Learning foreign languages

"Where did you learn English?" Many people asked me this question. Actually, English was my 3rd foreign language and I learned it at the evening classes in Hanoi. While English was not my official foreign language that I learned at school and college, it's now my major foreign language at work and I can travel extensively with the ability to speak it. If I could turn back the hand of time, I would focus on learning English and French, maybe a little Japanese. All the international organizations prefer English and French when employing new staff and they often provide good offers in both the pay and benefits. Unfortunately, I couldn't satisfy both conditions. I had spent too much time and energy learning Japanese and then I realized that English was the most important language in business and for doing anything. It's also much easier than other languages. It took me many years to learn the truth and I had to make another effort from the beginning.

Russian was my first foreign language and I didn't like it at all. Japanese always is the most difficult language that I've known. Its pronounciation is easy, but reading and writing are real challenges. Even Japanese students in Vietnam, after 4-year graduation from their colleges, still cannot read newspapers. There are about 2,000 Chinese characters in Japanese and when they combine with each other, there is no fixed rule to read them correctly. French was my 4th foreign language and I had problems with its pronounciation. My teacher said that my French was affected by English accents. I only learned basic French for a few months and since then I have had no chance to continue learning or speaking it, so I have almost forgotten this language.

With my confidence of speaking English well, it is easy for me to travel around and talk with both tourists and locals in different countries. In Laos, I asked the receptionists to write down some necessary words in Lao language, for example, "not spicy", "bus station" and "toilet" and showed them to the people who couldn't understand English. In Thailand, the locals are very helpful to tourists. If I ask someone in English and that person does not understand, he will take me to someone who can speak English. The simplest way is to say one or two words and point at the things that I want. Myanmar is another experience. At a restaurant in Mandalay, I asked for a bowl, a local boy brought me a spoon. I tried to explain, but he couldn't understand. Luckily, there is the word "bowl" in Burmese at the end of the Lonely Planet guide book and I showed it to him. The boy smiled happily and ran back with a bowl for me.

English was completely useless when I traveled in China. During my 6 trips there, I talked in English with only one person in the China Mainland and he worked at a pharmacy. Sometimes I feel myself and the Chinese I've met are like the mute and deaf people talking with each other. In these cases, the calculators could say everything. One day in Beijing, myself and 3 Vietnamese girls on the tour lost our way in a supermarket and we struggled with finding the exit gate, where our Chinese guide was waiting for us. For an hour, we went up and down elevators and couldn't find out where the exit gate was. In the end, I remembered that Chinese and Japanese have the same characters for "Exit", so I wrote it down on paper and showed it to a Chinese man. It worked at once and we found the gate where our guide was patiently waiting for us, while other people on the tour had gone back to the hotel.

Now I only dream of improving my English to a better level. My working environment mainly involves contact with Japanese people and they are not very good at English. Maybe someday I should go back to school for another English course.

One of the challenges for foreigners, who want to learn Vietnamese, is not only pronounciation, but also how to get the tones right. They are also confused by complicated personal pronouns based on the age that we often guess and relationships. For a short visit, "hello", "thank you" and "good bye" in local languages are enough, but I always feel that the locals anywhere are more than happy, if we know their languages better than that.

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