an interesting language. In this video, I'm going to talk about the similarities

between Vietnamese, which is my mother tongue, and Cantonese. The two languages

are extremely similar vocabulary wise and pronunciation wise. Not to mention

that both languages have six tones. But let's not get ahead of myself.

Now let's get into the important part of learning any Chinese languages.

Chinese characters. Now I've been studying Japanese for over a year now,

so I do have a little bit of knowledge about Chinese characters

and radicals and that sort of thing. But traditional Chinese is just on another level of difficulty.

If you know a bit about the East Asian languages, you may be tempted to think that

the Chinese language actually had a lot of influence on languages like Vietnamese,

Korean, and Japanese. And you'd be right. Of course, apart from the Chinese

character part, the Vietnamese language actually has something called the

Sino Vietnamese vocabulary. And it's basically a bunch of Vietnamese words

that have been transliterated from the Chinese language.

Let's take an example. Let's say we have the word for

a thesis essay. What is it in Chinese?

論文. And in Vietnamese, it would be Luận văn.

Pretty similar, right? Now let us take this second character and combine it with another character.

And now we have the word for culture. And yes,

they all share the same meaning across other languages, except for some

occasions, though, where there is actually a slight deviation in meaning between the languages.

So like, for example, 開心 doesn't actually exist in Japanese,

, but in Vietnamese, it actually means to broaden your horizons in a spiritual way.

(At least that's how I've heard this word used.)

I tend to go on random Chinese websites and try to read them

with my humble knowledge of kanji. But then one day, I came across this banner

banner and imagine how confused I was when I saw this:

At first, I thought it meant something like buy condom, experience epiphany.

But then I realized buying condoms didn't have anything

to do with spirituality, so I had to look it up.

And boom. Turns out it just means to be happy. There are also

many more cases of this, such as 頭先 is actually đầu tiên in Vietnamese,

but it means first and foremost in Vietnamese instead of a moment ago,

like in Cantonese. Also, can I just talk briefly about something?

The fact that both jyut (việt 粵) and jyut (việt 越) share the same reading did confuse

me a little bit at first. When I went on the jyutping.org site,

I thought it was talking about the Vietnamese language, but when I switched

to Chinese, I quickly realized it was talking about Cantonese. Also, here's

a funny story. At some point in history, Vietnam was actually named Đại Ngu

Great Peace. But guess what? This character, which means stupid,

also reads as Ngu and is the only meaning of the word Ngu that

Vietnamese people know today. So whenever we hear ĐạI Ngu, the first thing

we think of is the big stupid. And that's why we tend to use Sino Vietnamese

words when it's in compounds. That way, there's less risk of misunderstanding.

I think it's much like Chinese. Also, if you're curious how I'm getting

all my Sino Vietnamese knowledge from, there are mainly two ways for a

Vietnamese person to know about it. First, you either go to a Japanese or

a Chinese class, and that's like the only instance I can think of

that we actually learn about the Chinese characters. Also, there's like

a Sino Vietnamese dictionary at the end of our literature textbooks, but

literally no one care- Second, there is this cool website called

HV Dictionary that indexes virtually all Chinese characters that I've learned.

I use it all the time for my Japanese studies, but I also

use it to study Chinese as well. So for example, I was reading

this site in Cantonese, and one of the lines read,

"今日佢要去大陸出差” (Chinese) → Kim Nhật Cự Yếu Khứ Đại Lục Xuất Sai (Sino-Vietnamese) → Hôm nay (今日) họ (佢) cần (要) đi (去) Đại Lục (大陸) "Xuất sai??" (Vietnamese aka what i said)

I don't know what 出差 means, so I looked it u- and boom,

there we go. It means to go on a business trip. Now I'm

going off on a tangent here, but apparently there are two ways to say

go on a business trip in Cantonese. One is for written Cantonese,

and one is for spoken Cantonese. In Vietnamese, I don't think we do

that, though we definitely prefer to use Sino Vietnamese words in official

documents because it seems more formal that way. So like the word for

marry is Cưới, but in official documents you would say Kết hôn,

so yeah it is a little different. Now on to pronunciation, I can

tell that both Vietnamese and Cantonese pronunciation…

are not as close as I hoped it would be. People say that both languages have six tones,

so they are a little similar, right? Not exactly. They have six

tones, but the tones are different. And also I speak a Vietnamese dialect

that only has five tones. Okay, so first of all, let's talk

about the tones. In Cantonese, you would have si1, si2, si3, si4, si5, si6.

People claim that there are an additional 3 tones: sik1, sik3, sik6 (sik7, sik8, sik9)

But guess what, in Vietnamese, the tones are:

Now if I were to compare them, I would say the first tone

in Vietnamese is too high, we don't have the fifth tone,

and...

okay, maybe the rest are a little similar, but I still have a lot

of trouble trying to recognize the Cantonese tone- especially

second and the fifth tone. These two tones, I often hear

native Cantonese speakers mix them up together, and it's kind of similar

like in Vietnamese, a lot of dialects actually mix up the hỏi and the ngã.

Now let's stop talking about the tones, and let's talk

about the vowels, consonants, and diphthongs. Now for the most part,

these languages could be a little similar in that we share a lot of sounds.

For example, the word for happiness in Cantonese is Hanh4 Fuk1, and Hạnh Phúc in Vietnamese.

The first time I heard it I was like:

No way. But let's talk about the ones that are

actually different, like this thing right here (oe). To put it simply, I've had

lots of trouble trying to pronounce this, and it's everywhere, even in the word: 香港 (Hoeng1 Gong2)

like how do you even say it? I've done my research on Google, and

apparently they say it's kind of similar to the "Ur" as in the

English word Fur, so (I try to say 香港),

maybe? Alright, now I'm going to talk a

bit about grammar. I've only been studying vocabulary at this point,

but I've learned a bit about Cantonese grammar. And yes, Cantonese is indeed

similar to Vietnamese when it comes to grammar. In Vietnamese,

saying I am John would be Tôi là John. In Cantonese,

it's 我係John (ngo5 hai6 John). In Vietnamese, even though là means to be,

we don't use it when it's followed by an adjective.

So for example, if I wanted to say "I'm beautiful"

I would say:

Tôi thật đẹp (or Tôi đẹp lắm)

The other day I asked my grandma:

"Granny how do you say I'm beautiful in Cantonese?"

And she said:

我好靚 (Ngo5 hou2 leng3)

And I was a bit confused,

like, why didn't you say 我係靚 (Ngo5 hai6 leng3)??

But then I realized we do the same thing in Vietnamese. (There are more similarities I discovered, like 唔知 = Không biết = I wonder or 做乜嘢 = làm gì = Why)

My mind? Blown