Tools for Vietnamese Language Learning

• Introduction
• The Tools

Introduction

This year I really set out to improve my Vietnamese. My parents are Vietnamese, so I have a base understanding of the language, but it frustrates me that I can’t talk to them about more topics. I already started with Duo Lingo a while ago, but it was time to take it to the next level and really commit to it. It has become my main hobby now!

But lots of parts of language learning are repetitive and tedious. For example, imagine adding all the words manually to your Anki deck. Inconceivable! Of course, I can use my skills gained throughout my education and career to help me with this and have some fun in the process.

This is also the main reason why I started this blog in the first place. I feel like I created some results that are worth sharing with other people who are studying Vietnamese or perhaps another low-resource language.

Oh, and special thanks to my girlfriend for providing me with the thumbnail image [1], it turned out great!

The Tools

This page is still under construction.

Here I will list all the tools and things I built. I will structure them into separate blog posts but collect them and summarize them here.

1. Extracting the most common words in Vietnamese
   • We estimate how many of the most frequent words we need to reach a certain level of proficiency, and I describe some tools that help with the extraction of this information.
2. Automatic creation of Anki Cards with Wiktionary definitions and clozed examples
3. Adding new words while consuming media with automatic speech recognition