Cám Ơn - Thank You

A typical phrasebook, useless as they often are*, will tell you that "cam on" (usually written without diacritic marks) means thank you in Vietnamese. It's okay when you're a foreigner and you come out with "Kam Awn," folks in Vietnam will understand what you're trying to say, even though it doesn't sound anything like the actual Vietnamese phrase. Any phrasebook worth the ink on its pages will at least give you a semblance of the pronunciation. The mouth forms a phrase that sounds more like "gham euhn," which is closer. But without the diacritics, or knowing how to pronounce the proper tone, it's still not going to sound right.

The first word has two different tonal pronunciations. The first is cảm, with a questioning tone. The second is cám, and the voice lifts with a rising tone. I can't get a good explanation for when to use either one, and my resident translators can't say. Wiktionary is no help either. But I found a text that lets me hazard a guess. Cảm ơn stands alone, while cám ơn is used with further words, such as kinship terms, according to the phrasebook Hoàng Yến Tiếng Việt. Take this explanation with a grain of salt.

Either way it's pronounced, the Vietnamese word for thank you seems to be a loan word from Chinese, according to Wiktionary. Both cảm ơn and cám ơn are based on the characters 感恩, which together mean something akin to a feeling of mercy or charity. Whether the Vietnamese word for thank you is a loan word or not, there is one thing I know for sure. I've heard from three sources that the Vietnamese rarely ever say thank you. Instead, gratitude is implied through the choice of words. It's the same as in English, in which a person can express thanks without saying it.

My sources also tell me that the words for thank you are used rarely because they express the deepest and most sincere appreciation. Just think in terms of a debt. When you're indebted to someone for a deed they've done for you, you're obliged to pay them back. The Vietnamese expression for being indebted is "mang ơn," which means to carry a debt to be repaid. When you say "cảm ơn" to someone, you're expressing that you're carrying an emotional debt, a debt that can never be repaid. This is the magnitude of the Vietnamese expression of thanks.

This magnitude is an aspect of thank you that phrase books always seem to leave out. Instead, the books encourage foreigners and tourists to throw the word thank you around like it was meaningless. Thank you for the fast food. Thank you for bus ride. Thank you for giving me the receipt for the groceries I paid for. The word seems trite and commonplace with overuse. The Vietnamese seem to understand this, and so reserve the word for the most special occasions. The locals seem to accept our tendency for overuse. They will even say it to us because they realize we expect to hear it.

It's not that the Vietnamese never say thank you. They place such an extensive emphasis on it that if you ever heard it said you would know the enormous emotion that was there. This emphasis made me wonder about my own use of the phrase. I wonder, how do you state true gratitude if the words are the same ones you would say to the bus driver when hopping off the bus? I throw the word thanks around a lot. I wonder if it's maybe too much. I wonder if thank you, like sorry, loses its meaning if spoken out of reflex and not from the heart. This amazing lesson is one of the ways my trip here has changed me for the better, by helping me understand how to be truly grateful.


* Before I came to Vietnam, I thought I would need a phrasebook to help me get by on my own. While browsing the local quirky used bookstore, I found one--a knock-off version of a popular brand of pocketsize phrasebooks. I flipped it open, and couldn't believe what I saw. It was a list of phrases one would need when buying or selling narcotics. Select phrases included "do you have any clean syringes for sale?" and "this is for personal use," and "I'm having an overdose." The funny thing is, none of the phrases were written in tones, which means you'd probably never be understood. Good luck getting poison control to take care of your OD when you're saying "These shoes don't fit like last year."