A note about language...

Knowing absolutely nothing about Vietnamese before leaving, I was slightly anxious as to how I was going to communicate with folks. Though I still struggle with Japanese, I have learned enough to get where I'm going, get what I need, and make small talk with folks. Going to Vietnam was erasing all that, and starting over with something completely different.

I needn't have worried, plenty of Vietnamese speak English, or at least enough to help tourists with money. "Where you go?" was the question I heard most I think. With the exception of one town in the Mekong, everywhere we went we found at least a few folks who spoke English quite well, and plenty of those who had some capability with the language. So communication was not a problem at all, and became a source of great amusement.

Vietnamese, at first glance, seems reasonable enough. At least it uses the Roman alphabet, right? But, looking in my new phrasebook, I discovered Vietnamese has 6 tones. Each spelling in Vietnamese has only one syllable, but can be pronounced 6 different ways (marked by accents above or below the vowel), each with a different meaning. To steal an example from the phrasebook, the syllable "ma", depending on the tone/mark can mean: ghost, cheek, but, rice seedling, tomb, or horse. So despite attempts to learn some handy phrases like "Where's the bathroom?" and "Can I have the check please?", I found it impossible to pronounce anything correctly. A Vietnamese could repeat something 10 times, and I would say it 10 different ways, all incorrect. It was much easier just to find what I was looking for and point to it, rather than butchering the pronunciation and risk saying something silly like "I would like to rent a tomb for the afternoon".



Yet, over the course of a couple weeks, we (Aaron and I) did manage to learn a few essentials like: Good morning, hello, thank you, No thank you (perhaps the most useful), how much?, too expensive, moustache, beautiful young woman, I am handsome man, and our three favorites, "Oh My God!" "Liar" and "You are a BIG liar / Bullshit!". We threw these out with great frequency, and were rewarded almost everytime with surprised laughter from the Vietnamese. Used with some simple gestures, you'd be surprised how far you can get with just a dozen or so words.

I will have more to say on both English and Vietnamese in further posts, but wanted to give a brief introduction to show how much I don't know. In further posts, I will incorrectly write all Vietnamese words without the accent marks because 1) I don't understand them, and 2) I can't figure out how to type them all on my laptop.