I've been living in Vietnam for the last four years and there's a huge difference in dialects from southern, central and northern Vietnam. People from the center in particular are often unintelligible even to other Vietnamese. It's a treacherous enough language already since getting a tone wrong can mean you're unintentionally saying something quite vulgar.

Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a pass for making these kinds of mistakes and they're happy that you're even make an effort to learn their language.

> Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a pass for making these kinds of mistakes and they're happy that you're even make an effort to learn their language.

This is correct. It is always expected that foreigners will speak broken Vietnamese, and given that it is already rare in the first place to hear a foreigner speak Vietnamese, most will be delighted to see you do it, no matter how broken it is.

An American friend who lives in Vietnam has told me he finds that while Vietnamese people aren't bothered by foreigners speaking broken Vietnamese, they also don't have an especially practiced facility for guessing what someone might have meant when they butcher something. He theorizes that because there's almost no non-native speaker population, Vietnamese people just don't get much experience having to do that the way Americans do with non-native English speakers. The impression I got was that if you messed up tones, you might get a delighted, but also perplexed, response.

I've found that, ironically, Vietnamese that already speak English are also more likely to understand my amateur Vietnamese. Maybe that's because they're more familiar with the sounds of English and can make more educated guesses about what I'm trying to say.

I suppose this is true of all tonal languages but Vietnamese is very unforgiving. Even when people really butcher the pronunciation and grammar of English I can still usually guess what they're trying to say. If you don't really nail the pronunciation and tones of Vietnamese people won't understand you at all. I've seen a lot of foreigners give up in frustration even after years of living here.

If you really want to learn to speak tiếng Việt you have to find a real teacher and drill the basics of tones and pronunciation. If you try to pick it up a phrase at a time chatting with people you'll never get it.

That makes sense. As a non-native English speaker I find it easier to understand people from my country speaking English than other accents.

I also found out that after starting studying Chinese it is easier to me to understand Chinese people speaking Portuguese (my native language) because I understand a bit of the Chinese grammar and phrasal structures.

Well, after my time in China, I sucked it up and tried to learn Chinese and communicate in broken Chinese with my students.

When other kids complained about our old Taiwanese teacher's English accent, I asked them simply: "let's say hypothetically we inverted the situation and found an exact parallel of your Chinese accent to her spoken English when Chinese comes out of your mouth, and you understand the accent is native. How hard will you laugh?"

No surprise here. I majored in Arabic in college. I have looked into Chinese, Farsi, Hindi/Urdi, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese, in order of effort, with a year of Chinese at college level (in the US that is bullshit, but while doing grad level Arabic, caused people to laugh in conversation at my masochism).

The ASEAN languages, so Thai and Indonesian and Vietnamese, seemed so so much harder than Chinese. Not even sure why.

Mandarin was hard, with 4 tones. I think standard Vietnamese has ... five?

God help me if I ever learned Cantonese Chinese! I actually knew people from the south, and eight/nine tones made me wonder how they fuck people stop learning the language and move onto anything else.

Me: 200 characters of Mandarian

Southern Chinese Dude w/ College Degree: Spoken Cantonense with 9 tones and 20,000 chacters in Mandarin Chinese

Fuck my life.

I'm Czech and I can attest to something similar in my country with its measly 10 million people. There's a Bohemian and a Moravian/Silesian dialect.

Bohemia is part of the country where Prague is and with that dialect, you can fare very well all over the country. You'll stick out, and sound downright silly in the depths of Moravia, but you'll be fine. I can't ever remember not being able to understand a Bohemian simply because most TV shows are dubbed by Bohemians.

But if you're a Moravian (like me), you'll be quite unlucky in the rest of the country. Moravians speak quite quickly and in a deep voice. The language in the thick of it is nearly impossible to understand. There's nothing offensive about it, it just sounds like garbage to any person that speaks the proper Czech language.

This reminds me of the Scottish english accent. It's pretty cool sounding (to my west-coast US ears), but a thick Scottish accent can be quite tricky to understand.

I dated a girl whose parents were from Scotland. We were in Canada. I could barely understand anything her father said - one time at dinner he had to ask me to 'pass the salt' three times and I couldn't get it.

Geordies (people from Newcastle) are a struggle for me as well, as a Londoner.

Polish has a Silesian accent too(hardly surprising, seeing how the Silesian region changed ownership in the last few centuries), and people with really strong Silesian accent are really really difficult to understand for everyone speaking "normal" Polish.

This is interesting. My parents grew up in the north, so I understand when they speak.

The thing is, even if I'm not very good at it and I've never even been there, I can tell what part of Vietnam someone is from. It seems the southern dialect is very easily distinguished from the northern one.

It makes a difference to the diaspora people because it gives you an idea of whether you're of similar background. The exodus seems to have had different stages and groups (eg people who left with the Americans vs Hoa who left a few years later).

The Amana Colonies in Iowa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amana_Colonies) was settled by Germans, and many continue to speak German. A friend of mine is a professor at the University of Iowa, and a colleague of his grew up speaking German. But, much of her diction sounded quaint to German speakers in Germany; the word she used for "airplane" was closer to the word "dirigible".

French in Quebec is kind of similar - to avoid being assimilated into English Canadian culture, it's very resistant to change. French speakers from Europe tend to find it kind of quaint because it's been developing independently since the 1700s.

That's a great story. I'm curious about Arabic now - can you tell us more?

I'm not the grandparent but:

Arabic is highly diglossic: in any given area, people use a standard written language called Modern Standard Arabic (used in speech only in certain formal situations) and a local spoke language ("vernacular") used in everyday life. They differ greatly in terms of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Note that vernacular isn't mere slang: it's one's native language.

Also, the vernaculars form a sort of dialect continuum: a Iraqi might have little problem understanding a Syrian from a nearby area, and Syrians might have little trouble understanding Palestinians, and so on, but Iraqi and Moroccan Arabic have little mutual intelligibility.

Neither phenomenon is unique to Arabic. Some Americans speak, say, African American Vernacular English but can also use "standard" American English; of course the difference isn't that big in this case. Brazilian Portuguese is another case of diglossia: the written language has multiple verb tenses and conjugations that aren't used in spoken language, for example.

Dialect continuums also happen in other places, e.g. the Getman speaking countries.

But Arabic is an especially extreme and interesting case (subjectively speaking).