Pronunciation may be the death of me

Another week gone by, I am happy to report that all of us are happily settling into our jobs and working again.

 

After mastering the art of catching (and actually staying on) a motorbike taxi, the next big challenge is the language barrier.

I would like to expand on Duncan's blog update from last week where he gave you an introduction into the world of Vietnamese pronunciation. This little problem we are having extends further than not ordering chicken in a restaurant for fear of insulting the waitress.

 

As Duncan and Donovan have discovered over the past couple of weeks here, Vietnamese is a world apart from English. In English, we tend to stress the consonants of the words we say. This is proven by the fact that we can understand Americans (who say "cAn't"), Australians (who say "cyAAn't") and the English (who say "can't" properly). All of them have different stresses on the vowel, but we know what they are saying because the consonants remain neutral.

The opposite can be said for Vietnamese. In every word, the emphasis is placed on the pronunciation of the vowel sound to a point where the majority of them drop the consonant completely. Now, this wouldn't normally be too much of a problem BUT the Vietnamese like to string together as many vowels as possible to make up words. It's almost as if when the language was created there were only nine letters in the alphabet.

To give you an example of this, in my one high school class there are two boys that sit next to each other. The one's name is Nyeuaeu and the other's name is Nyueaue. How the hell do you say that?? The answer is, you don't. A big trend in Vietnam is to have an "English" name. Most of these are given to the students by their foreign teachers. I find this a bit awkward and prefer to let them "name" themselves. The result is that you end up with people in your class named John Cena, Enrique, Angelina, Miley, Flower, Moon, Love. Not too bad, until you reach the back row of students who have now run out of options and you start getting Messi, Trust, Mr Karate and my all time favourite (and this is no lie) ... Pegasus. The result is that I now have a class made up of 20 celebrities, 8 emotions and 1 flying horse.

 

Class names are not the biggest concern though. It's actually getting to work. The bigger area's in the city are broken down into districts 1 to 11. Easy enough as most people know English numbers here. Unfortunately, not one of us work in one of the districts, but in the little in between area's that were not included into this clever system.

To better illustrate my point I will give you a breakdown of my teaching schedule. As you know, I work at a university in the evenings and a high school during the day. The high school is one of the better schools in the city and have 3 different campuses which I travel to. I start my morning at our guest house. We live in Binh Thanh (pronounced Bin Tun) district. From here I travel to the first school in Thanh Binh (pronounced Tun Bin) district. When I am finished there I have 2 hours until my next lesson so I go to get lunch at Benh Thanh (pronounced Ben Tan) market where I get a delicious baguette, which in Vietnamese is called Ban Tan (said like an American would). Then I am off to my next lesson in Binh Tanh (pronounced Bin Tan) district. Do you start seeing the complications here? These places are not close together either. Apparently there is a really nice garden area in Bin Than (pronunciation unknown) but I am too scared to go there for fear of never returning.

So basically what I am saying is that whenever I get on a motorbike and state where I would like to go I am never quite sure if I will end up at either school, the market, back at home, a strange garden or if I have asked the driver to buy me a baguette. Either way, it is exciting and I get to see something new everyday :)

 

My advice from all of this, should you come and visit us, is this: if you are sitting in a restaurant and suddenly here a strange sound, like a woman in pain and her airpipe struggling to take in oxygen DO NOT attempt the Heimlich maneuver as she is probably only calling her son Huuaeeye over.