Like A Local: The first days of learning Vietnamese

What's a new and nervous expat going to make of learning Vietnamese, one of South East Asia's most notoriously difficult and confusingly accented languages?

After four years, I've gained enough experience in horribly, violently butchering the language and have gained at least a little conversational know-how, if only through making mistakes so often.
Let me give a little insight into how I made it from level zero, all the way to at least fourth-grade fluency, and how the art of being open to ridicule is going to make your language learning adventure in the early days in Vietnam a lot more bearable.

My love affair with learning languages began to blossom later in life than most kids in the modern world, at the ripe old age of ten. Our Japanese teacher visited our 5th grade classroom every Thursday for an hour or two and pretty soon the whole class could sing, remember basic greetings on cue and took delight in chiming "Arigatouuuu" as we bowed deeply.

Continuing the same lessons and extending upon them in my elective subjects in high school, I gradually picked up the grammar structure, the nuances of the pronunciation, and had a moderate amount of kanji characters in my repertoire. I never reached a high proficiency level, nor was I able to muster great confidence in speaking, having not once, but twice using the word for "Sorry" instead of "goodbye" in my spoken assessment examinations. After graduation, my Japanese skills gradually faded away into nothingness, the old trope of "use it or lose it" being evident and punishing my laziness.

I did not study any other foreign languages in the four years that followed, until my trip to Vietnam in March 2013. Using a few simple language apps to master the words for "Hello," "Good bye," "My name is" and other basic essentials, I felt at least prepared for at least the first few seconds of my time in Vietnam.  Studying more vocabulary from a small Lonely Planet phrasebook on the plane en route to Hanoi became useful later when I blurted out the word for 'hospital' to the taxi driver after my friend Shannon had had an accident and needed stitches.

Over the first few weeks during my volunteer stint in Hanoi, I managed to piece together some simple phrases that I felt were most important and urgent enough to memorise, including "How much is this?" "I am vegetarian" and "Where is the toilet?" I used those three phrases so often within the last few days of my trip that it must have seemed to outsiders that I was suffering from some kind of digestional discomfort from all the reasonably priced vegetables I was eating. In the last few moments of my Hanoi days, I finally managed to pipe up a meek "please stop here" in the taxi at the airport. He clearly didn't need reminding as there was nowhere else for a white girl with all her luggage to be 40kms out of Hanoi, but I felt accomplished nonetheless.

Coming back to Hanoi in September of the same year, I felt more confident to use Vietnamese in the next phase of life in Vietnam, learning more carefully how to master the tones and how not to accidentally say "penis" all the time, which is frighteningly easy and a story for another day.

For people only starting out in Vietnam, I would strongly suggest locking down a Vietnamese friend in the early days and having them give you an hour or two per week in basic communication and practising the correct pronunciation of greetings, numbers and phrases.

Nine times out of ten, when you go to the market as a budding expat and you're filled with hope and excitement, you will forget your Vietnamese in the hustle and bustle and cacophony of it all. You will accept a price which has been carefully hiked up to a hefty double or triple amount to suit your assumed wealth, and a swift "Không" and a smile will swiftly let it be known that you are not to be fucked with.
The woman who's cheekily asking for you to mortgage your moped in exchange for watermelons will suddenly change her tune. With a bit of apologetic flirting, she'll give you a price that's still far above the local rate, but will at least suffice, until you can gloriously master "I'm not a backpacker, don't lie to me"and the whole village will bow down to your blind confidence in awe as you sashay out of there with mountains of still-just-barely-above-local-rate produce. You'll make the best salad of your life and enjoy every bite, still probably not realising that though she might have come down on price, she's given you the oldest tomatoes from the pile or the ones that fell off the cart this morning.

Sometimes, less is more, and I can't even imagine counting the amount of times I've muttered ONE WORD in Vietnamese and market ladies/taxi drivers/acquaintances will exclaim "WOW she speaks Vietnamese."
Your fragile ego will take whatever acknowledgement it can to counterbalance the embarrassment of fucking up LITERALLY SO, SO OFTEN.
You'll have a sliver of success in squeaking out a few words pf baby-level Tieng Viet, and pretty soon you'll be shouting "EM OI" with brash confidence in the typical waiter-summoning style of your new home.

Once you've got "What is this?" down-pat, you'll soon enter a new level of language learner proficiency, and locals will delight in giving you an impromptu Vietnamese lesson as you point at salt shakers and pomelos and chopsticks and sandals excitedly as your vocabulary grows exponentially and you make an absolutely dick of yourself.

The beauty is in making a dick of yourself, and not being afraid to. The more dickish and ridiculous you look, even as your parents visit and laugh at you as you haggle with a cyclo driver, even as you consistently say "stupid" instead of "sleep," the more the locals cackle at your frail attempts, the better! You're making it, and every little bit of Tieng Viet helps your day to day goings on in Hanoi, your new home and the centre stage of your newest and scariest language adventure.

Stay tuned for a more exhaustive list of how Vietnamese has its fair share of tricky words to be wary of, and how to go from nervous newbie to pompous pro in a few excruciating years.

Until then! Cháo Bàn!
(Shown incorrectly to mean 'porridge table' instead of 'goodbye.' Told ya.)