Kadai languages), Tsat (a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group within Austronesian), and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature, although their respective ancestral languages were not originally tonal.
The Vietnamese language has similarities with Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and unreleased plosive consonant endings, a legacy of archaic Chinese that can also be found in Korean.

The ancestor of the Vietnamese language was originally based in the area of the Red River in what is now northern Vietnam, and during the subsequent expansion of the Vietnamese language and people into what is now central and southern Vietnam (through conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and the Khmer people of the Mekong delta in the vicinity of present-day Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnamese was linguistically influenced primarily by Indic and Malayo-Polynesian languages at first, until Chinese came to predominate politically toward the middle of the first millennium C.E.

With the rise of Chinese political dominance came radical importation of Chinese vocabulary and grammatical influence. As Chinese was, for a prolonged period, the only medium of literature and government, as well as the primary language of the ruling class in Vietnam, much of the Vietnamese lexicon in all realms consists of Hán Việt (Sino-Vietnamese) words. In fact, as the vernacular language of Vietnam gradually grew in prestige toward the beginning of the second millennium, the Vietnamese language was written using Chinese characters (see Chu Nom) adapted to write Vietnamese, in a similar pattern as used in Japan (see kanji), Korea and other countries in the Chinese cultural sphere. The Nôm writing reached its zenith in the 18th century when many Vietnamese writers and poets composed their works in Chữ Nôm, most notably Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương (dubbed "the Queen of Nôm poetry").

As contact with the West grew, the Quốc Ngữ system of Romanized writing was developed in the 17th century by Portuguese and other Europeans involved in proselytizing and trade in Vietnam. When France invaded Vietnam in the late 19th century, French gradually replaced Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm (dame, from madame), ga (train station, from gare), and va-li (valise). In addition, many Sino-Vietnamese terms were devised for Western ideas imported through the French. However, the Romanized script did not come to predominate until the beginning of the 20th century, when education became widespread and a simpler writing system was found more expedient for teaching and communication with the general population.


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[jackbl]

GRAMMER
========
Vietnamese, like many languages in Southeast Asia and Chinese, is an analytic (or isolating) language. As such its grammar highly relies on word order and sentence structure rather than morphology (word changes through inflection). While most European languages would use morphology to express tense Vietnamese uses grammatical particles or syntactic constructions.
Vietnamese is often erroneously considered to be a "monosyllabic" language. It is true that Vietnamese has many words that consist of only one syllable; however, most words are indeed bi-syllabic. This is largely because of the many reduplication words that appear in household vocabulary, or adjectives.

Vietnamese syntax conforms to the Subject Verb Object word order.

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[jackbl]

TENSE
======

Although it is not usually required, past tense is indicated by adding the particle đã, present progressive tense by the particle đang, and future tense is indicated by the particle sẽ.

Topic Comment Structure
=================

The topic-comment structure is an important sentence type in Vietnamese. Therefore Vietnamese has often been claimed to be a topic-prominent language (Thompson 1991). As an example the sentence "tôi đọc sách này rồi" can be transformed into the following topic prominent equivalent.

Sách này thì tôi đọc rồi.
book this (TOPICMARKER) I read already
I already read this book.


PLURAL
=====

Although it is not usually required, the plural may be indicated by particles like những, các, chúng.


CLASSIFIERS
=========

Vietnamese extensively uses a system of classifiers to indicate word classes of nouns. English classifiers, for example, may be (highlighted in bold) one head of cattle or three pieces of cheese. Vietnamese's system and usage of classifiers are similar to Chinese and are more variable than English. Among the most common classifiers are:

~ cái : used for most inanimate objects;
~ con: usually for animals, but can be used to describe some inanimate objects (con dao = knife, con đường = street, con vít = screw)
~ bài: used for compositions like songs, drawings, poems, essays, etc.
~ cây: used for stick-like objects (plants, guns, canes, etc.)
~ chiếc: objects that are worn or moved by people (chairs, cars, ear rings, ships, shirts, shoes)
~ tòa: buildings of authority: courts, halls, "ivory towers".
~ quả/trái: used for globular objects (the Earth, fruits)
~ quyển/cuốn: used for book-like objects (books, journals, etc.)
~ tờ: sheets and other thin objects made of paper (newspaper, paper, calendar etc.)
~ việc: an event or an ongoing process

The classifier cái has a special role in that it can extend all other classifiers, e.g. cái con, cái chiếc.

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