HANOI, VIETNAM – Melanie and I finally did it… After living in Hanoi for five months we finally signed up for a Vietnamese language course – 10 lessons over five weeks (15 hours of class time).
We’re looking forward to learning to speak enough Vietnamese to be able to carry on a conversation, however simple, with the people we encounter on a daily basis.
We can say “Hello” and “Thank You”
To our credit, we have picked up a few words here and there. We can say “hello,” “thank you” and “no,” and we’ve learned the names of some of the different kinds of food. But that’s about it.
We can’t even count in Vietnamese… Well, except for the words in the title above: “Một, hai, ba” (“One, two, three”). I’ll say more about that in just a minute.
We’ve been lucky so far. A lot of Vietnamese speak at least a little bit of English, especially here in Hanoi. Being the capital city, as well as a huge tourist destination, a lot of foreigners live, work and visit here. And most of the foreigners (even those not from the U.S.) can speak some English.
Being unable to speak Vietnamese doesn’t mean we’re completely excluded from the marketplace. Some basic sign language, pointing and smiling has proven to be very effective.
In a restaurant, if there is no English menu, we will often point to what someone else is eating and hold up two fingers to indicate that we’d like two orders of that selection.
I hold up my fingers to indicate the quantity…
Same thing in the Market. I can point at the mangoes, onions, peppers, eggs, whatever, and hold up my fingers to indicate the quantity. That and my winning smile seems to go a long way in communication.
When it comes time to pay, the vendor will often pull out a pocket calculator to show us how much is due. Sometimes they’ll pull out a wad of currency and peel off the appropriate bills to show the total.
I’ve even had them reach into my own wad of cash and extract the correct payment. That can be a little disconcerting, but so far no one has tried to grab the whole thing. They only take what’s rightfully due.
I said before that we don’t know how to count, except for “một, hai, ba.” Let me explain…
We know those few numbers because that’s a popular drinking toast among the Vietnamese men who frequent the many hotpot restaurants around our neighborhood.
At lunchtime there will be a very lively crowd of men sitting together at a long table, with a pot of boiling broth in the middle into which various greens, slices of meat or seafood (sometimes live) and gobs of rice noodles are cooked and shared around the table.
The meal is accompanied by numerous pitchers of beer
The meal is usually accompanied by numerous pitchers of golden beer. After a few pitchers, the toasts become more raucous and repeat at much shorter intervals. “Một, hai, ba, dô!” (“One, two, three, in!”) they shout, after which everyone at the table is expected to down their entire glass of beer.
Once you’ve heard that shouted toast repeated several times it becomes indelibly etched into your brain. “Một, hai, ba, dô!”
I can only hope our Vietnamese language class is half as effective in teaching us how to say more than “one, two, three.”
On any weekend you will find a group of Vietnamese chaps on the path around the lake opposite the Apricot hotel. They are English language students and their teacher and they accost likely looking targets on whom they can practise their new-found skills. The guys I came across had been studying for five months and were doing really well. Maybe you could come to an agreement with them to improve your abilities in each other’s language.
We often encounter students (of all ages) who want to practice their English on us. But they usually ONLY want to speak English. But we do have a couple of Vietnamese friends who are willing to suffer through our mistakes and correct us as we try to learn their language.
Well, that’s about one word a month. You guys should be fluent soon! The cook in Peru sat and talked to me all evening after dinner in Spanish and I didn’t understand a word. Ha! But I think I learned bits anyway. And I found that a beer or two makes me fluent!