August 28, 2006

Do you know that feeling when you’re learning a foreign language and your teacher asks you to read a sentence aloud to test your pronunciation? You hesitate for a moment, reading the sentence quietly to yourself first, thinking about how you are going to pronounce all the words. You hesitate, delaying – you really do not want to go a head with this. But there is no way out. The stakes are not life threatening by any means, but you’d really rather avoid this. Then it’s like, ‘well, there’s no way out, let’s do it’, so you take a breath then launch into it. The sentence might only be 10 or 20 words long, but once you’re into it nothing else matters. At least now that you have started, half the battle is won. The world has stopped and you are on show. Your teacher is the critical audience ready to cut you down and make you read it again should you stumble.

Once you’ve started the sentence there is no turning back, so you almost assume a relaxed que sera sera attitude. It’s almost a surreal feeling. If you mess it up, so be it. You’ll just take whatever criticism comes your way. But until you launch into it, your heart pounds! You will very probably make it to the end in one piece. You may make a mistake, and if you do, you’ll start again. But starting, when you do not want to, is the critical first step.

Well, in Hanoi and much of Vietnam you can get that feeling simply by crossing the road. Picture this. You want to cross the road. It’s busy so you move to the pedestrian crossing and wait for the traffic to stop for you. After a few minutes (or, for the more astute, a few seconds), you learn that this is simply not going to happen. So what do you do? You have to get across somehow! Well, in Hanoi, it’s just like reading that sentence to your language teacher – you simply have to take that first step onto the road and walk. It’s like a leap of faith. With all that traffic it seems like there is no way through, but unless you take that first step, with your heart pounding, you will never get across.

The traffic here is primarily small cc engined motorbikes. And there must be millions of them in this country. They are not going to stop for you, but they do know how to move around you. So, while your “ordered traffic mind” tells you to not cross the road when there is traffic around, it is the only way to cross the road here. And magically, as you walk you notice bikes gracefully alter their course to avoid you. Reminisent of Moses parting the Red Sea perhaps – the traffic just parts for you. So, just like reading that sentence, you have to take a breath, throw away your fears, step into it and …. que sera sera. You’ll get across. I don’t know how, but you will.

But do not stop! The motorbikes can’t guage stationary objects. They’ve already just calculated your walking speed and are taking that into account. Should you stop, you throw that calculation awry – just watch the biker’s face change as you end up remaining on the spot where he or she was expecting you to be gone from one second ago. It is not once that I have seen a riders expressionless face turn to confusion as I have frozen like a rabbit stuck in the headlights of a car.

The Vietnamese language is a relatively simple one. In fact, one of the dialogs in my exercise book I practiced recently claims it is too – well, there you go! The sentence structure itself is relatively straight forward. No tense (well, sort of, but certainly not the future perfect, past perfect, imperfect and all those other tenses we learnt in French class years ago). To a degree, you could argue that once you’ve learnt the basics, then it’s just a matter of learning vocab. Ok, perhaps a little simplistic, but my point is that written word is probably a lot easier to learn than English.

But there is one major difference in this language that really trips us native English speakers up. In fact, in many ways it similar to the ‘rules of the road’ here – they trip us foreigners up. You see, there are traffic rules in Vietnam, but they are only sort of obeyed to the letter. Probably the best way to describe it is to liken it to pedestrians walking a busy street. In many cities, busy pedestrian footpaths sort of have rules. An unwritten ‘code of footpath’ perhaps – for example, in a country where cars drive on the left hand side of the road, people will tend to walk on the left hand side of the foot path (I am talking about those busy streets that people pour on to from busstops and underground train stations to get to their offices). But these are not rules of law, and if someone comes toward you on your side of the street, then we do not honk at them (or yell)….we just kind of move around them. That is exactly how the roads work here. Do not be surprised at all to have a motorcycle, car, or bus coming toward on your side of the road. No one gets angry about it. Both may parties toot as if to say, “hey, I am heading towards you” and the reply toot being “yeah, so what, I am heading towards you too”, then they both just swerve around each other. And remember, this lone ‘wrong-directional’ biker, is probably not just taking you on, but the other hundreds of bikers also riding around you.

Anyway, just as the lack of obedience to the road rules throws us foreigners, so does the rigidity of the pronunciation of the language. Vietnamese is a tonal language – 6 of them in fact. Add to that complexity, 11 vowels. Then you have a ‘G’, ‘D’, ‘R’, ‘X’ and ‘S’ that all sound quite similar to an ‘S’. Rules rules rules – all of which are so key to being understood. It really is quite incredible how subtle the differences can be between two words of completely different meaning. I am quite certain that Vietnamese pronunciation could make Cantonese look like a dodle! What is key in Vietnamese is that, if you can write a word, but not know how to pronounce it, then you do not know the word!!!

Prior to the arrival of the French, the Vietnamese had a character based system similar to that of the Chinese and Japanese. The early French missionaries (no doubt confused themselves), derived a phonetic script based on the alphabet. It is an interesting looking script. You would recognize all the base letters, but they are all full of squiggles and tonal indicators above and below them.

I can just imagine the French missionaries sitting down with learned Vietnamese linguists trying to devise this new script:

Fr. Piere: What is this?

Mr. Nguyen: It is ‘chao’.

Fr. Piere: Mais oui. But this is 'chao', n’est pas?

Mr. Nguyen: No, that is ‘chao’. This is ‘chao’.

Fr. Piere: Mon Pere Gilles, I think we need a new vowel.

A word of warning, if you are writing down an address to pass to a taxi driver, then write all those squiggles and tones too – most important!

So, there are two aspects of life in Vietnam, mastery of which will stand you in good stead for long term habitation here. The language and the traffic. The new arrival is going to have to go through the nightmare of crossing the road and riding with the traffic, as well as the horror of trying your best to understand the difference between the sound ‘to’ and the sound ‘to’!

If you can ride a bike and not blink when other traffic turns into your path; and if you can string a few sentences together, without flinching, and be understood, then you really will get an understanding as to how this place works.

Needless to say, learning the language IS as differcult as crossing the road.

Chao for now.

Please send your comments and questions to: tom@eyeonhanoi.com