UNIS should teach pupils some Vietnamese

For Westerners, Vietnamese is hilariously difficult to learn and most give up after a few cursory attempts. Less easy to forgive is the fact that the kids’ school, the United Nations School of Hanoi, also appears to have given up. From 11 years and up Vietnamese is only taught to mother tongue students. This means that a typical non-Vietnamese pupil knows next-to-none of the language at all. Some might be able to produce a toneless “hello” and “thank you”, comprehensible only to people used to hearing foreigners mangle the lingo. Not knowing any Vietnamese keeps UNIS kids in a bubble separate from the wider community, and by not teaching the kids the local language UNIS is also inadvertently teaching the kids that it is unimportant to interact with your local environment. An irony is that back in many of the countries that the expat pupils come from, people are outraged when foreigners fail to learn the local language.

No-one that I have talked to at the school claims to feel particularly comfortable with the situation, so why does the school not teach any Vietnamese to foreign kids? One reason offered is that Vietnamese is difficult. Yes, and so is maths. Next reason! It is also objected that there is not room in the timetable. This is just about what the school prioritises. Can an hour a week not be fitted in? Some Vietnamese parents aren’t keen on Vietnamese being spoken because they are paying for their kids to receive an English language education. Well, that’s OK, this is not about children who can already speak Vietnamese; it’s about the foreign pupils being taught at the very least the basics of the local language, as is the norm in international schools across the world. It is also claimed that not enough of the foreign parents want it either. Well, that may or may not be true but really doesn’t wash: If you send your kids to a United Nations school then you have already signed up to a culturally-sensitive, meet-people-on-their-own-premises kind of deal. The school teaches lots about Vietnam in various parts of the curriculum and the residential trips really open the kids’ eyes to how rural Vietnamese people live, but the language, nah, we don’t teach them any of that. So in other ways the effort and desire the school shows to link to the community around it is genuine enough, impressive in fact, but the integration of the school with its surroundings would be improved if all pupils were taught to count to 10 in Vietnamese, to ask for a sandwich in the canteen, order a taxi or hold a simple conversation with a local.

So come on UNIS, get with it and teach Vietnamese!