Who Let The Sheep In? - Our First Vietnamese Lesson

I couldn’t look at Carolyn and Amy, sitting either side of me. The urge to giggle was becoming unbearable.

The previous hour and a half of ‘Survival Vietnamese’ had been baffling enough, struggling to make sense of address forms and any number other than 3 (333 being the name of a brand of Vietnamese beer, it was the one number we all knew already). But then our teacher, Ms. Khanh, began to introduce the six tones of Vietnamese. One by one they were added to a diagram like the one below, with examples from the vocabulary we’d learnt earlier. Then the drilling started…

Ma… ma… ma-ah… maah… ma-aa-argh… Eighteen English teachers? No. We had been transformed into a flock of mildly embarrassed sheep. And Carolyn was starting to add a touch of vibrato to her ma’s for that extra hint of sheepiness…

(yes, I know the dotted line for the Hanoi ma is missing. It went AWOL somewhere in the process of converting to PDF).


The follow-up activity lost me completely. Momentarily distracted, by the time I zoned back in, the ‘Identify the Tone’ Quiz was moving too quickly for me to keep up. I’ve got a feeling the next fifteen weeks of lessons are going to be a bit of a slog.

To be fair, I had been doing alright earlier in the lesson. The basic forms of address Ms Khanh presented, weren’t too complicated if you’ve already struggled with Japanese politeness forms, and if, like me (and Ms Khanh apparently), you are prone to drawing pictures and diagrams on the board which make sense in your head as you draw them, but which are greeted with furrowed brows and perplexed expressions from your students.

And Carolyn and I won a lolly each in a numbers game. Ms Khanh called out a number and you had to hold hands with that number of people. If you couldn’t find a group to join, Ms Khanh dotted your arm with a red board marker. We escaped with only one dot each (thereby winning the lollies) by standing hand-in-hand in the corner looking nervous, and just reaching out and grabbing the hand of the next nearest person whenever Ms Khanh called out a number greater than two.

If nothing else it’s going to be interesting comparing these lessons with my other language learning experiences, as well as mentally making notes on and stealing ideas from Ms Khanh.