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"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut"

Sam Rayburn (1882 -1961)

say that again please?

Well the second week has now passed and our fascinating In Country Orientation (ICO)continues. For a quick recap on week one please feel free to watch the delightful slideshow put together by Trish, a co-volunteer, and soon to be my housemate, along with Louisa, who also has a starring feature in the show; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppN8ImThZds.

Each day we have two Vietnamese lessons and we have now progressed from saying our name, to the more complex conversations required to barter at the market. It is to language that I now turn in this blog, for, unlike Sam Rayburn, if I am stay here for two years I will definately need to open my mouth. Yesterday we had our first practical session at the open air market. I refrained from buying a duck as I didn't want it waddling around the hotel bathroom and bought a grapefruit instead. Well at least I thought it was a grapefruit but it turned out to be something else, it was quite tasty though, whatever it was. The fact that I managed to buy anything was quite an achievement and testiment to the skills of our patient and good humoured language teacher who puts up with our outrageous pronounciation.

So why is Vietnamese so difficult? Well for those of you not familiar with this sort of language, it is tonal. This means that the sounds you make and where they are in the word, are equally, if not more important, than the combination of letters that make them up. There are six tones in the Vietnamese language; mid, low falling, low rising, high broken, high rising, and low broken. Thus every syllable can be pronounced in six different ways. Where these sounds occur in each word, is indicated by the diacritic-laden letters that you see in Vietamese writing, (thats the strange squiggles you see at the top and bottom of the letters).

The consequence of this is that different tones can completely change a words meaning. For example depending on how it is said ma could mean ghost, cheek, but, rice seedling, tomb or horse. The possibility for confusion is near endless for example, you could go to buy some oil (dầu), long tone high pitch falling, and instead say (dâu), short tone, low pitch, sudden stop, which means bride, or mistake trousers (quần) for a pub (quán). These are not the sort of confusions you wish to make in polite conversation. Just to make matters more confusing the dialect in the north is different to that in the south. In HCMC (Saigon) the low rising and high broken tones are both pronounced as the low rising tone, and to make matters that bit more interesting the Vietnamese spoken around Hue, in the centre of the country, is considered unique even by the Vietnamese.

So if you have followed me this far...you may wonder how it can be learnt. Well far from frustrating it is quite fun, learning Vietnamese improves your listening skills and exercises facial muscles you didn't know you had. The lessons on the ICO are very practical and the laughter loud, you don't even want to know the embarrasment caused if you ask for pork incorrectly, and most of all the language, like the country and people, is very beautiful as the high and low pitches swoop and glide in a musical manner. So I will persevere, and hopefully my efforts will be rewarded by even more unusual purchases at the market.

However, I have mastered one phrase, and for those of you wondering what the title of this blog is, it states..

"May I have one beer please?"

To which once it arrives the answer can only be,

"Chuc suc khoe!" or "Cheers"

See you next week for house hunting adventures in Hanoi.