Toi khong hieu!

I keep on getting slapped in the face with realities about language and communication, and how these have become mental workouts for me.

A Vietnamese woman yelled at me because I was blocking her way while she was dragging her motorbike in the sidewalk, looking for a spot to park.

“Peep peep peep!” she yelled, her voice blended very well with all the other vehicles honking in the narrow alleys of the Old Quarter in Hanoi.

I turned to my friend, after the silly encounter.

“Toby, a woman just yelled at me,” I started. “She yelled: peep peep peep!”

Toby laughed. I laughed with him.

That encounter was hilarious because I knew exactly what was happening: the woman, who was dragging a heaving motorbike, knew that I wasn’t Vietnamese and she wasn’t exactly sure how to yell “get out of the way” in English. She used her instinct and mimicked a sound that would communicate the same idea (cleverly, albeit ungracefully).

Conversely, I have been subjected to several situations where pointing and nodding are my only means for communication. I even mispronounce my ever-reliable survival phrase “toi khong hieu,” which I’m pretty sure caused me to become the laughing stock of the Vietnamese.

Clearly, hazy communication had me driving down a rough road with a clunky vehicle. Daily interactions and even language classes often ensue hilarity; but in the end, the Vietnamese and I get our ideas across the language barrier.

Not same same

My first months in Hanoi broke down all my communication skills back to basics. It was a refreshing chance to take a step back for a bird’s eye view of how we all communicate to each other…and how much I have countlessly resisted the urge to pull my hair out of frustration.

My Malayo-Polynesian language, Filipino, is worlds apart from what there is in Vietnam.

Vietnamese belongs to the Austroasiatic language family. It borrows most of its vocabulary from Chinese, and its writing system (Quoc Ngu) is heavily influenced by the French. The sophisticated Latin alphabet of Vietnamese makes it easy for its speakers to tell how words should be pronounced because of the diacritics that indicate accents and tones.

Employing multiple tones for communication is crucial and is the key feature of the language. Each syllable in Vietnamese is marked with a tone that indicates differences in meaning.

This is where hilarity and frustration ensue–especially for a beginner like me.

I like to order stir-fried noodles with beef, My Xao Bo (Bo means beef). All three syllables are pronounced with a low, falling accent, which I normally can’t do. That’s how I almost always end up ordering stir-fried noodles with father (because I tend to mispronounce “Bo”). Seeing a waiter laugh at me feels like clockwork.

stir fried noodles with beef…not with father

And apparently, I’m not alone. Funny encounters of foreigners with Vietnamese are all over the Internet.

There’s an American guy who can’t pronounce the name of his sister-in-law correctly. There’s a guy who struggled pronouncing the Vietnamese word for “station” correctly. And there’s another who now refuses to say “I like pork meat” in Vietnamese to eliminate the risk of sounding offensive to women.

Similarly, the Vietnamese have a hard time learning and speaking English too! In a scientific journal published by the Vietnam National University, author Ha Cam Tam points out that “Vietnamese learners encounter great difficulties in learning English pronunciation.” This is because of the foreign sound systems in English–more specifically, the way English speakers pronounce ending sounds differently from what is “deeply rooted” in native Vietnamese speakers.

It is natural to encounter these difficulties; anyone who wishes to cross the language barrier has to go through some sort of mental shock as a form of preparation for a new set of syntax and lexicon. And this doesn’t happen overnight (not with low-quality language resources and a Vietnamese teacher who herself can’t speak intermediate English)! It would take some time before all these unintelligible sounds around me to form into meaningful conversations.

Can the real Mr. Huyen please stand up?

Learning syntax is one thing. Pronunciation is another. And trying to put sense into a conversation with the Vietnamese is another universe.

Anyone who is new to Vietnamese (and comes from a culture where tone is of low importance) will constantly find speaking correctly a challenge. In the same way, to be understood by someone becomes a test of patience that has once caused me to resist the urge to gouge my eyeballs.

In a soiree, I asked my co-workers whether Huyen was coming.

“Huyen, who?”

They didn’t know whom I was referring to, possibly because I had the syllables spoken incorrectly.

Our name game was easy really: there is only one Huyen in the newsroom, but everyone was clueless.

I tried speaking the same name with different tone permutations, going through trial and error and risking myself of sounding extremely funny.

Hooyen. Hooyin, Hoyeen. But no. They didn’t know any of the Huyens that I mentioned.

Then I blurted out, “Huyen, the designer!”

They all sighed in unison “Huh-yun!”

I felt the need to facepalm. And surely, I’m not alone.

Expats in Vietnam share the same sentiment. “If I tell a taxi driver ‘Ga Saigon,’ but pronounce the ‘ga’ wrongly (as in ‘chicken’), he should surely be able to deduce that I’m not asking him for chicken, but asking him to take me to the railway station. But no, mispronunciation is always met with a shake of the head and zero effort to work out what it is I’m trying to say,” shared British Tim Russel in a newspaper story.

I have observed that the Vietnamese pay sometimes very little attention to the context by which words are used. And they laugh at pronunciation blunders or word misuse instead of politely correcting them.

“Their laughter is meant to be a friendly gesture,” my co-worker Minh Tien told me after I narrated about how I sometimes feel insulted when I’m met with these reactions. “They expect you to laugh with them. The Vietnamese are generally friendly.”

I often sincerely hope that they are, and that they won’t give me a knuckle sandwich when I confuse “sinh vien” (student) and “ve sinh” (toilet) causing more hilarity.

When in a mall and wanting to take a leak, I once asked someone, “Sinh vien o dau?” (Where is the student?).

And in a bus station, I asked someone “Em la ve sinh khong?” (Are you a toilet?).

Other lamentations

Real life interactions in Hanoi are a good place to practice what I have learned in my Vietnamese class. However, I am constantly bugged by some language residue from my university days; I studied Japanese for a year and there’s a nook in my brain that is thinking that Japanese is the same as Vietnamese.

It is not. When this happens, I keep on getting slapped in the face with realities about language and communication and how these have become mental workouts for me.

During my first month, I didn’t understand Vietnamese; but somehow, because my brain wanted to engage in conversations with the Vietnamese people that I meet, I ended using whatever (Asian language) resource it has.

I can’t count the number of times I have uttered Japanese words when talking to people here. I say “kudasai,” “chotto matte kudasai,” and “onegaishimasu,” and I say all these by accident and as thought these were mental reflexes.

And as if that’s not enough, some French words are competing for space and usage in my head. I once confused the French word for dog (chien) with dog for Vietnamese (cho). Saying “it’s nice to meet you” in French is as easy as wearing a smiling face followed by “enchanté.” Exchanging pleasantries with acquaintances in Vietnamese requires me to take a full deep breath for “rat vui duoc gap ban.”

What I find praise-worthy, however, is the amount of respect that is reflected in Vietnamese, where extensive salutations are used. “Ban,” “anh,” “chi,” “em,” “co,” “ong,” and “ba,” all have certain uses to address someone with respect.

Language baffles me almost all the time when I’m in a place away from my communication comfort zone.

I find it frustrating that today’s technology hasn’t actually reached a practical amount of utility for daily use. The Wordlens iPhone app, for instance, doesn’t support Asian languages for augmented reality translations yet; iTranslate Voice has wonky translation algorithms; and the ever-handy Google Translate just doesn’t work.

I brace myself everyday because I know that I will always fall flat on my face whenever I go down and dirty practicing my Vietnamese. Toi khong hieu!

(This story was first published in Mindanao Times and in Vietnam Economic Times – The Guide magazine; Writing Detours was nominated in the 2013 Globe Davao Media Excellence Awards for the Blogger of the Year award for this story)