Things Expats Often Misjudge when picking a country to live in — Part 1

The Language

There are a LOT of things I learned about Vietnam, the first country I chose to live in, after I was committed to living here. The most important was the language, but it wasn’t the first.

The Vietnamese language (tiếng Việt) is a tonal language. My American English is NOT. In a tonal language, the way you say a word determines its meaning. In a non-tonal language, how you say a word may give a clue to your emotion at the moment, but the basic meaning of the word remains the same in context regardless of how it’s said.

For example… in English, when you say “table”, it could be the thing you sit at to eat; or it could be an organized list like the periodic table; or it could be a water table, though in that case, you would say, “water table”. Even if you pronounced it ‘incorrectly’, most English-speakers would understand what you meant.

In Vietnamese, the word for the thing at which you sit is “bàn” with a downward inflection.

If you say it with an upward inflection, “bán”, you’ve said “sell”.

If you say it with no inflection, “ban”, you’ve said “board”.

If you say it with a questioning inflection, “bản”, you’ve said “copy”.

If you say it with a truncated ‘a’ (bạn), you’ve said “friend”.

There are more bans, but by now you get my point. When I think I say table, there’s a good chance I’ve said board or friend.

And there are dozens more such words, e.g. “muỗi” is mosquito and “muối” is salt.

When I moved here, I knew tiếng Việt was a tonal language, but I didn’t know that I would absolutely SUCK at hearing or speaking it. I also didn’t know that when many Vietnamese see a Western European-looking white bread face like mine (or indeed any non-Asian mug), they assume either that any noise coming out of the pie hole is English, or that they will not understand my attempts at their language. This means that even on the rare occasion that my wife or my daughter later verify that I said something correctly, the intended recipient looks at me like I have three heads and quickly turns to them and asks, “Ông nói gì?” (“What did he say?”).

So, with the exception of numbers — like the cost of something in a store/restaurant or how many of something I want — or basic pleasantries, I pretty much leave speaking the Vietnamese language to the Vietnamese people.

This is also one of the reasons that, when I first dated my now wife, I paid dearly for her to take private English lessons three days a week for about 18 months. The other reason is that tiếng Việt is widely spoken only in Vietnam and Southern California, whereas English will get you by almost anywhere.

Getting back to my lack of ability, some (many? most?) reading this will say,

“Take classes!”

I have. I need group in-person language training to really get it and was taking such classes in 2016 when the local government shut down only the Vietnamese language classes in my town. The school still today teaches English, French, and German, but not Vietnamese. I’ve heard it’s because the law requires tiếng Việt teachers to have a certification in Vietnamese culture that is apparently difficult to get. If they ever start up again, I’ll be in the queue the first day.

Until then, I will regularly thank the gods for my Google Translate app — though it really needs to improve its Vietnamese-to-English abilities.