How to Learn Vietnamese Pronunciation with The Mimic Method

Two weeks ago, I moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  I will base here for the next three months while I focus on rolling out version 1 of The Mimic Method app.

There are many reason why I chose Ho Chi Minh city as my operation headquarters.  Firstly, Ho Chi Minh has a very low cost of living, which means that I can reinvest more of my business profits into the continual development of this app.

Secondly, there is a fair-sized community of software entrepreneurs here, and as I once wrote in this guest post on Mark Manson’s blog, it is important to surround yourself with the people you want to mimic. 

The third reason I chose to come to Ho Chi Minh is because of the Vietnamese Language.  The Flow of Vietnamese is very different from what I’m used to. Not only is it tonal, it also contains several sounds that are extremely different from anything you would find in English or any romance language.Not surprisingly, not many foreigners can speak very well at all.  Indeed, many of the expats here have completely written Vietnamese off as “impossible” to learn.

That’s why Vietnamese is the perfect language to demonstrate the training process in The Mimic Method app.

In my kickstarter, I described how The Mimic Method app has three parts to it – the Mind (code), Body (content) and soul (design). I also described how “The Body” of version 1 of this app will be pronunciation aids for the Duolingo program.  What I didn’t describe in that post, however, is what the learning process would entail.

In this blog post, I will walk you through the process using Vietnamese as an example.

There are three steps to mastering the pronunciation of a word or phrase:

1. Break it down
2. Build it up
3. Mimic

If you have yet to tune your ears, mouth and brain to the sounds of your target language, then you will NOT be able to process a phrase spoken naturally by a native.

The only way to learn that phrase is to break it down into smaller pieces. 

Take this Vietnamese phrase for example:

Notice how “blurry” it sounds to you?  Try to mimic it out loud and you simply won’t get it.  It’s too fast, and there are too many unfamiliar sounds.

First thing we need to do is slow it down to at least 50% of the original speed so we can really hear the nuances:

Next step is to break it down into chunks.  Chunks are the rhythmic groupings of sounds that our brains latch onto when processing speech (and music too).

If this phrase were a jumbo-sized cookie, the chunks would be the bite-sized pieces you break off with your fingers.  

This phrase can be divided into the following chunks:

Your first goal on the “Break it Down” stage is to wrap your ears and mouth around each chunk.

Depending on your familiarity with the flow of the language,however, you may struggle with this.

To help you, the Mimic Method app gives you the ability to “isolate” the rhythm, intonation or syllables of a chunk so you can study it in more detail. 

Let’s start with the rhythm of chunk 1 of our Vietnamese phrase.  I have replaced its stressed syllables with a “DA” and unstressed syllables with a “di”, then set them to a musical loop.

Repeat this phrase “DAdiDAdi” version of the phrase enough times, and you will ingrain the natural rhythm of the chunk into your brain.

Next we have the intonation.

You don’t want to think about tones any more than a native speaker does (i.e. not at all).  Tones have their own flow to it – it’s just hard to hear as an outsider with all the other information going on.

To help you focus just on the tones, we apply a filter to each chunk flattens the phonemes and turns the phrase into a hum.  Hum along with it and you will ingrain the “tonal flow” into your brain.

Finally we have the syllables.  The syllables are like the individual musical notes of a phrase.  Just as you would need to adjust your fingers to “tune” the notes on a violin, you need to adjust the articulators in your mouth to “tune” the syllables.

In the recording below, I play each syllable from the vietnamese recording twice with space in between for you to mimic out loud if you want.

Of course, some of these syllables are still really hard to make out.  That’s where “The Brain” of The Mimic Method app comes into play.  But we’ll save that discussion for a later post.

For now, let’s work with what we got and try to put all these pieces back together.

When you first start off in a language, it will be extremely difficult for you to memorize a string of more than 4 syllables.  So you have to “build up” the phrase chunk by chunk.

In our app, we have limited our practice phrases to no more than four chunks, and each chunk is no more than 4 syllables long.  Therefore, you will never train more than 16 syllables at a time.

If you have already memorized each individual chunk, then the build it up process is about memorizing the transitions between each chunk.

Step 1 is to memorize the transition between chunk 1 and chunk 2.

Step 2 is to memorize the transition between chunk 3 and chunk 4

Finally, Step 3 is to memorize the transition between chunks 2 and 3.

In future coursses, you advance through each step by doing sets of 4 repetitions.  Do as many sets as you need to recite the chunk combo from memory without audio aid, then move onto the next step.

Once you have finished all three steps, the final task is to truly mimic the phrase.

So you’ve mastered each component of the phrase in part and parcel and are probably feeling good about yourself right about now.

But don’t forget, we’re only at 50% of full speed.

The final step of the process is to gradually build your speed back up to 100%.  Start by making sure you have all four chunks solid at 50% speed.

Then baby step it up to 75% of the speed.

Then if your tongue hasn’t caught fire yet, you can finally try for full speed.

And there you have it, what was once nothing more than a bunch of garbled noise is now starting to flow!