Cambodian History

Here is the link to another quite extended piece this time on Cambodia's history originally from Lonely Planet. It divides this into three periods of history which it describes as:

The Good
The Bad
The Ugly

Chinese History

Follow this link to find a big chunk of information from Lonely Planet about China's history. It divides into two categories which I will try to expand upon:

Pre-20th Century History
Modern History

Chinese Culture

Follow this link to find out some tidbits about Chinese culture. The culture is divided there into the following categories which I will try to expand upon as I read up more:

People
Non-verbal Communication
Food
Architecture
Transportation
Education
Languages
Religion
Music

Vietnamese History

Follow this link to find some tidbits originally from Lonely Planet. The history of Vietnam seems to fit under four periods:

Chinese Rule

Vietnamese Rule

French Rule

Vietnamese Communist Rule

And here is a further overview and timeline of events from BBC's country profile of Vietnam.

Malaysian language

Malay alphabet

A Malay alphabet table from this website. I’ve made some adjustments based on what it says in the accompanying pronunciation videos (one for vowels and the other for consonants).

Malay Alphabet	English Sound	Pronunciation Example
a	[a]	as in father
b	[b]	as in bay
c	[ʨ]	ch as in chair
d	[d]	as in day
e	[ɛ] or [ə] or [eɪ]	as in elephant or as in fur or as in ray
f	[f]	as in fine
g	[ɡ]	as in gold not gentle
h	[h]	as in house
i	[i]	'ee' as in meat
j	[ʥ]	as in job
k	[k]	as in kitchen, more softly pronounced if at end of word
l	[l]	as in life
m	[m]	as in man
n	[n]	as in nice
o	[o]	as in olive
p	[p]	as in pool
q	[k]	as in kiss
r	[r]	as in rice
s	[s]	as in smile
t	[t]	as in time
u	[u]	'oo' as in mood
v	[f]	f as in free
w	[w]	as in wind
x	[ks]	as in wax
y	[j]	as in year
z	[z]	as in Zulu
ng	eng	as in hanging, or Thai  งู (nguu)
ny	nye	as in mañana or El Niño
kh	kha	as in Bach or loch
sy	sya	as in shield
ngg	nng	as in bingo

Differences from standard English pronunciation of the 26 letters of the alphabet to note are that the letter c is pronounced [ch] as in chair and the letter v is pronounced [f] as in free. According to the consonants video, k is always pronounced softly at the end of words rather as it is in Thai. The video also says that g is only ever pronounced hard as it is in gold and never soft as it is in gentle.

The vowels video says that there are two ways of pronouncing e – as the vowel sound in fur or as the vowel sound in ray. The table on the website gives a third way of pronouncing it – as it is in elephant. I don’t know which to trust so I’ve put all three into the table on our site (I will do some more research on this).

The combination consonants ng as in singing and ngg as in bingo are like Thai's ง (ngor nguu) in that they can form the starting consonant of words. A quick note to explain how ngg works: in English, for the two-syllable word bingo, you say ng in the first syllable (bing) and then g in the second syllable (go) and this is exactly what you should do in words that are spelt with ngg in Malay.

kh as in Bach or loch will be easy enough for a Scot to say. A conflicting piece of information from the consonants video though is that words which begin with this combination are either pronounced with a dominant k or a dominant h, and you just need to learn which ones are pronounced which way. 

For the other combination consonants, ny as in mañana is also commonly heard pronounced in the meteorological event El Niño.  sy is the least obvious one to know how to pronounce on first sight; the table says it should be pronounced [sh] as in shield.