Khong biet tieng Viet

Vietnamese hurts my throat.

We’re on lesson three with our Vietnamese language tutor Duong (that’s right, Zoong, just like it looks), and I still can’t recite the alphabet. Not only can I not remember it, which he wouldn’t be cruel enough to ask me to do, but I can’t look at the letters on a piece of paper and identify what sounds they make.

The vowels are the worst. Sure, I can remember tr sounds like ch, x is s and d, r and gi all make a z sound (so this soup rieu dau is actually zieu zau, and it’s on giang vo (zang va) street). But there’s one “u” sound that no human mouth should ever be asked to make. I have never felt my mind go so blank as when I try to pronounce it, literally unable to imagine which throat muscles I’d have to employ to make a sound like an aroused bull trapped in a foghorn.

I can, however, say Nobel is Swedish and I work in a publishing house (only the least useful of those is true).

I can pretty much only say those sentences to myself, though, because my lack of vocal control makes me incomprehensible to the Vietnamese. It’s a tonal language, and what appears to be the same word, said in each of the six tones, is in fact six completely different words with different meanings. That makes the language a minefield for Westerners who might, for example, change the boy’s name “Dai” to “urine” by pronouncing it a tone too high, and a torture chamber for me, whose throat cannot stand being coached in tones for an hour and a half a week. It’s like I’m training to sing in an opera, and also to be a robot when I have to say several words of the same tone in a row.

Some of the vocabulary is fun, though. For example:

Carrot = ca rot
Car = O to
Beer = bia

On the street we do a lot of miming. Otherwise, we’re like infants, pointing at words we know and saying them to each other. Generally, we know food and animals, which are in the food.

“Rice!” “Rice.” “Chicken!” “Chicken.”