Anh mà là tôi thì anh không làm như thế

Of all the languages on my shelf, I truly did not expect to be dabbling in Vietnamese. I have a shiny textbook bought during the crest of my earlier interest, but I haven't cracked it in years. Then I found that some naïve thing on one of my boards is trying to teach himself it without the benefit of decent materials and I thought I'd pitch in.

The orthography is every bit as ridiculous as I remember it being. I'm not even half trying to pronounce the words in my head as I type them. When it comes to grammar, I find it hard to go wrong as long as I follow the instincts honed from learning Chinese--with certain reservations. Native constructions are generally head-initial rather than head final which means, among other things, that relative clauses work the same way they do in SAE rather than coming before the head noun as in East Asian languages (or like the pre-noun inserts of literary German).

It would be nice if I retained something from this bout of study, but I doubt I will. After all, I hardly remember anything of the Swedish I studied last year or the Polish and the Hindi I learned the year before that. Right now, I'd just be happy to get my German back up to the level it was before I started fooling around with these other distractions.