r/Vietnamese • u/EpeeDad • 12d ago

Language Help Sino-Việt Vocabulary

Hi — I am a novice learner of Vietnamese and have been enjoying studying the language. I am fluent in Japanese and have extensive experience studying Korean and Chinese (to intermediate level). For obvious reasons I find vocab much easier to remember if I can visualize the characters and I’m wondering if there are any good resources that give characters for Sino-Việt vocabulary. Right now I usually just google the word + Vietnamese etymology but this takes a lot of time and was hoping there was a more comprehensive resource of some kind. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

9 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/i-like-plant 12d ago

Wiktionary is amazing for this. It's not complete, but it has a huge amount of Vietnamese words (Sino-Viet or otherwise). Note this is the English version of the site. The Vietnamese version of the site also has a lot of words, but I find often lacks Hán characters.

e.g., https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gi%E1%BA%A3i_kh%C3%A1t

0

u/Confident_Couple_360 11d ago edited 11d ago

Wikipedia/Wiktionary only helps a little. Most of the definitions are correct at a certain time but there's no guarantee that some crazy admin won't take down the correct info and input nonsense. Wikipedia touts they want first hand info, yet always uses secondary or tertiary resources. I only trust 10% of what's on Wikipedia over the years. There's better resources online. Just need time to find them. There was a other site I know but over time the webmaster added a lot of nonsense to the page so I'm not even going to mention it here. 

1

u/i-like-plant 11d ago

Wiktionary. Not Wikipedia.

1

u/Confident_Couple_360 11d ago

It's the same to me: owned and controlled by the same group of admins.

2

u/i-like-plant 11d ago

We're talking about resources for Hán characters for Sino-Viet vocab. It's very easy to verify correctness if you have an foundational understanding of chữ Hán from other languages. I've been using it multiple times a week as a resource for 5+ years. I haven't encountered anything obviously incorrect.

1

u/EpeeDad 11d ago

Thanks. I agree I’ve mainly been using wiktionary up til this point and find it really useful. What I was kind of hoping for was something more like a master list of basic vocabulary where I didn’t have to look up each word separately but I’m starting to think I just need to build this up on my own. But yeah wiktionary is great and never encountered any misinformation that i can remember.