White Hmong Dialogues

Publication date: 1986
Number of pages: 23Hmong is spoken by several million people in China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Burma, and by Hmong living in such countries as Australia, France, French Guiana, and the United States. In Thailand, Laos, and the overseas Hmong communities there are two principal varieties of Hmong, White Hmong (Hmoob Dawb) and Green Hmong (Hmoob Ntsuab). They differ from one another in many details of pronunciation and vocabulary, but they are sufficiently similar to one another that speakers of one dialect can understand the other without difficulty. The dialogues in this book are in White Hmong.
These dialogues were originally developed for an intensive beginning Hmong class taught by the authors. They are not a complete course in Hmong. In our class we also used pronunciation drills, conversation drills, exercises and readings. The dialogues, however, were an important part of the course. The students first mastered the dialogues on their own, imitating tape recordings made by Lopao Vang, and then paired off in class to practice the dialogues under the supervision of the teachers, who corrected their pronunciation. Eventually the students found that they had learned certain dialogues by heart and when they were conversing in Hmong they found themselves spontaneously using phrases from the dialogues at appropriate points in the conversation. We have tried, therefore, to provide appropriate natural utterances for a variety of social situations.