The Language

Well, Adam and I have begun to take Vietnamese language lessons. We have done pretty well for ourselves in terms of picking up important phrases, and even being able to pronounce them correctly, however there is much more to the language than please, beer, soup and rice (haha). I just had my second lesson today (Adam missed it as he is feeling ill) and it was qutie intense. There are two major differences between english and vietnamese which make things difficult. First is the alphabet. In the vietnamese alphabet, there are 3 A's, 2 E's, 3 O's, 2 U's, and I and Y sound the same, except I is a little be 'shorter' than Y. Oh, and S and X are the same sound (S), but the S is more of a Sh, and the X is a shorter S sound. The rest of the letters are somewhat similar except for Q, which is more of a 'wha' sound, and they have a second D. The D that we useis a 'yuh' sound, and the other D has a dash through the stem (so that the straight line would look like a small t if you stood it by iteslf). This D is the actual D sound. And when you say the alphabet, you don't say the letter, you say the sound. (which is a good idea, and makes me wonder at the english alphabet. I mean seriously, we have one letter, but it can have many sounds. At least in vietnamese, you say the sound that the letter makes, and that's the only sound the letter makes). However it is really difficult to pronounce some of the sounds.
The second difference is that each word has a tone. So there are 6 accents on the words. There is a no accent, and up accent (accent agout), a down accent (accent grave), an accent that is a . under the word, a tilda (~) on the word, and a question mark on top of hte word. Each one represents a different accent (obviously). This is where the real difficult comes in. You must remember all of the sounds of the alphabet, and then apply the accent to the word. So you must be able to manipulate the sound of the letter to sound proper while using hte accent. Quite strange.
Then there is another difficulty. The vietnamese vocabulary is very small. I've heard several different numbers on the amount of words, but it is somewhere around 5000 as far as I can tell. That's a lot less than the 400,000 in the english language. You may think SWEET. Well keep this in mind. Almost every word (the spelling at least) can mean 6 different things, depending ont he accent. So if you accidentally put an upward accent on a word that is supposed to be flat (no accent) you've just completely changed the meaning of your sentence.l And then whoever you are talking to bursts out in laughter, becasue they are forgiving enough to not take it offensive that you can't speak their language. In the phrase book we first got from Rog and Vicki, they showed these accents with the word Ma. Which ironically with no accent does mean mum. However, it also can mean goat, and several other words that I cannot remember. The word Ba, with no accent means 3, with an upward accent means old lady. The list is qutie extensive of mistakes that can be made.
OH, and here's the difficult thing for english speakers. Think abot how you speak. When you get excited you start talking louder. When you are tired you speak slower and quiter, and pronounce things differently. When you'r being sarcastic, or when you're angry, you say the same words, but you pronounce them differently, but essentially the MEAN the same thing. Here, if I get excited, and I say a sentence, most likely it's going to change the accent, which means I'm going to change the word meaning. So because I"m happy, I just said "I want old lady of these". So we have to learn how to control our tones. Which was a great revelation to my teaching. These children aren't used to being able to put different emphasis on words. They just read because there are no accents and so everything is bland to them. Teaching them to get excited or talk interoggatively is extremely difficult.
BUT. it is rewarding. I've said hello, and how are you and I want this in conversation to people and they actually understand and it feels good. Eventually I will be able to have a conversation which is good to know.
As for now, I just keep repeating this sounds to myself and hope that I get them right over time.
Good bye (tam biet) (The a has a . under it, which means you end the word really abruptly. The e has a ^ on it which makes it and Ay sound, and it also has a . under it which means to cut it short) Interesting.
Good luck,and good night.