Wrong habits of Vietnamese people when using English

Teacher Nguyen Phuong, who taught for many years at the University of Foreign Languages ​​(Hanoi National University), shares about learning English, especially Vietnamese pronunciation.

Sometimes parents complain about English teachers’ pronunciation. Some complaints are even exaggerated, such as “Vietnamese teachers at foreign language centers pronounce words wrongly.”Not really.

Once, to confirm the authenticity of such a comment, I asked the person who made the comment to record the teacher's pronunciation. When I listened to it again, I told him that the teacher's pronunciation was not wrong, but that his (my nephew's) ear had a problem.

To be more convincing, I compared the teacher's pronunciation with the standard pronunciation (from the pronunciation dictionary) using a spectrum comparison software. The comparison confirmed that the teacher's pronunciation was correct, only the tone and pitch were different. I asked him to pronounce it, but he read it incorrectly.

So not everyone can judge right or wrong about a teacher's pronunciation. Someone who sings off key will most likely judge someone who sings correctly as singing wrong!

Another time, my niece in 9th grade said: "My teacher read the two words 'cool air' in the lesson as if they were one word, the final sound of cool was attached to the first sound of air, right or wrong?". I said: "When she read smoothly and naturally, the teacher read it like that, it was correct."

Don't think only foreign teachers have standard pronunciation.

In simple terms, mispronunciation is synonymous with "he says chicken, she says duck".Once I was invited to visit a language center. There were both foreign teachers (native speakers) and Vietnamese teachers teaching English.

After observing and discussing, with personal experience, I found that young Vietnamese female teachers speak English quite well and fluently, most of them have quite standard American pronunciation.

It must be said that, in all fairness, thanks to access to standard English through many ways: studying abroad, self-improvement, and electronic means... young teachers today have made a lot of progress. They pronounce more accurately, speak more fluently, have more lively teaching methods, and are more confident than previous generations of colleagues, not much less than native speakers.

Teacher quality must be considered for each individual, regardless of whether they are native English or Vietnamese speakers, full-time or part-time… and cannot be generalized.

Imagine a foreigner learning Vietnamese, the student will be unfortunate to have a Vietnamese tourist with a lisp, a strong regional accent, and low education! Remember that not all Vietnamese speak Vietnamese well and can teach Vietnamese. The same goes for foreign languages.

And, mispronunciation is not only found in foreign language learning (but also in “internal language”).

English “Kinds”

According to S. Huntington, it is because English no longer has a racial identity that it is increasingly used in almost every field.Because of this, people can talk about “variety” of Englishes. In addition to the main varieties of English spoken in the US, Australia, New Zealand…, there is Indian English, Singaporean English… and perhaps soon there will be Venglish?

In interaction with native languages, English also has variations that create difficulties in communication.

Vietnamese people are considered to have the best ability to imitate sounds in the Asian region. Perhaps partly because Vietnamese has 6 tones, the Latin alphabet system is enough to cover the range of sounds and letters of English, and Vietnamese people have better “musical ears”? We don’t see Vietnamese people reading “when” as /ven/ like many Thai people, or reading “mail” as /meo/…

However, it is this closeness that sometimes makes learners misunderstand and simplify the sounds of English. Although Vietnamese and English have similar writing/sounds, they are actually not pronounced exactly the same. English sounds are often assimilated by speakers in interaction with Vietnamese sounds, that is, "Vietnamized".

Wrong habits

The framework of a general article only allows discussion of some relatively typical points to illustrate the habits of Vietnamese people using English (not only Vietnamese people in the country).

Spelling and pronunciation.One of the bad habits of learners is learning by analogy, which leads to misreading.

English has many words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently: plow, enough, thought, though, through, borough; ace, face and preface; chore and chorus, chaotic. It is impossible to think of the pronunciation of “cough” as the pronunciation of “though” or “through”…

Words with the same spelling but different pronunciation and stress when they change word class, for example the verb “export” and the noun “export”, the verb “increase” and the noun “increase”… are different in both pronunciation and stress position (place of emphasis); “clean” in the noun “cleanliness” is no longer pronounced as the original… The above example is quite common in English.

Learners should especially not “formulaize” linguistic phenomena (for example, they should not conclude “if OO is written, it is read as /u/; if EA is written, it is read as /i:/…; if a word has two syllables, the stress is on the first syllable…).

Furthermore, while English is not a tonal language like Vietnamese, we should not read English words as if they have a tone mark: read “card” as /cách/, “source” as /suộc/… as if they had a heavy tone mark (.).

That is a wrong way of learning, because the English language is famous for “writing one way, reading another”. Every rule in English has many exceptions. Teachers should not “mislead” learners to follow that way.

Final sound.English and Vietnamese also differ in the way they pronounce the final sounds of each word, especially the consonant sounds. For example, when read aloud, the words “write” and “ride”, “rice” and “rise” differ in the final phoneme (/t/ vs /d/, /s/ vs /z/) making them different in meaning.

Because Vietnamese words do not take these characteristics seriously, when speaking English, Vietnamese people tend to almost drop the final sound, which is difficult and annoying for listeners.

On the other hand, some people put so much emphasis on the final sound that the exaggeration loses its naturalness, for example, “home” is exaggerated to sound almost like “homer” (almost adding an extra syllable).

Sound properties.Although Vietnamese, for example, also has the sound /t/, it does not have the aspirated quality like in English; the sound /k/ in "lúc" is not pronounced like in "look" in English... That is the difference in the characteristics of this sound between the two languages.

Stress.First of all, word stress, learners absolutely do not “regularize” or “summarize” the way to stress in English into “formulas”, as the example above. Similarly, when learning pronunciation, when encountering new words or word variations, never forget to look at the position of the main and secondary stress.

Since English rules have so many exceptions, the best way is to memorize and practice.

Intonation.Whether or not intonation is natural depends on correct pronunciation, stress, and rhythm. It will help the speaker speak fluently. However, many Vietnamese people tend to read/speak English in a flat voice, without rhythm and sentence emphasis.

For any English learner or teacher, when looking up the meaning of new words, never forget to look up the pronunciation; do not pronounce by inference or generalization; try to compare your pronunciation with words in the electronic dictionary.

Because practical phonetics, including pronunciation, stress and intonation, is important for English learners, the Ministry of Education and Training's exam questions from the 2001-2002 school year up to now have maintained a practical phonetics test section, which serves as a reminder to both students and teachers.

Even though the trend is increasingly valuing fluency over accuracy, correct pronunciation, with the right intonation, will make it easier, more effective, and more elegant for others to communicate with you.

Learning American English or English is good, but every time I hear British Prime Minister Theresa May speak, I personally still love that kind of English the most - "round, clear" and elegant.