Communication

As a part of our volunteer fee, we were provided with two Vietnamese lessons to give us an overview of the language. Ten minutes in I had a headache and intense look of frustration plastered on my face as I struggled to imitate the sounds that our teacher was asking us to repeat back to her.

The very first thing we were taught were the different 'a' sounds. There are three different 'a's in the alphabet, and these three different 'a's can have five different accents, six if you count the sound you make if there is no accent at all. The three A's are:

a â ă

The five accents are (shown on the a we use):

ã ạ ả á à

These accents can also be added to the second two 'a's in the alphabet, for example the letter â with the five accents looks like this:

ấ ẫ, ầ, ậ ẩ

So in total, there are 18 different kinds of 'a's. Our first lesson involved pronouncing the word 'ba' with five different 'a' accents (bã bạ bả bá bà). To the trained Vietnamese ear, these sounds are all very distinguishable from each other and present little problem. So, when our teacher quickly read us the five 'ba's, she expected us to repeat them all back to her. The problem however, was that to westerners, she sounded like this: Bah bah bah baaah bah. After straining my hearing and having her repeat herself many times, I could hear slight differences in a few, but not enough difference to remember, and certainly not enough to imitate myself. This presents a problem (no pun intended...lame), as these 'ba's all have very different meanings. For example, one of them means grandmother. Another means rat poison.

Vietnamese is a monosyllabic, tonal language. Every word, as you might guess, is only one syllable (Vietnam is Việt Nam). It is tonal in the sense that many words are almost sung, and different pitches and intonations indicate different letters, words and phrases. So you need to have a good ear for pitch. If you are one of those people who can't sing along to a song for the life of you, I'm sorry to report that you will never learn Vietnamese. That includes my brother, sorry bud.

I have better luck with phrases (v. lone words), simply because if you are saying multiple words a Vietnamese person can more easily guess what you are trying to say. There are also few things most foreigners know how to say, so they can guess that way as well. Saying hello is Xin chào. (Seen chow), this one seemed pretty easy, but apparently if you pronounce it incorrectly you could be saying 'give me rice' instead of hi.

If you're wondering why their language is not comprised of typical Asian characters, it's because of colonialism. The French adapted their language from characters to a roman alphabet in the 1950's I think. I'm not sure of the exact decade because most Vietnamese I ask don't know for sure either. Most of them cannot read their traditional alphabet.

One thing that seems to translate in every country is a sense of humor. I've found that if you always manage to keep your temper, laugh things off, smile and act eager, that you can easily win friends and good favor. It's something important for many westerners to remember when traveling to asia, because many tend to lose their temper very easily, and if you are not laid back there are a million things here that can set you off.