Return to Vietnam!

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Well, this is the entry I thought I would write two entries ago. I have been back in Vietnam for almost three weeks and blog-wise, have nothing to show for it. Next entry I hope to cover three very exciting topics - motorbikes, roommates (house included), and jobs. But before all that, I need to detail the first two weeks back in Vietnam and the end of the LanguageCorps portion of my adventure - Teacher Training Part Two!

NOTE: Upon completing this entry, I realized that I had taken a woeful three pictures that actually correlated in some way with what I had written. So what I have done is posted photos from two places I visited on my second day in Vietnam - the War Remnants Museum and the Vietnam Zoo. To be honest, I was a little disappointed with both. The museum had a few moving photos and exhibits but it didn't really differ from any other Vietnam gallery I could have found in the States, except that it was laughably biased. Still, the photos of Agent Orange victims were haunting and there was a nice gallery of children’s artwork promoting peace. I might return to the zoo on a nicer day because by the time I arrived in the late afternoon, the drizzle had turned into a steady rainfall; I likely wouldn’t have gone in at all had admission not cost 50 cents. Only a few of the animals were out in the rain so I don’t think I got the full experience, although I must say visitors are allowed to get shockingly close to the enclosed creatures. I climbed a raised platform and petted a giraffe’s head when it bowed down to eat grass; it was like petting a horse except…well, actually it was exactly like petting a horse. Anyhow, enjoy the pictures, back to LanguageCorps.

The second half of the program is divided into two parts: local language classes in the morning and teaching practice in the afternoons. Every morning at 9, I would bounce out of bed and bound down the stairs, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to begin another lesson in learning Vietnamese.

At first glance, the Vietnamese language is less intimidating than Thai or Khmer, simply because it uses English letters instead of foreign characters. However, after spending the first two days working on pronunciation of the alphabet and various letter combinations, one quickly realizes that certain aspects of the language are deceptively difficult. But first, the good news. Vietnamese grammar is beautiful in its simplicity. Each verb only has one tense, so when comparing the sentences “I eat rice” (Tôi ăn cơm) to “I ate rice” (Tôi đã ăn cơm), “I will eat rice” (Tôi sẽ ăn cơm) and “I am eating rice” (Tôi đang ăn cơm), the word for “eat” (ăn) stays the same. Vietnamese simply add an all-encompassing word in front of each verb to provide its tense - “đã” for past, "sẽ” for future, and “đang” for present continuous. Conjugation of verbs, the hardest part of learning Spanish, I found, is non-existent. Even simpler is the numeral system. Each number from 1-10 has a distinct word and then after that, numbers are comprised of putting these words together. For example, the number 16 (mười sáu) is made up of 10 (mười) and 6 (sáu). To say 57 (năm mười bảy), one literally says “Five ten seven” or “Five tens and one seven”. Learning to count in Vietnamese reminds me of learning to count in third-grade with those math problems that use blocks stacked in tens to illustrate grouping. The system is so simple that the Vietnamese use it for more than just counting. Days of the week are distinguished by the word for “day” (thứ) followed by whatever number day it is starting with Sunday. So to say Tuesday, one says “Thứ ba” (Day three). The same format is utilized with months: September is “Tháng chín” (Month nine) and so forth. It is as if parts of the language were constructed using a computer generated formula. In terms of substance and flavor, it’s about as imaginative as a ham sandwich. In terms of helping me learn the language, it’s absolutely priceless.

Now, the bad news. While both reading and writing Vietnamese are made fairly simple by the grammar system, speaking and understanding the language when spoken is extremely challenging for foreigners due to the tonal inflection that each word carries. Virtually all words in Vietnamese are monosyllabic. In addition, there are only eight consonant or consonant combinations that words can end with (p, c, m, n, t, ch, nh, ng). Those two points in mind, one can see that after a while the options for word spellings are going to be fairly limited. Enter: alternative vowels and tonal accents. All vowels except for “i” have two or three possible sounds, like English. But whereas in English the sound is determined by surrounding letters, Vietnamese vowel sounds are determined by an accent placed above the letter. On top of that, there are six different ways that a word can be said and interpreted depending on the tone with which says it. There are also accents for these five tones: highest (á) , lower (à), lowest (ạ), low-rising (ả), broken low-rising (ã). The absence of an accent indicates a flat tone. In English, the tone with which one says a word can affect context - “I ordered three beers” suggests a misunderstanding in quantity while one might say, ”I ordered three beers” when three Shirley Temples arrive at the table . In Vietnamese, the tone and pitch affect the overall meaning of the word. For example, the word ma said with a flat tone means “ghost”. But said in highest tone, má means “cheek”, lower tone - mà means “but”, lowest tone - mạ means “rice seeding”, low-rising tone - mả means “tomb”, and broken low-rising tone - mã means “horse”. I once complained to Linh, my instructor, that speaking Vietnamese is like being trapped in a sort of annunciation prison - no one is free to just fling around words and people are verbal slaves to the all-mighty tone. And really, it is sort of true. In a conversation about music with some students, I learned that many young Vietnamese people favor Western music (more on this later) and find traditional music boring. This, they said, is due to many Vietnamese songs having similar tunes because they are limited by the tones in lyrics. Basically, if a song about love suddenly has a note that differs in pitch from the inflection used for the word “love”, the song is no longer about love anymore.

Even more difficult than applying the correct tone to a word is picking up on it when a Vietnamese person is speaking. The words in the language are all short and when flying rapidly past my novice ears, many of them sound completely indistinguishable. So when a waiter in a restaurant asks me where I would like to sit (Bạn muốn ngồi ở đâu?), all I hear is “muffle muffle coconut muffle”, at which point I politely decline (“Không cám ơn”) and end up standing for dinner. I like to think that perhaps I will reach a point of exposure to the language where certain things will click and the learning curve will increase - maybe, maybe not. But until then, my goal is to learn and retain one new vocabulary word or phrase per day. Today’s phrase is, “I didn’t order this!” (Tôi không gọi món này!) which I plan to use later at dinner when the person taking my order invariably misunderstands my infantile attempts at speaking the language.

After Vietnamese class ended around 10:30, I typically spent most of lunchtime planning what I was going to teach in the afternoon. The set up for practice teaching is very simple: volunteer students sign up and come for an hour and a half each day to learn English from LanguageCorps teachers who in turn gain valuable experience managing a classroom. The program does not incorporate a textbook and therefore gives teachers absolute freedom in deciding what to teach. In my case, this was not as beneficial as it may sound. Teachers usually work each class in pairs, both brainstorming and teaching the lesson. As the only member of the October - November session, I flew solo for two weeks. Each day I would usually sit on my hands for at least a half hour trying to think of an interesting topic that would incorporate vocabulary that the students did not already know and would actually benefit from; my students - mixed gender, aged 18-22 - knew a fair amount of English already and so by the end of the two weeks I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas. Anyway, rather than droll through the duration of the session, I thought I’d share five of my favorite moments from practice teaching, in no particular order:

* During one of the first classes, I taught a lesson on menus and students learned the words restaurants use to describe their food (vocabulary such as fresh, tender, juicy, crispy, low-fat, all-natural). To end class, students were put into groups and I handed out blank sheets of paper telling them to imagine their own restaurant and create a menu that describes how delicious all the food is. Though the groups were all excited and worked hard, one all-male group could not stop laughing as the members furiously scribbled, fighting over the pen as ideas sparked. I had all the groups present their menu in front of the class and of course, the boys wanted to go first. Their restaurant? Yum Yum Bow Wow. The menu? Dog-meat burger, dog-meat pizza, dog-meat burrito, dog-meat noodle soup, and everyone’s favorite, spaghetti with dogballs. Ironically, they forgot to include hot dog.

* November 20th is Teacher Day in Vietnam and it was nice to see that it is celebrated with an ardent sense of gusto. (NOTE: how many American children do you think know when Teacher Appreciation Day is in the U.S.? Do you know? Click here to find out). There is no class on Teacher Day and students oftentimes visit their current or former teachers at their homes and present gifts such as cake and flowers. A popular tradition is for teachers to take their class out to karaoke that evening. For one day each year teachers are fully appreciated for their efforts and remember, all this from a country that has a very high level of respect for their educators in the first place. Anyhow, the first wind I caught of this holiday was the day beforehand when students began asking me if class would be canceled. I looked over at Linh who happened to be observing my teaching that lesson and she shook her head. “There will be class” she said, “because Mr. Thom isn’t a real teacher yet!” The class laughed and all went “aww” the way a studio audience does when a sitcom character gets dumped. But several students brought me cake and little Vietnamese candies the next day, which I found both touching and tasty.

* Towards the end of the first week, we revisited food and focused on types of seafood (i.e. oysters, clams, mussels, etc.) The lesson turned out a little drier (pun intended) than I had anticipated and so in a moment of spontaneity, I broke off the students into groups and told them that they would be writing and performing short skits that would take place at a restaurant. Back in Cambodia, Rick had warned us that Asian students can be particularly shy in the classroom and so I thought I would put his theory to the test. I decided to give them each a different style to perform the scene in; they were either assigned to use robot voices, pretend to be cartoon characters, walk and talk in slow motion, sing the entire scene as an opera, or make their skit a Shakespearean tragedy where everybody dies in the end. I had no idea how it would turn out but really, isn’t that the fun of it? Surprisingly, it was a huge success, the students were very outgoing and the class wailed with laughter the whole time, especially when one of the students stabbed another with lobster claws and then turned the crustacean on himself - a clever mesh-up of Romeo & Juliet and Cleopatra.

* The classroom at LanguageCorps has a television on a side table that gets a variety of stations. I don’t know how exactly how cable programming works in Vietnam but most televisions I’ve watched seem to have HBO, Cinemax, Cartoon Network, and ESPN, as well as a good deal of British and Vietnamese channels. Many times students would file in late to class and so to keep them and myself entertained I would turn it to Cartoon Network which always shows Tom & Jerry at 3:00. The program mainly runs the more recent cartoons where the characters talk but occasionally we would get one of the classics where everything is sexist, racist, and funny; I definitely remembered a few of them from a certain VHS tape that Mom and Dad will undoubtedly recall. Anyhow, the television is an old one and the numbers on the remote control fail to respond when pushed, meaning that one has to scroll through endless channels of full or mostly-static to eventually arrive at the desired station. I was doing just that to reach the Cartoon Network when all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of something on one of the mostly-static channels that made me stop and turn back. Through the flickering gray, I could definitely make it out. It was an image I had seen many times since I arrived at Robbins Hall dormitory in the fall of 2003. Hard as it was to believe, I was looking at the giant yellow “O” painted on the halfway line of the football field at Autzen Stadium in Eugene. Squinting, I could just make out the score: Oregon 10, Stanford 3. This was the first American football I had seen on television during the trip and it wasn’t NFL, it wasn’t a highly-touted college game; neither of the teams were even ranked. To this day I have no idea how or why that game was being broadcast over here but it brought me unbridled amusement to think back to junior year of college when we spent all Saturday morning pre-gaming in preparation to watch Oregon play at Stanford only to find out that the game wasn’t on television, even in Eugene. And here I was, halfway around the world, getting my alma mater update.

* I taught a lesson one class on world music, instruments, and language. I brought in my laptop with some pre-downloaded YouTube clips and “traveled around the world” by showing the class videos of African drumming, Mexican mariachi, Indian Bollywood, Japanese pop, and American rock. Each video we discussed the instruments used and language sung in. I had earlier heard a Green Day song in the supermarket and so for American rock, I showed a video of the band playing one of its more recent songs live and funny enough, all the students knew the song and started singing along. After teaching the difference between “electric” and “acoustic” guitar, I told the students that I also liked Green Day and asked if they knew any of the band's other songs. They immediately rattled off four or five from the latest album American Idiot, so I then asked if they had heard any of the older stuff: Longview? When I Come Around? Brain Stew? Not a single hand went up. A couple of students had heard Good Riddance (Time of your Life) but that was about it. Completely unacceptable, I thought, and that is how it came to be that students were treated to a "Green Day: Past to Present" lesson the next day in class. I played selected tracks (mostly my personal favorites) and for each song I printed off a lyric sheet with some of the words blanked out that they had to fill in as the song played; some might call it a waste of time, I would call it a foreign language listening activity. Of course, I had to alter a few inappropriate lyrics, most notably, “Masturbation’s lost its fun” became “Recreation in the sun”. But in all, the students enjoyed it and who knows, maybe one day I’ll be hanging out downtown and run into one of them wearing a Dookie shirt.

Right now it has just passed midnight for all of you back home on the West Coast and so here I go...

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

In a few hours we will be enjoying a savory Indian takeout meal with rice and naan and I believe a pumpkin cheesecake has been purchased for dessert. Hope everyone enjoys the holidays to the fullest extent and make sure to send any funny stories from the weekend my way!

Chào!

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Comments

[Chris]

Sweet
Thom, epic to hear about your teaching activities. Sounds like things are going great. Glad to hear things are a success in the classroom. Hopefully you don't find anymore dark wells to almost fall off of in Vietnam like you did in Cambodia.