Learning Vietnamese
What better time to take a Vietnamese lesson than my first day in Vietnam? The tourist office in Sapa offers a free hour long lesson every evening from 7.30pm. The enthusiastic teacher took the eight of us in attendance through basic greetings to ordering food. Vietnamese is all about the pronunciation, words of the same spelling take on a completely different meaning if you say it too low or too high. A Scottish accent really doesn’t help when learning as it makes everything sound a bit wrong. As we each took turns trying to pronounce each of the words, our teacher laughed and looked confused as Scottish, Irish, Italian, Finnish and German accents all butchered the phrase “I want to eat dinner”. The word dinner is spelt the same as the word for I/myself so nearly all of us announced that we wanted to be cannibals.
Since that first day I have been carrying around a sheet of paper with all the phrases I was taught written, as they are spelt as well as phonetically. Even when I’ve screwed up the pronunciation, being able to point at the phrases has worked wonders on the few occasions when I’ve encountered someone that doesn’t speak either English or French. Both languages are widely spoken in Vietnam, French being the language of choice among the older generations on the coast. My high school French may be rusty, but its helped me out a number of times.
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