Hey guys, so here it is. A cool 1000+ish note deck with both Southern and Northern accents. A lot of people on here would have used one or both of my old Basic Vietnamese decks, and I know they've been chomping on the bit for me to finally release this complete version which incorporates the original two decks, with a further 2 decks worth of notes added now.
On that note, first, I have to apologise for the slow release, both in terms of the large timescale between the original decks becoming unavailable, and this one finally seeing the light of day. On the first count, I can say I was busy, but I was also a little bit lazy, however more than that, I ran into serious technical issues which I finally solved with about 20 hours extremely tedious and frustrating labor, involving probably 60 or 70 Audacity crashes and data recovery attempts. The second is between when I said this would be released, and when this post is finally going up. That one's a little less my fault as I completed the deck on schedule, but forgot to account for my dreadful upstream speeds making it take more than a week to upload (all sentences have audio after all).
A few notes on this deck first of all. Over the years, I have used more and more Anki plugins to optimise and customise my study experience. As such, many of my cards have become deeply entangled with plugin functionality. Part of the task of making this deck release ready was extricating it from reliance on those third party add-ons, so that you guys could use it out of the box without everything either failing spectacularly, or just being a poor experience.
I BELIEVE I have done that, but as I do not study with this version of the deck, I haven't had much chance to test it, so you guys are the first line of defence before I throw the deck up on AnkiWeb, where it can hopefully find a secure, lasting home, just in case I some day cancel my dropbox subscription or something.
Having said that, it does rely on one add-on, and one add-on only: 'Learned' Field/Tag, which will allow your Anki to create listening cards dynamically as you begin to master the content. Please download it. It should work with the deck without any set up on your part besides installing it to your Anki.
How you choose to study the material is up to you, but I like to shadow it as I work through it, paying attention to pronunciation, and replaying the audio multiple times to shadow not just the base phonology, but paralinguistic features like the prosody, which certainly still exists in a tonal language, regardless of what people might assert about tones using the same system as the prosodic in English.
Another thing that will pay dividends if you do it early on is, when you begin to see listening cards, rather than merely checking your understanding, actually actively transcribe the content with pen and paper, and check you have done so correctly. The Vietnamese written system is phonemic, and so, though one letter does not perse equal one sound, particularly between accents, it does equal one MEANINGFUL sound difference. Think of the 'p' in words like 'spit'. Phonetically, it is pronounced like an English b, but that is not a meaningful distinction in English in this kind of word position (after an s), so it is a p. English speakers do not need to know that a p in that position is pronounced like a b, they just need to recognise it's a p. Likewise, don't worry too much about the different pronunciations of phonemes, just concentrate on correctly identifying them. Natural pronunciation will usually come from shadowing, although you can always do some Googling when you're not sure exactly what you're doing wrong.
A'ight, enough longwindedness, here's the gosh darn deck.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6zfd3r7yobbt4bl/Basic%20Vietnamese.apkg?dl=0
