Warm Up - Celebrity Heads

Isaiah and Wizzy were volunteered to play Vietnamese Language Class Celebrity heads where they sat in front of the white board facing the rest of the students and had names written up behind them - Sa-mu-ên and Chị Lan. Isaiah guessed his celebrity name first, merely one question before Wizzy guessed hers.

The students were given this Tones Practice worksheet. First a review of the six tones. The students were told the secret to achieving correct Vietnamese tones: find your 'monotone'. You can do this with the help of certain nursery rhymes, because from there you use your 'monotone' as a point of reference. Then we practiced the word "Ma" with different tones completely at random, as they appeared on the worksheet. This was to demonstrate that it doesn't matters where you are in the sentence, nor the mood of the subject or even the meaning of the word. Only the word's "Dấu" affects the word's tone. Then we looked at how we can naturally inflect English intonation onto our Vietnamese tones, and how hard we must try to avoid that with constant concentration. Then we broke up into groups of three students each and in each group, one student would read one of the "Ma" sentences leaving the remaining two students to critique how they went with their tones. This was an excellent exercise in not only getting your own tones right with constructive criticism, but also gives you the opportunity to hear others and thus begin to recognize what you need to listen out for when it comes to identifying tones.

Here is the audio to this tones worksheet.

This worksheet is possibly one of the most important and useful ULG's we will learn, as it teaches us how to ask the far majority of all the questions we can ask in Vietnamese. Excluding how and maybe who, this ULG gives you a potential 4,160 different combinations of questions; what a powerful tool!

Here is some audio for this ULG on Questions.

Introduction to Ê and some of it's sounds. Ê / ÊU / ÊN - ÊNH / ÊM

Here is its audio.

Tea Break

Lesson 4 - Numbers

Numbers Exam - We almost immediately broke up into the same groups as above. When we were all separated across the hall, a numbers question was asked. Every group had to try to come up with the numerical answer in Vietnamese as quickly as possible. Yes, many of our advanced students knew these answers straight away. But not only could they assist the newer students in working out the answers, they could also experience coaching and instructing themselves. Some of the questions were:

How many are going to heaven?

How many songs are there in our new song book?

How many congregations are there in the world?

On what day is our Memorial this Year?

How many months in the year?

How many Psalms are there?

Which Psalm is the longest?

What year did Christ start ruling?

For how long will we live?

Everyone passed.

We continued with these sounds  ẾT ẾCH / ẾP - and then we did the E and Ê REVIEW.

Here is it's audio.

This was another Basic Conversation lesson with a Communicative Approach Exercise! It happens to have some excellent questions! These questions are a sneak peek into a large part of Vietnamese culture and heritage: housing, migration, spirituality and FOOD! Please get familiar with these questions, Communicative Approach is REPETITION! These are the subjects that most Vietnamese are concerned about.

Here is some quick Audio for it just to get these questions right.

First Katrina explained where our Vietnamese Latin script came from. It had it's beginnings almost half a millennium ago, however, it's official implementation was surprisingly recent.

Then we discussed the most pertinent and common Tips on Vietnamese Manners. Find the notes here and the handout here.

We will continue on using the same Memorial Campaign presentation from last week. Here is some audio of the memorial campaign presentation.

Homework Sheet.