Vietnamese in a Flash Kit Volume 1: 448 cards; 16-page reference booklet in a 6 x 9 box (Tuttle Specials)

The stack has key words that will be used daily. On top of that, 4 additional combined words to expand. It is a vocabulary builder, not a phrase card - for travelers, for instance. Its intention is purely to teach vocabulary. Vietnamese does not create new nouns. But use adjectives and adverbs to create new meanings. Instead of 1 word to describe a noun like most languages, they use a stem noun, and modify it with adjectives and adverbs. Some time it takes 5 words to make one meaning. It is confusing to new learners. But it is necessary to understand the language. The complaints by a reviewer is due to the difficulty of the language. Wait until you master the pronouns and speaking in second person, or third. That confuses you even more! Familial nouns becomes pronouns - and it is rank ordered or age ordered. So there is no standard or literal translation for a pronoun. It is a great vocabulary builder for someone who already have mastered the basics of reading Vietnamese. It will not help a beginner traveling to the country the first time. We can wing it pronouncing German, Spanish and French. But Vietnamese really has about 300 sounds from the original 29 alphabets. The accents, marks and inflections multiply it by 10. So trying to pronounce it is futile unless you already had learned the basics of the language. The accents are used to denote six distinctive tones: “level” (ngang), “acute-angry” (sắc), “grave-lowering” (huyền), “smooth-rising” hỏi, “chesty-raised”(ngã), and “chesty-heavy” (nặng). There are 12 single vowels: a, ă, â, e, ê, i, y, o, o, õ, u, ư. There is one extra consonant: đ . They do not use w, or z. As you can see, one word can have 20 meanings, and 20 different pronunciation- if typed on an English keyboard. It is the error made by one reviewer, who got frustrated by these rules, and wanted to “westernize” the language to his liking. It will take alot of one on one coaching to learn to pronounce these words and accents. Explaining why Rosetta Stone is completely inadequate for teaching the language. Learning by sight alone is impossible, as we are taught to ignore the little wiggles and squirmies in reading it as if it were English, Spanish or German. The forms used are standard. I did not see any deviations from the norm. For a reviewer to say the author is using the “wrong formThe language has evolved over the last 50 years. But I doubt if it will be noted too much here.

I have family who grew up in Vietnam and have made several unsuccessful attempts to learn the language casually. The language is extremely subtle and details of punctuation are very important. I am very satisfied with the flash cards and my vocabulary has tripled with surprisingly little effort. There are regional accents in Vietnam, which are as different as U.S. accents in the Bronx vs rural Louisiana. These cards are useful regardless of which accent you are interested in learning. Because pronunciation is so important, I think the publisher would be wise to post recordings of these flash card words being spoken in each of the accents. With only several hundred words, it would not take long and would greatly speed up the slow process of mastering these nuanced and complex words. Overall, I am very pleased.

This is a gift for a friend who wishes to learn Vietnamese.As the headline says, he has found this to be more helpful and effective than CD's or other methods.Not expensive, either.

Would be far more helpful to include pictures on flashcards.

I really like these cards. This is helpful for memorizing common words and I like how it uses the word in a sentence.

I purchased the product thinking it might facilitate my learning Vietnamese only to discover that the authors used a set of writing conventions that one sees neither in local print media nor on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. The volume is absolutely confounding to anyone who visits Viet Nam, and its current edition needs to be yanked from the shelves and thoroughly revised to reflect the conventions actually used within the Vietnamese culture.

The flashcards are great. I pick and choose which one show the kids. I use the words like sight words (which is really what they are, besides the word beer.

The Kindle version has incorrect representation of the Vietnamese type-set. While the hardcopy is devoid of this problem. The hardcopy is superb, although the kindle version is absolutely useless as the typeset is incorrect.

The Kindle version has incorrect representation of the Vietnamese type-set. While the hardcopy is devoid of this problem. The hardcopy is superb, although the kindle version is absolutely useless as the typeset is incorrect.