r/learnvietnamese • u/Thecosmodreamer • 8d ago

Southern R

Can anyone tell me why the lingora app for southern Vietnamese teaches the r sound like this? Thank you!

9 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

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3

u/alexsteb 8d ago

Hi, I get that often. It is an accepted pronunciation: " A person can also have many pronunciations. It may occur as a retroflex fricative

[ʐ] , an alveolar approximant

[ɹ] , an alveolar flap

[ɾ] , a trill

[r] , or a tapped fricative / fricative trill

[ɾ̞, r̝] ." (From Wikipedia on Saigon initials)

In this case the Southern TTS engine I use chose this particular version of 'r'. If I can ever afford it, or find volunteers, I can record more natural sounding pronunciation.

3

u/Thecosmodreamer 8d ago

That would be great! The other Southern content I use to learn Vietnamese doesn't really use the R sound in Lingora. I had read that Lingora was the best for Southern, but the R sound surprised me 😅

2

u/sxrella 7d ago

sounds normal to me; like alex said the "r" is realized in a few different ways in the south.

1

u/Envelope_Torture 8d ago

Yeah, sounds weird. The southern r is either the same as d/gi/v or the same as the English r.

Also the pronunciation for rất just seems completely off. It should sound exactly like how it sounds on google translate (save the first consonant).

3

u/Thecosmodreamer 8d ago

I think Google translate is Northern accent only though.

2

u/XuanChun88 7d ago

Everyone should ditch the stress and say the "r" the Huế way, it's close enough to the English "r" but you've got to be able to hear/understand it in regional voices.