It’s time to fess up: after several years of living in Vietnam, my Vietnamese language skills remain a disaster. It’s a veritable train wreck, there’s no getting around it. I have excuses which I replay in my mind in an effort to dull the pain of defeat, most of which are pretty lame. Vietnamese is a tough language for most foreigners to grasp, with endless pronunciation quirks representing the biggest obstacle between us and success. Fair enough, we all know that. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to practice their English with us, so we, as guests, should indulge them, even at the expense of our own progress. That approach conveniently twists a feeble excuse for tires spinning in mud into a benevolent gesture, so that we feel we are making a contribution to the community when the truth is it’s laziness on the part of us foreigners. Those damn accents are the crux of the problem, and the cause for much despair, and there are lots of them – rising, falling, short, long, flat, bim, bam, bop, humpty, dumpty, and probably a few I’m forgetting. As if that’s not enough, sometimes the accents are stacked up on top of letters, while others appear underneath – a circle, a French-style circumflex hat thingy, a teeny-weeny dot, and a rising or falling symbol. The speaker needs to decipher them together with all the corresponding letters, then amalgamate the entire mess, and spit it all out masterfully in one fell swoop. Some words demand complementing facial movements and gesticulations, which are as critical to the word as the letters and accents, such that without those gyrations a listener won’t have the faintest idea what we’re on about. All that is great theory, very logical, so now let’s put ourselves in a day-to-day scenario in the local market. Check out this linguistic work of art: ‘cá lóc’ (snakehead fish), a freshwater beauty commonly used in Vietnamese soups and hotpots. A snakehead fish – ‘cá lóc’ ‘Cá’ is the generic term for fish – …
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