Vietnamese used to look very different…

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In ancient times, China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan all used the same type of writing (Traditional Chinese characters). That means, if we don't understand each other verbally, we can still communicate through writing. Very interesting.

A nicely detailed (and entertaining) description of Chữ Nôm! And congratulations on getting sponsored!

back when i was 5, my grandad often tried to teach me chữ nôm cause he used to teach it to people but when the france colonized vietnam,it was removed from school and my grandad became unemployed.And i hated chữ nôm because is too hard to learn and study so i avoided when ever my grandad tried to teach me.Later i got told that my grandad was litterally the only person from my homeland that knew chữ nôm and he wanted to teach me it because he wanted to pass it down to the next genaration which me :(

Trước học văn thấy nhắc đến chữ Nôm, nhưng nhờ video này mình mới thật sự hiểu và được thấy trông nó ra sao :)) Cảm ơn bạn vì video bổ ích!!

I am fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese and now I live in Vietnam learning Vietnamese. Sometimes when I don't know a word in Vietnamese I say the Cantonese word and more often than not people actually understand what I mean :D

Spent seven years learning and mastering Chinese, swore I'd never learn another language but now I want to learn Viet just for this fun stuff.

I get excited whenever I see a new linguistic video about a Sinosphere language (CJKV). It's interesting that Vietnamese, unlike Korean and Japanese, didn't develop a native phonetic script, but continued with the logographic type.I think that's mostly because of language structure.Japanese and Korean are agglutinative, so they need phonetic script to represent particles, suffixes, conjugations etc, while Vietnamese is analytical, same like Chinese, which means no inflection, and logographic writing just fits well into analytic languages, so no need for a phonetic script.

Never expected someone would explain Vietnamese History in such a way in English :0 +1000000000000 respect!

Mình rất cảm ơn bạn vì đã làm ra video này. Cách mà bạn truyền đạt rất tích cực T.T. Bởi vì trước giờ mình rất buồn khi tưởng rằng dường như chỉ có mình là thích tìm hiểu về chữ nôm trong khi bạn bè trang lứa thì lại chẳng biết một chút gì cả, thậm chí đôi khi còn đánh đồng với chữ hán. Cũng không trách được, thời đại bây giờ mà học chữ Nôm thì chẳng có gì để thực dụng trong xã hội cả nên tự khắc chẳng còn mấy ai quan tâm nữa, từ đó sinh ra nhiều lỗ hổng kiến thức với những quan niệm sai lầm. Thực sự coi xong video của bạn phần nào trong mình cảm thấy ấm lòng hơn hẳn. Những thông tin mà bạn đã chia sẻ sẽ cực kì hữu ích đối với những người mới bắt đầu tìm hiểu về chữ Nôm hoặc là chưa có kiến thức căn bản (Tất nhiên là đối với những ai biết tiếng Anh). Hơn hết, cách trình bày của bạn rất dễ hiểu, mặc dù là tóm tắt nhưng vẫn đầy đủ. Cách dẫn của bạn cũng rất dễ thương và hài hước nữa! 🥺

This is really interesting because Korean had something very similar between 7th and 10th century AD (unified Silla period). It was called Hyangchal, used to write a collection of Hyangga- many of them Buddhist poems written by monks at the time. Similar to how you describe the Chữ Nôm system, Hyangchal uses homophonic Chinese characters for native Korean words (including grammar structures), and very occasionally uses Chinese loan words (back in the day they used more native Korean words than now). There are basically 0 resources for the average person (except for an inaccurate recording by a Japanese Youtuber) and virtually all Koreans can't read it (even scholars have to make educated guesses). There are also virtually no accurate English translations on the internet as many of these western scholars do not have the cultural understanding behind these poems. I found this fascinating, like you did with Chữ Nôm, and created this channel to explore the reconstructions of this language. Great video!

One thing to note: Chữ quốc ngữ is actually the product of Portuguese missionaries.

Hi, I'm a Vietnamese Canadian and I find your videos very helpful and informative. It's nice connecting a bit with my culture. If you don't mind could you expand on the Vietnamese texts that you said Vietnamese people know and what they're about, and maybe the meanings behind them? it is hard to find complete translated works here. Thank you.

Dude, this is brilliant work! Thank you so much for the excellent and informative video! You have no idea how precious and valuable this is to the preservation of Vietnamese culture and history. I wish there will be and App for this Chữ Nôm dictionary by inputing the Vietnamese charectors. Please keep up the great work! Very much appreciated! Peace!

Ahhhh, that is gorgeous! Thanks a lot for a video! I’ve studied Chinese and watched some short videos about Vietnamese. So cool to find out about this writing system.

This is interesting. Thank you for making this. I will point out that for someone who can read classical Chinese, we can read more of that poem example than you first state. 如果 does mean if in modern Chinese, but in classical Chinese it can be read "as like a fruit" too, and that's how I initially understood it. It's not a reflection necessarily of Vietnamese grammar per se, as classical Chinese would have done the same. Where it differs is that the kind of fruit "jackfruit" would of had the descriptor before not after... ie. maoguo instead of quamit, as in Vietnamese. Additionally, while I have never seen the character em specifically, I immediately knew it meant "my" because classical Chinese uses "ang" 俺 as the pronoun historically, and many Chinese dialects today still do. The female distinction, however, I have not seen before. Again, the thing that is different is the possessive pronoun goes after the subject in Vietnamese, whereas in Chinese it would precede it. (ie. My body versus Body mine). For me as a classical Chinese reader, I initially understood "Body mine like a fruit 'blah tree' blah 'another blah tree'. The hardest one for me was the character tren. My initial guess was something like 'besides' or 'following'. I was focused on the bottom 连 part, and not the 上 on the top. Nonetheless, this was great. Thank you for sharing.

One the things that got me really interested in Vietnamese was chữ nôm! Thank you for sharing more about this awesome script, it's a shame that not more people know about it, much less know how to read it.

The Jackfruit poem really hits different when you understand Vietnamese 😂

After learning japanese for about a year. I was pleasantly surprised to find out just how much our languages had in common since it made learning chinese loan words significantly easier. From there, I started looking into other languages in the sinosphere and chữ Hán Việt. After countless hours of sleeping or slacking off in Ngữ Văn I never thought me of all people would ever take an interest in the subject. I never knew history and geography could have such a massive impact on so many cultures/languages. It's really nice to see someone else who had the same experience as you. Also thanks for recommending rikaikun that thing is a life saver

I've just watched 2 videos of Keit for the past 2 days and I love them all really love your content 🥰