Vietnamese: The third most difficult langauge in the world

Finally, a post on the experience of trying to learn Vietnamese: the third most difficult language in the world *read dramatically*. So why is it so hard? The tones. I think at one point I said there were seven tones in Vietnamese, that proves just how well I have mastered the language, there are actually six. They are as follows: level, high rising, falling, dipping-rising, high breaking-rising, and finally the foot stop. Some words are spelled the same way but change the tone and they mean something completely different. So basically you can have the same word, but with the six different tones it can have six  different meanings.

F, J, W, & Z do not exist in the Vietnamese alphabet (making my name Emma Ells Ames). Even with the absence of these four letters, there are a total of 29 letters in the Vietnamese alphabet. How can this be? Well it is because all the diacritics, the accents around certain letters that symbolize a different pronunciation. For example, there are three different letters A's. ,  ,  . Now, this is when it gets tricky– each of the six tones can be applied to these a's. That means that there are 18 different ways to pronounce the letter a. AHHHHH! You can have something that looks like this: or this or even this: ặ

This post is all over the place and I apologize, but I feel like I can't write one thing without explaining something else. Back to the alphabet: there are also two d's, D and Đ. D actually makes a y or z sound depending on what region you are in (Northerners dialect z, Southern y) Đ  makes the hard d sound, the way we pronounce d in English. Other very different pronunciations: X makes a ssss sound and S makes a sh sound (in the North).

I know I said that there are 29 letters in the alphabet but ng, nh, tr, th, kh, gh, & gi are also considered letters since they make their own sound– I guess it is equivalent to "ch" or "tr" in English.

So here is an example of the different tones and diacritics in Vietnamese and how much they can mess with your mind. I just took three letters "cho" and added different tones and accents to them. There are probably at least a dozen more meanings for cho if I combined accents and diacritics differently. I just didn't have the patience to do so.

dog= chó

market = chợ

for = cho

seat = chỗ

place = chổ

elbow = chỏ

wait= chờ

It is really hard to get away from the mindset that whenever I see o, it doesn't make the ohhh sound.  ô makes the oohhh sound. o almost sounds like aww. Whaatt is going on here? 

I have concluded that the reason for all the tones and accents is because Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. If a word is more than two syllables there is a space between the syllables. For example the word for farmer is nông dân, not nôngdân. This is even seen in the names of cities, towns and provinces. Westerners write Hanoi, Vietnamese write Hà Nội.

I mentioned before that there are regional dialects– the Northern, Central, and Southern. In America each state or region has its own accent, however we can still easily understand one another. Not the case in Vietnam. Northerners complain that they can't understand the Southern accent and vice-versa. And some say that the Central accent is the hardest to understand. While getting our fortune told in Hue, (central Vietnam) Vy, who is from the south, had a hard time understanding the fortune teller. Vy was actually concerned that she wouldn't be able to translate because the fortune teller's pronunciation was so different from her own.

Here is a story about the difficulty of differentiating the tones and sounds of letters. When I was at the pagoda last Sunday it was someone's birthday so after lunch we had birthday cake (yum). I was sitting across the table from the birthday boy and there was one piece of cake left. I tried to say, ăn bánh– eat the cake. Everyone burst out laughing. Why? Because I had actually said ăn bảng– eat the table. G and H sound ridiculously similar in Vietnamese. I have learned that the best way to deal with embarrassing situations like this is to just laugh along. Vietnamese really appreciate the fact that I even try to learn their difficult language, and are easily impressed when I am able to successfully communicate a phrase or two. So until I leave Vietnam I am going to keep stumbling along, laughing the whole way.