Question

How come Vietnamese is the easiest language in the world yet not many people learn it?

Answer 1

The US Foreign Service Institute rates Vietnamese as among the Category IV (Four, of of Five categories) Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English. And within Category,IV, among that categories most difficult.

I presume that the poster already speaks a tonal language, and therefore finds it easier. A Vietnamese Special Forces soldier in the US Army assigned to a Korean tasked unit found the Korean language fairly easy to learn. As he said to me: “Hey Pop, it’s just like Vietnamese, except no tones.” I lived in Korea for seven years and learned just enough to get by.

Answer 2

Vietnamese has no grammatics. Really NO. No cases, everything spoken in base form.

On the other hand it got several tones (I think 6, I never managed more than 3 of them - at least speaking them as good that the differentiation was understandable).#

Also Vietnamese includes a lot of ultra-short words, which makes them hard to learn (if “for Europeans” many words just sound the same).

So no. It is not the easiest language of the world.

On the other hand for a Vietnamese to learn a language like German is ultra-hard. I still remember the desperate questions of my (Vietnamese) wife: “Accusative ? Dative ? What even IS that nonsense! What’s it’s purpose ?”

Vietnamese basically speak like:

I going supermarket. This guy being the uncle of father (instead of saying “the father’s uncle).

No grammatical cases (not sure if I brought it good across, english is not my native language, I could more easy provide an Example in German language).

On the other hand you have stuff like this:

gà - Hühnchen

ga - Bahnhof (try going up or down in voice with a TWO LETTER WORD!!!!)

bô - Dad (actually another accent on that o - two accents on one letter - I cannot do this with a german keyboard)

bò - Beef (I actually once called by father-in-law beef, later my wife told me there is a south-vietnamese word ba I could have used which is with less “issues” - Dad-in-Law laughed, luckily he took it with humor and knew that I had not done it on purpose ;-) )

Answer 3

I beg to differ. For a native English speaker it is excruciatingly difficult and even worse if you have a tin ear. I know, because I was an advisor during the Vietnam War and had a 3 month DLI course in Vietnamese. I tried, my counterpart smiled!

Answer 4

There are 2 assumptions in your question “Vietnamese is the easiest language in the word" and “not many people learn it". Firstly, I would say the procedure of learning a new language will gets tricky when you actually digging deeply into many of its perspectives which intellectual requirement. Secondly, I'm Vietnamese, hence I totally acknowledg my nation disadvantages. Vietnam still itself a developing country ( again the aftermath of colonization and war but I think also the government and party should take some responsibilities), so not so many people willing to learn a language comes from a not so wealthy country, they consider it is not functional or essential for their life.

Answer 5

Vietnamese is not easy to learn when compared to English. The Department of State classifies Vietnamese less difficult than Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean, which are Category V. These languages are often grouped together in culture, tradition, and basically geography. Vietnamese is classified as Category IV, if you are coming from English. You can compare that to learning a language nearby English in geography and tradition, being on the European continent. These include Spanish and French, as...

Answer 6

Grammatically, Vietnamese is very simple, like all isolating languages. The difficulty comes in producing and recognizing the tones. I suppose that if all you wanted to do was read and not speak, it would be a good choice.

People do not learn it because it is the language of a relatively poor and small country. People do not choose which language to learn based on the simplicity of its grammar to the exclusion of anything else, including its complex pronunciation, or its utility, or a cultural and historical connection.

Answer 7

Whoever made this statement is the dumbest person ever. Being a Malaysian-born Hokkien Chinese where I speak Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese and Hainanese dialect still made pronunciation mistakes. I live in Vietnam 4 years and trust me, learning French and Russian is much easier. For example, the word “Ban” can carry more than 5 meanings all depending on the intonation when speaking. Sorry I don’t know how to type the symbol on the letter A. But that is on grammatical. What I mean is should a Vietnamese teach you how to pronounce “Ban” (selling) and “Ban” (Friend) or “Ban” (Table), we as foreigner will hear like only one sound is produced which is “Ban”. It took me 3 years to master the language but I am still considered as beginners level today. So in conclusion… it’s not an easy language to learn especially if you’re Westerner, something you cannot pick up in just a month.

Answer 8

Who said so? It is one of the hardest except for few East Asians like Chinese, Lao, Khmers etc.

For others it is very very tough.