Lingua frankly

Vietnamese is difficult. The tones, oh the tones, the sextet of tones, the consonant clusters, and the letters. The alphabet looks sort of Western European, unlike the Thai scribble (ท ทหาร), but it does have traps like ơ and ă. And that’s even before you get to how the Portuguese and French missionaries of centuries past elected to transcribe the language. Many words I still cannot pronounce due to my own bucco-lingual stubbornness. But for other words, learning of the pronunciation was impeded for about a year by the way they are written. Words like “học” and “độc”. You concentrate on the dot which is a tone directing you to snatch at the word, say it really quickly, possibly going down in intonation while not neglecting any letter. (Alexandre de Rhodes (1651) apparently described this tone as “chesty-heavy”. Nope, that doesn’t help, Alex). No teacher was ever very pleased with the way I said “học” (or indeed “độc”). But why not? One clue was that when they said hoc or doc they would puff their cheeks out. Try it. It is clumsy. Now I have worked out what the difficulty is. The mistake is thinking of the last sound as a “c”: It should be a “p”. Thanks for nothing, Franco-Iberian monks. Words ending in “-ong” present a similar case: It is obvious how they should be pronounced, right? Except that you would be wrong. The “ong” at the end of a word you should say like a snappy “om”, as would a fish shutting its mouth after its prey has wandered in (cheek-puffing preferred but optional). Words ending in “-ang” are another kettle of fish, whereas “Ng” at the start of a word is simply another sad chapter: It is certainly not pronounced “ng” or “m”. No, it is much more like the sound you make when scraping brown Norwegian goat’s cheese from the roof of your mouth while moaning quietly.

Still, I’ve acquired a few hundred words of Vietnamese and today a translation app understood me (eh, Gunnar?). So to end with, here are some abstract, universal laws of language:

1. A person who says that a particular language is simple invariably does not speak that language

Both in Vietnam and Norway one meets visitors claiming that the local language is simple. Really, well, if so, why can’t you speak it? It’s easy to see where this comes from. It does seem impoverished to an English speaker to find out that in Vietnamese there are no definite articles. Haha, sounds a bit basic. Yes, so if the grammar is “simple”, then all you have to master is the vernacular, the prosody, the terms of address and the count nouns and you’ll soon be successfully ordering chicken noodles all by yourself (as long as you are in a restaurant with nothing else on the menu).

2. Repeating something in a loud voice when not being understood the first time is not a habit exclusive to the English

It is certainly common amongst Vietnamese speakers. OK, I’m mainly thinking of those in bia hois, late at night.

3. After the third use of the word “like”, a sentence may safely be ignored.

4. Multilinguistic people surf in n dimensions while monoglots run in straight lines

That’s not to say that monoglots are lazy imperialists though.

 

Sixty years since a decisive battle

The French were directly involved in the running of Vietnam for 90 years until the battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. This was the first of General Giap’s historical triumphs. He led Vietnamese troops to victory in the city of Dien Bien Phu, 500 km from Hanoi, near the Laos border. There was a long build-up of tension: Both sides knew that if diplomacy failed there would be a battle and both sides were confident of victory. Amongst other factors that tipped it in Vietnam’s favour was their incomprehensible ability to transport heavy artillery across mountains with no roads. There are accounts of armies moving only at night through forests for hundreds of kilometres to reach DBP. This is an enemy that is more determined than you are. By this time the French effort was largely financed by the US. The US had many observers and advisers present, they saw what happened to the militarily superior French and yet they didn’t learn the correct lessons.

The French were in the valley where the town is, and the Vietnamese were in the surrounding mountains. The French knew that the Vietnamese didn’t have much bombing capability up there, except that they did. And they bombarded them from invisible mountain hideouts for just less than two months until the French surrendered, Giap deliberately prolonging the siege because they had a grip on the French supply lines.

So, a while ago I set off to find DBP, to see the lay of the land. I have been through many Bosnian towns that were difficult to defend because they were surrounded by mountains. Sarajevo is one case, not to mention Olovo and Tuzla. More benignly, when driving in Tromsø, and even more so in Grenoble, one navigates by glimpses of the mountains. So it was a bit of a surprise that the mountains around Dien Bien Phu seemed much further away than all of these towns.

The statues commemorating the battle comprised chunky, determined figures.

The museum to celebrate the victory was slightly interesting, it was cheap, but really it was poorly-curated and uninspiring to the non-Vietnamese speaker.

The town itself was pretty unremarkable, but the scenery each way was super. Parts looked like lakes that turned out to be cloud, other parts looked just like Telemark.

I don’t think school attendance is as high as one would wish it to be. On the way one sees plenty of children working with adults on the land, happy to be photographed.

Corn is grown by the tonne.

And this is how you dry it.

So, not the most exciting town to visit but a great relaxing ride, not too many lorries (compared to going North…), a bit hot, mainly blue skies, beer and pho. This was one of those trips where the journey was more important than the destination.

 

The perils of automatically translating your menu

The local bia hoi used to have a scruffy piece of cardboard for a menu. On it there were translations that made you wonder (“frog cement”??) and ones that made you laugh out loud: “Fried motherboard”. With silicon chips perhaps?

Recently I came across a restaurant full of business folk at lunchtime, possibly the sort of place looking to attract foreign customers, so they have the menu in English too. A down-to-earth beer parlour, one accepts, has neither the wit nor inclination to translate things properly, but a fully-fledged restaurant? I suspect though that they just bunged their dishes into Google Translate and printed the results, not asking a competent speaker to have a look, or if they did do so they found one who got kicked out of Monty Python for being too wacky.

Here were some of the pleasures on offer, and you will find other novel delicacies in the pictures below.

Three three-frequency medicine: By prescription only, presumably.

The grilled fish tail leaves the guise: In disguise?

Fish tail the head cook baked beans banana: The seafood chef fell into the vat of beans and fruit? Is there much call for this cannibalistic concoction?

Devil fish baked in the banana downstairs: Pity. I would have preferred the banana oven on the second floor.

Fried frog discharge pepper: NB. Not to be tried before you are firmly connected to a stomach pump.

Om sour frog cement: Ah, our old favourite.

Supergetty: a very rich pasta dish, I suppose.

And in keeping with these times of austerity and cutbacks:

Streamlined administrative beef broth pepper

So please contact clam prawn for more information.

Oh Hanoi, you crack me up.

 

 

 

Tongue-tied by lexical looseness and tonal trickery

When the fragile equilibrium of one’s neurolinguistic systems is torpedoed by the Vietnamese language, weird consequences ensue. I think it’s because you have to de-learn so much, dampen longstanding associations and teach your neurons to cartwheel over superfluous synapses. Before you know it, your angular gyrus is gyroscoping angularly and you are spotting novel connections in the hexatonal monstrosity known as Vietnamese.

The first sign of the creative potential that could be unleashed by the recalibration of your Broca-Wernickes was the discovery that “fat cat” is “mèo béo“. Superb. Unfortunately there are no portly felines around these parts, so you don’t get the chance to point and (casually) say “Oh look, a meo beo”.

Slowly as the tones strangle your larynx and you slide down the slope of lunacee, you begin to notice things such as if the iced tea you ordered appears more quickly than expected then you could say:

Trà đá, ta da!

Soon you’ve leant over too far and have fallen into the high-calorie word-salad vinaigrette. And if you were then surprised by the listing of frog hotpot on a menu, you would say

By ‘eck, lẩu ếch!

and you would want to tell the world that Tim has a purple heart by saying Tim tim tím, or that I haven’t bought yoghurt yet: Chưa mua sữa chua

And the last stage before enforced psychiatric repatriation consists of utterances like “Zack is old and rich”:

Zack giàu và già rồi (“Zack zow va za zoi”)

On the plane home, strapped to the seat, victims are heard to mumble and splutter:

Wait! There’s the dog market: Chờ! Chợ chó

and

Wait! The team is hungry: Đợi! Đội đói.

I just hope my Vietnamese teacher and my psychologist don’t read my blog.

 

Foreigners: On a scale from -2 to +2, how used to the Vietnamese are you?

The revenge blog, though I’m not sure which way the revenge is being taken.

My first impressions of Vietnamese people as a freshly-arrived foreigner were that they tooted on their horns a lot, were softly-spoken and helpful. Then I went to a bia hoi. For the first weeks, you are off the scale, not even getting a minus 2.

When your stuff arrives and the removal company delivers it at the fourth time of asking, then you scrape on to -2. You deal mainly with English-speaking Vietnamese, and think “This is easier than I expected”. Some foreigners bump along on -2 throughout their stay in Hanoi. They don’t know any locals, they know they don’t like phở (that they pronounce “foe”, appropriately enough), they think the traffic is kerrazee and they can’t wait to be transferred to Singapore or Taiwan.

On -1 you find the adapting foreigner. They say xin chao to the maid but order taxis in English. They feel a special connection with the nice lady at the coffee shop, and will learn her name any day now. They don’t know what their Vietnamese neighbours look like and blame them for this. When having a massage they suffer in silence, not daring to tell her to stop sticking her toes between their vertebrae. They think, “If she does it three more times, I’m going to tell her” but then when she does they think it would be rude to interrupt someone at work, so don’t say anything.

0. Most foreigners settle on Level Zero. It is comfortable. In most non-alcoholic situations you manage to avoid being ripped off. You’re quite pleased that on average it only takes you three shopping trips into Hanoi to find what you are looking for. Loud Vietnamese voices no longer cause people on Level Zero to spill their coffee and horns tooting no longer cause them to swerve their bike. When you are perusing the menu, you expect a waitress to stand near (but not at) your table and that a slight nod should bring her within the second to take your order, her first words to you invariably being “Excuse me”. In the rare cases where the nod does not produce a waitress, a loud “Em ơi” is acceptable, indeed required.

+1. This is where you want to aim to be. When abroad you miss the simplicity of life in Vietnam (and you never thought you would be saying that!), you miss the honesty and unpeturbability of the Vietnamese. Also, you eat local, have in-jokes with the maid, and you like not being a +2, who think they know it all and have the unmitigated temerity to criticise other foreigners for not knowing enough about Vietnam.

Er, I’ll get my coat.

 

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!

 

Just so easy to learn

The Vietnamese language has some nifty quirks. If you are specifying how many of a thing you are talking about, you don’t say “three shirts”, you say “three count noun shirts”. The count noun for shirts is “cai”, as it is for most things. It’s just that some categories have their own private little count noun. So for fruit you use “qua”: Not 4 bananas, but 4 “qua” bananas. Animals are counted with “con”, pictures with “tam” (or “buc”, obviously), newspapers with “to” (also used for other types of paper too, as you will have guessed), books have “quyen”, flowers take “bong”, and best of all, root vegetables are counted with “cu”. Just to cap it all, the actual count nouns are written:

cái, quả, con, tấm, bức, tờ, quyển, bông, & cử

and some of these count nouns also mean other things, like “results”, “children”, & “celebration”, so you see, learning Vietnamese really is as easy as nailing jelly to the ceiling.

My, what a fine bông of flowers you have on the back of your bike, madam.

“Ten” sounds the same as “salt”, I believe “road” is actually the same as “sugar”, and how you address someone depends on how old they are, in relation to you, in relation to their father, as well as your rank and serial number.

 

Disclaimer: I don’t know what I am talking about, and frankly even my Danish is better than my Vietnamese, so this might all be unmitigated garbage. Regular readers will, of course, take this for granted.

 

I am a journalist

My struggle with the Vietnamese language continues. It dispirits me twice a week. The teacher says, “But you already know this”, to which I reply, “I assure you, I don’t”. Occasionally, it’s true, I manage to arrange my tongue, teeth and lips in such a way as to correctly pronounce a particularly chewy consonant cluster. This elicits applause but there is no guarantee that the next attempt will be recognisable, let alone as good. I look for ways to hammer the basic pronounciations into my thick skull. There is a couple of subtly dissimilar sounds that I think of as different ways of checking the roof of your mouth for soreness. It’s a neat heuristic, but it doesn’t work.

Back out on the street, Vietnamese people I bump into generally ask the same questions: where do you come from, how old are you, how long have you been here, are you married, do you have children, do you want to buy a postcard/hat/bunch of flowers, and of course, what do you do. I listen intently, trying to pick up on a giveaway word that would identify which particular question is being asked. Sometimes I guess right. I can now answer most of the questions comprehensibly, given an extra go and a sympathetic hearing. One challenge is the “What do you do?” one, and not only due to present circumstances. It turns out that “researcher” is the phrase “nhà nghiên cứu”, the last word of which I cannot produce, so no-one gets what on Earth I am purporting to be. Psychologist translates as “nhà tâm lý học”, my pronounciation of which rather impresses me, but sadly not others. So folks, I is a journalist, because that is the eminently utterable “nhà báo”. A woman behind a shop counter replied “I think that is good job”. Yes, I agreed, I think it might very well be.

 

Swimming with big fish

We have had quite a week. Having flown back from our weekend at a resort, Ragnhild unpacked and then packed again, and went straight back to the airport to fly off to Oslo for a two-day meeting. A bonus was that a colleague of mine in Oslo also turned up here for a quick tour of the house before sitting next to Ragnhild for the flight.

The rest of the week has been dominated by a seemingly trivial incident from the weekend. As shown in a previous picture, the children went off in a boat to fish, and also went swimming in the sea. There were these enormous blue fish who turned out to be inquisitive, and they brushed past a couple of the kids. Rebecca now says that she thought the fish were going to eat them, but they weren’t aggressive.

However, a graze on Jemima’s arm, and minor ones on the rest of her body, turned fiery red on Monday, and since, the week has gone on visits to the doctor. Her arm hurts and she is now on antibiotics. We think that it is now on the retreat, but we aren’t sure, and when she threw up last night, she was rushed in for blood tests.

This then is our introduction to tropical medicine. The uncertainties are much larger than in Western medicine. There are fewer tested medicines, there are fewer identified viruses. If it doesn’t get better soon, she may be evacuated to Bangkok.

Ever the optimist, she is planning on playing in her first league match on Sunday. That is, if the typhoon that is coming in over Hanoi as I write is over by then…

Have a peaceful weekend, folks.

 

Learning Vietnamese

As I suspected, this language is rather difficult to learn. There are examples here of multilingual expats, fluent in another Asian language, who have accepted that they will never manage to conquer more than instructions in a taxi. The problem really is that each word can take on any one of 5 (or maybe 6) different tones, most of which sound almost identical to the outsider’s ear, and can only reliably be distinguished with deep concentration and advanced lip-reading. Then try to actually pronounce them without your Vietnamese teacher collapsing in a fit of giggles. After an hour of this battering, you end up begging pathetically, “Please say “ten” and salt” again, but slowly, and then tell me how to say them.” Sad fact of the day: I have yet to pronounce correctly any word beginning with “ng-“.

All this means that you take any triumph you can get, and so getting a taxi driver to understand where you want to go to, without resorting to showing it on your mobile phone, is a source of deep inner warmth. And if you can get him to turn left and right at your command then you brag about it when you get home.

There should be more hope for the children, neurologically speaking. Unfortunately, and inexplicably, the school only offers Vietnamese for native speakers. If this doesn’t change, then we will find another way to give the girls a chance of picking up the language. I firmly believe that kids should be exposed to as many languages as possible as early as possible, let them bathe in them, and they just pick them up. I learnt Italian at international school before the age of 12 and it has stuck with me. OK, I can only talk about football (and swear like a Roman), but that’s all you really ever need anyway.