Chờ em một chút vậy?

So after 6 months of communicating largely through hand gestures, caveman grunts, and pleading smiles, I finally bit the bullet and invested in actual Vietnamese lessons. Yep, I could have done this like, wayyyyyy earlier than I did. Here’s the summation of what I’ve learned about the Vietnamese language so far, and by so far, I mean mostly in the past 3 weeks.

Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. Since most words are only one syllable, the putative lexicon is very restricted. However, expression is not limited by the size of the vocabulary. Instead, two or more words are grouped together to form a more holistic meaning. In English, words that often occur together are called collocations. I don't think it’s really accurate to say that Vietnamese is a language of collocations. It’s similar to the way that English words use prefixes and suffixes, although not exactly the same. The building block words have much more abstract meanings. Moreover, they don’t typically have an exact translation. Hence transcribing word by word into English can produce amusing results. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

Helmet – nón bảo hiểm – “hat insurance”

Refrigerator – tủ lạnh – “cold stomach”

And there are some that really don’t make sense in English:

To request –yêu cầu– “love bridge”

As you can see, the spaces between ‘words’ don’t necessarily denote the beginning and end. That makes deconstructing long sentences difficult, especially with a novice understanding of the grammar. For the same reason, Google Translate is hopeless unless you’re just trying to look up one word with a fairly concrete definition. Even the most sophisticated translation software probably wouldn’t be able to pick up on the nuances because English and Vietnamese are about as different as two languages can be.

But they do have one major thing in common – the use of the Roman alphabet. That was actually part of my rationale for choosing Vietnam over other Southeast Asian destinations. Going to a new country where I didn’t know anyone and couldn’t speak the language seemed magnitudes scarier when compounded with being totally illiterate. Vietnam uses a modified alphabet developed in the 16^th Century by the French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes. So I can at least recognize words in text even if I have no idea what they mean. And if I were any good at pronunciation, I’d be in the right place too. That’s the really cool thing about Vietnamese writing – it’s almost perfectly phonetic. Even the accents used to indicate tones are an illustration of what your voice should be doing. The tones. Oh the tones. I could write an entire post about the difficulty of Vietnamese intonation, but suffice to say this feature of the language is foreign in every sense of the word. My Vietnamese teacher introduced the concept of tones using a graph, which is a really helpful visual. If you look at the image below and think of the y-axis representing pitch, and the x-axis representing time, you can get a sense of the vocal acrobatics required to speak proper Vietnamese.

The phonemes “ma” given in this example can mean six different things, depending on the intonation! Also, Northern and Southern Vietnamese have substantial differences. In the Southern dialect (spoken where I live) hỏi and ngã have converged, so there are really only five tones. Which is good for me because I have an especially hard time hearing the difference between those two tones. I really wish I could hear how foreigners speaking Vietnamese sound to natives. It’s usually easy to identify the native language of somebody speaking English by their pronunciation of sounds which don’t exist in their own language. Vietnamese is full of sounds that don’t exist in English – there are 12 vowels, in addition to all those nasal-sounding consonants. We also rely much less on intonation for semantics, so I imagine that the English accent speaking Vietnamese sounds pretty weird. 

I know that I won't ever sound like a natural, but that's no reason not to try. Hopefully I'll be completely fluent by the time this 40-hour course ends. Just kidding. There's definitely a loooottt of room for improvement.