As promised, superbeginner style videos with Vietnamese and English subtitles!
In the welcome thread the other day we were discussing the tradeoffs around making good superbeginner* content. At Langiri we want to make sure we have videos that even people with no prior exposure to Vietnamese will find approachable, but without being boring. It also came up that some people really do like subtitles. So here are two candidates we identified for superbeginners. We ensured that these were subtitled in English and Vietnamese (at least), and restricted ourselves to videos that do not require a subscription to watch.
This video: Feeling sick? Describe your symptoms in Vietnamese! is from Tâm, and is in the Southern Dialect. We have quite a few videos across the introductory and beginner levels that center around this vocabulary, so you should be able to find good "next steps" when you've mastered this one.
For those that prefer Northern Dialect, try this one instead: Ordering Coffee in Vietnam. On this one, don't sleep on the "repeat after me" section at the end. Of course, if you are being strict about CI you won't want to actually repeat after Trâm, but it's a great way to hear key words in isolation, and then go back and rewatch the video to see if you can pick them out. The series builds from there, staying beginner friendly and adding on gradually so that you can reinforce the vocabulary you've already learned.
Others that might be interesting to compare are this fun story video from Ngân that uses phrases that might be slightly "harder" in the classroom sense (phrases and sentence structures you probably wouldn't learn in your first semester), but we think it is just right for someone who is trying to get used to natural speech early... the context makes it very easy to follow. This is one of the strengths of the comprehensible input method, after all. If you enjoy that customer interaction style from earlier, this shopping roleplay from Ngọc should be reasonably easy to follow, especially on a second playthrough.
We encourage feedback, as we want to make the videos that are most helpful to you, the learners! Tell us what you like or dislike about these (or any of the other videos on our site for that matter), and if you want even easier videos let us know what might help you to get a foothold, so that we can adjust accordingly in future videos.
^(* At Langiri, we call this easiest level of content "introductory", because our founder insists (jokingly, I'm pretty sure) that "super" is Latin for "above" or "beyond" and that superbeginner should be what you do) ^(after) ^(beginner, not before it.)