When I was studying in Canada, I worked at a restaurant. The first Vietnamese I met a chef. She’s so adorable, funny, always smiling speak English with me, but do not pronounce correctly, so I do not understand even one word.
A few years ago, my mother visits to Vietnam. Friendly Neighbors I think they can speak English quite good for asking my mother questions in plain English as: “How are you? (Are you well?)”. Meanwhile, my mom really embarrassed for not understanding what they are saying. Since then I realized that, after a period of living, studying and working in Vietnam, I was familiar with “how the Vietnamese speak English”.
I really like Vietnamese because this is a very unique language, intonation and bookmarks. These two factors make the Vietnamese become very special than 6,500 languages in the world. However, this also makes the Vietnamese language becomes a “Struggle” for native English speakers, and also difficult for native speakers to learn English.
Vietnamese who knows, I realized that the Vietnam rather unfavorable learn English than for other countries. Simply because the Vietnamese have mouth muscles used in a completely different way to “speak” English.
In addition, the majority of teaching English in Vietnam are translated from foreign policy, common curriculum for students in the country do not use language “tone” as the Vietnamese.
Methods of teaching English in Vietnam are taking “grammar” and “vocabulary” as the original, while the foundation for effective learning English lies in the “pronunciation”.
Of course, I do not deny the importance of learning grammar, but you also do not be too focused on that, unless you want to become a writer in English.
Learning English in Vietnam just take vocabulary and grammar as a foundation rather than focusing on pronunciation.
As a teacher of English to Vietnamese, I always want to find the best way and I came up with the idea of studying and learning Vietnamese. Fortunately I have a very good teacher and she said that, if you want to learn Vietnamese well, the first step is to articulate, and then can learn new vocabulary and speak.
If I learn vocabulary before learning the correct pronunciation when speaking, I would venture to make a mistake and create a habit so “bad” hard to get. And surprisingly, this method is very effective indeed. It helps me learn Vietnamese faster and become more confident when speaking. I am sure that this method will also be useful for the Vietnamese people to learn English. When switched to the sales manager for a company in Vietnam, I got to teach English to the staff in the evening. And they have become “the first mouse” in my lab. curriculum includes lessons pronounce all “phonetic” in English and tests. We started very well. The students are eager to learn, but very quickly, I encountered 3 unforeseen problems .
Firstly , they never learn English this way and always think in rut – grammar school as much as possible.
Secondly , the pronunciation lessons became an obsession because most of them have difficulty to pronounce repeated several times a negative 2 months with any of intensities 3 sessions per week. They are depressed and some decided to abandon after a few weeks of participation.
Thirdly , some of you know English, but with many errors in pronunciation. In particular, they never use the “sound of wind” and forget the correct pronunciation when speaking.
I myself also faced similar problems when beginning to learn Vietnamese so I understand. I can “learn the correct pronunciation,” but then when it comes to “forget the correct pronunciation.” I only really fix this error when Vietnamese teacher “threat” will never teach again, if I continue to recidivism.
As a result of my English classes very few students completed the course. I was a bit disappointed, although I have put a lot of heart and effort into the development of a method for teaching English to Vietnamese. But in English, we have a saying: “You can lead a horse to water but you can not make it drink”.
However, I am also very happy because some students can speak very well. They can read a book in English with clear pronunciation, almost on par with me. Methodology speech can fully apply to everyone. You know, just articulation, then the system will automatically get what they have learned. I know will be very difficult, but it would be a good leverage for your English learning.
Jesse Peterson
