Vietnamese Language

I thought I would write a bit about Vietnamese language and my progress so far. I did do some self-studying while I was in Pittsburgh before I arrived so I could familiarize myself with the grammar and writing system. This has really helped me since I have a basic level to start from. Now that I have set my schedule for my work and volunteering I have been able to organize my study of Vietnamese around my other obligations.

I refrained from enrolling in any Vietnamese course or paying a private tutor. I purchased a couple of text books for some structure (I also bought a Japanese textbook for Vietnamese students which has been useful in interesting ways). I posted an ad on a Hanoi website looking for language exchange. I offered to teach anyone interested English or Japanese in exchange for Vietnamese. I had a lot of responses and at this point I meet with 3 different Vietnamese people. I meet with one girl who wants to learn Japanese and she is the best teacher since she is fluent in English. The other two want practice with English conversation so it doesn’t require any effort from me aside from just talking. This language exchanges have been very fruitful and I am glad that I decided to do them.

Vietnamese is an interesting language. There seems to be three main dialects which are based on geography: northern, central, and southern. Northern Vietnamese is considered to be the official language and that is the dialect that is usually found in Vietnamese textbooks. The dialects are not wildly different like the myriad languages of the Philippines or India. There are differences in vocabulary and pronunciation but they are essentially the same language. Luckily, the Vietnamese long ago abandoned the burdensome Chinese characters and adopted the Romanized script created by a French missionary. It is thus very easy for me to read (unlike Japanese).

There are six different tones (although they only recognize five in the south). This means that seemingly identical words can have a completely different meaning. They signify different tones by using diacritical marks over top and below the words. For example, giay, giáy, giày, giảy, giạy, giãy are all completely different words. I know one of them is shoe but I forget which one it is. I don’t know about the other ones. There is a rising (giáy) , falling (giày) , and flat tone (giay) which are easy enough to figure out but the other three were tough for me to get my head around. One of them is like a sudden stop so it makes you swallow the word (giạy). One of them makes you make a glottal stop in your throat and rises sharply (giãy) and the last one starts low, goes lower and rises again (giảy). I’m sure not all of those “giay”s (the gi is pronounced like a z)  are real words. I just wanted to show you guys the tones. There are also plenty of other marks that are used to mark vowels to signify they have a completely different sound. A normal Vietnamese sentence looks like this: Tôi là người Mỹ và tôi muốn biết tiếng Việt nhưng tiếng Việt khó lằm. That means “I am American and I want to know Vietnamese but it is too difficult. The writing system is kind of intimidating at first but it’s honestly not that hard to learn.

The grammar is easy enough for me to understand. The grammar structure is subject+verb+object which is how I’m used to talking. Japanese language is structured quite differently and so it forces me to say things in a way that is contrary to my English thought process. I really have to get into a Japanese mindset to adequately speak Japanese. I don’t have that problem with Vietnamese. The verbs also do not conjugate. They signify the past, progressive, and future tense by small “helping” words put before the verb. However, if the context is obvious then they are usually dropped.

Every Asian language I have encountered has had some built in grammatical system to demonstrate status and show politeness. Tagalog (Philippines) was the easiest. You just have to insert the word po after whatever you say and it becomes polite. I’m sure there are other nuances but I didn’t dive into Tagalog in enough depth to be aware of them. Japanese has a very complex and tedious system to show politeness in varying circumstances. I know the two basic levels of politeness and I have an idea how to construct some of the honorific speech but I gave up trying to learn any more of it. The verbs completely change along with a lot of the vocabulary depending on if you are honoring the person you are talking to or humbling yourself and honestly it seems like a different language. It is only used for those working in strict Japanese companies or other sensitive circumstances. The system is so hard to use correctly that I heard a lot of young Japanese actually take a class to learn how to do it before they start working.  In Vietnam, the system revolves around pronouns. How you refer to yourself, the person you are talking to, or somebody you are referring to depends entirely on your and his/her age. It also based on how old your siblings and mother and father are. If the person you are talking/referring to is about your older sister/brothers age there is a special pronoun to use for them. If there is a person who is about your uncle/aunt’s age there is a pronoun. The keeps going past mother/father to grandmother/grandfather. So there’s about a dozen different pronouns.  They also don’t have fixed meanings so they could mean you or I depending on the situation. For example if I am talking to a man who is older than me but not older than my older sister then I would refer to him as anh and myself as em. This process is reversed if I am older. Em seems to be general pronoun used if you are the younger.  There are other irregularities such as how my friend has to refer to her younger cousin as if she was older because her cousin’s father is older than her father. It was very confusing system at first for me to learn. There are some nuances as well such as it is usually polite to refer to women as one level younger than you think they are. I guess it makes them feel young but more often than not I have just been corrected so my attempt at being nice falls flat. This is part of the reason why one the of first questions Vietnamese people ask is how old you are.

At this point I can carry basic conversations and navigate my way through markets. My vocabulary is expanding like a haphazard tapestry but eventual I’ll tie off the important loose ends. I am certainly not going to become fluent while I am here but I hope I can be pretty decent by the time I leave. The only problem I encounter is that the pronunciation can be so difficult that people will just stare at you blankly as you speak and will think you are speaking English. This is really frustrating but it gives me impetus to work harder at it.