Draven wrote:Frankly I don't think reading corpora with elaborated and layered lexicon like poetry and mystery novels is a good restart for your learning process, esp. with a language so dissimilar from your own. I would hang myself trying to work my way through the same things in German. But oh well, whatever floats your boat; the upside is that those things can actually stretch our attention span.
Make sure you get a hang of word boundary, otherwise having a dictionary is just as useless as not having one. Telling native words from Sinic ones is important too, even at a beginner's level. Things like knowing "yêu cầu" is a indivisible Hán-Việt unit meaning "to request, to demand" and not "to love a bridge" (yêu + cầu) are what make you a successful learner.
Hmm, maybe you're right. I think I'll start with the newspaper, that'll be more down to earth and understandable I think.
Are there any tricks to figure out the word boundaries, or is it just something you get a sense for? I guess a useful one would be that, if it makes no sense, then you've got a Sinic root (like "to love a bridge" )
ILuvEire wrote:maybe an online Vietnamese newspaper?
Please choose between communist Vietnam and right-wing Vietnamese diaspora in America. Tough choice, I know.
This will definitely be one of those situations where I turn my brain off to learn language