Learning Chinese as 3rd language

[papen]

Hi, I'm a Vietnamese and basically I'm picking up Chinese as a 3d language. I already study more than 1 year (on and off). I want to ask whether if any learn it as a 3rd language (Pu Tong Hua) as somehow It's messing with my Viet and English language. For example when someone says 你的中文很好啊, I normally reply 没有啦. Which if I translate literally means Don't have. It's understandable in english but in Viet, It's the right answer. And even for other words such as 得 ， 让， 才, 就 it's almost the same meaning and use in Viet, and even some vocabulary. However, there're also some grammar that Chinese and English share the same but inverted in Vietnamese. So I don't know which grammar I should stick to as it's confusing jumping between the 2 language grammar.

I'm trying to pick up a dictionary this few days as I don't know whether I should use Chinese-English dic or Chinese-Vietnamese dic to build up my vocabulary. As I'm learning Chinese from English textbook. So my question is If you learn Chinese as the 3rd language, you would prefer learning it from your mother tongue perspective or 2nd language perspective. I did some comparison between Cantonese and Madarin but at least the share the same grammar.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Dear Papen,

I say go with the language you are most proficient in.

Which of these two dictionaries would you be most comfortable with?

A New Century Chinese-English Dictionary (Xin Shiji Han-Ying Da Cidian)

or

A dictionary simply titled "Han Yue Cidian" put out by the Shangwu Yin Shu Guan (Commercial Press).

Since you're using English language Chinese learning materials it would seem that a Chinese-English would be more suited for you.

But then you say you are Vietnamese and are fluent in Vietnamese and, as we all know, modern Vietnamese derives a lot of its vocabulary from Chinese. (From all that time when Vietnam was a part of the Chinese empire on and off for more than a thousand years when literary Chinese held sway.)

So maybe in your case a Chinese-Vietnamese dictionary might be more preferable.

The good thing about the Shangwu Chinese-Vietnamese dictionary is that it includes a way of searching for characters based upon their Sino-Vietnamese readings.

This might be a good thing or not depending on how good you are at discerning between a word that has its origin from Chinese or not.

Also sometimes the Sino-Vietnamese reading might have more in common with the Cantonese reading of a character than with Mandarin.

Though, I suspect, at times they might have even more in common with Hakka and Taishanese readings than with Cantonese.

In Mandarin 'jade' is "yu4" and in Cantonese it's "yuk6". Cantonese has retained the final -k but not the initial ng-. In Hakka and Taishanese they still have the initial ng-. You can see the Sino-Vietnamese reading for "jade" is "ngoc" (sorry don't have Vietnamese input handy) with an initial ng-.

In the Shangwu, each character also includes the Sino-Vietnamese reading immediately following the Mandarin reading in Hanyu Pinyin.

The book also contains an index of Chinese surnames with their Sino-Vietnamese readings which might also be helpful.

In the old days Chinese kids had to memorize the hundred surname classic. :blink:

Papen wrote:

However, there're also some grammar that Chinese and English share the same but inverted in Vietnamese.

I don't know if you mean that the word order might be different in some cases between Vietnamese and Chinese at times but...

Here you can see the Chinese for "electron microscope" is "dianzi xianweijing" but in Vietnamese they have it "jing xianwei dianzi" (Sorry. Again don't have Vietnamese input so I've used Chinese Romanization to get my point across).

But other times they're spot on. See "dianzi guangxue" "electron optics" and "dianzixue" "electronics". The definitions in Vietnamese are exactly the Sino-Vietnamese readings for those characters.

Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.

[xuefang]

Chinese is my third language too. First is Finnish and second is English. I've always learned Chinese through English so I continue keeping it that way. I use the English-Chinese dictionary also because there aren't good Finnish-Chinese dictionaries. Sure sometimes I don't understand the English word and need to check the English-Finnish dictionary.

It sometimes does get messy because I speak all the three languages all the time. Sometimes almost in the same sentence. Once I said: 我去市中心"to"买衣服。Wo qu shizhongxin "to" mai yifu. I don't know how that happened but for some reason I added the English "to" in a completely Chinese sentence

I should add that I also used to study Swedish for 6 years and German for 5 years, but almost completely forgot them. But that gets me the idea of how to learn languages.