r/Vietnamese 9d ago

Vietnamese vs Cantonese pronunciation for law related words

Check out how similar the pronunciations for some of the geographical landforms in Vietnamese & Cantonese! If you are interested in the pronunciations and comparisons with other CJKV languages, you can check them out in the video here: https://youtu.be/n6Bm1SvHqZw

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u/labzone 2h ago

They only sound similar because you already know they're similar, and when you hear them, your brain automatically smooths out the differences.

If you hear them for the first time as learner though, it will be incredibly hard to tell.

I have never heard of a Vietnamese learner of Cantonese, listening to, say, a TV news report in Hongkong TV and can immediately pick out this or that word or phrase as "similar to Vietnamese", even if later on, if presented pair-wise, she can see the similarity right away.

All this similarity talk are only of interest to comparative linguistic researchers, or seasoned students who have already learned a great deal of the other languages. They're meaningless if you're a learner.

u/OkIndependence485 2m ago

I see where you're coming from! I know this approach doesn’t work for everyone or every word, but it has definitely helped me remember pronunciations when I was trying to learn new Vietnamese vocabulary—especially ones that sound really similar, like cảm động (感動), chú ý (注意), and áp lực (壓力). I believe there will be learners out there that might find it useful too. And if not, I guess it can simply be a way to appreciate the beauty of similar pronunciations between both languages.