Vietnamese Pronunciation: Part 3 -- Consonants

Whenever I'm out and about on the balmy streets of Saigon, I'm always taken aback by the ladies' clothing of choice: the hoodie sweatshirt. It's usually worn with the hood up, in weather that's nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 100 percent humidity. But folks here don't seem to mind the heat so much. When I come home in the evening, I might see the houseguard's child asleep in the common room on the ground floor, bundled up in layers of comforter blankets as if it was icy winter. The Vietnamese, particularly the ladyfolk, have an exceptionally high temperature threshold.

Ao Dai

Therefore, it's not surprising that the ao dai, the form-fitting, full-body tunic worn over a pair of silk slacks, is the quintessential clothing in this tropical land. If a person can stand to be cloaked in a hoodie in the middle of the sweltering day, then this silk costume must be the wardrobe equivalent to nectar and ambrosia. Not only is it comfortable, it's a beautiful costume with delicate cloth buttons and fine woven embroidery. The slender sleeves wrap the arm all the way to the wrist, a mandarin collar wreathes the throat, and the tunic splits up the sides to reveal the pant cloth and color, and just a hint of the shape of the leg. The colors are often loud and vivacious, but may be austere white. The ao dai is at once alluring and refined. You can even have them made for you at some specialty tailors in the states. But if you do decide to have one made, just don't ask for an "ow die," by pronouncing the word the way it's spelled in English. In Vietnamese, it's either "ow yai" or "ow zai," depending on where in Vietnam you're from. And that is a great segue into today's post on consonants.

The word ao dai demonstrates two significant facts about the Vietnamese consonant d: the letter is pronounced differently than it is in English, and its pronunciation varies between the southern dialect and the northern. Many other letters, including Q, R, S, and V have varying pronunciations depending whether the speaker is from the South or the North.

I've heard a lot of people say that the better accents are in the North--in Vietnam as it is in the United States. Southerners in both countries have the (perhaps unfair) reputation of being lazy in their speech. I asked Mike whether or not learning the "proper" Hanoi accent interested him, and he said no way. Most all Vietnamese Americans are from the South, including our family. He wants to be able to speak like them. Besides, the war (called the Vietnam War at home, and the American War here) still lingers in recent memory. Mike's understandably concerned if he learned a Northern accent he would alienate himself from Vietnamese Americans who lost their homes, their families, their land to the communist force in the North.

The following chart uses a slash to distinguish between the consonants of the South and of the North, with South being first. Most of the letters on the chart should be familiar since they exist in English, except for the Đ, or d with the stroke. And a couple of English letters are missing, like F, J, Z, and W. (We don't really need W anyway, right? Just put two U's together; isn't that what a W is, after all?) The one consonant, marked with a *, has an approximation, but no exact English equivalent.

B = buh	K = kuh	R = ruh/zuh
C = kuh	L = luh	S = shuh/suh
D = yuh/zuh	M = muh	T = thuh
Đ = dtuh	N = nuh	V = yuh/vuh
G = guh*	P = puh	X = suh
H = huh	Q = wuh/kwuh

In addition to the single consonants, Vietnamese has consonant clusters.

Ch = chuh	Nh = nuh	Th = tuh
Gh = guh	Ng = ng (sing)	Tr = truh
Gi = yuh	Ngh = ng (single)	Qu = qwuh
Kh = kuh	Ph = fuh

That's about it for the consonants. The take-away message is the differences in accents between the North and South are more significant than subtle nuances of pronunciation. The variations in speech seem to be a metaphor for underlying social and cultural differences, even tensions between the regions. This is just an initial impression, and something I'm looking forward to exploring more during my time here. For now, I'm going to satisfy myself with exploring the tones of the Vietnamese language. Tones was one of my favorite aspects of learning Mandarin. Looking forward to the next post and sharing what I learned.


Provender
- breakfast: phở and quả gấc
- lunch: xa pô chê and rice
- dinner: lazy home cookin - rice, chao, homemade ginger and peanut relish

Indulgences

Eclipse

Today is the fifteenth day of the lunar month, and the night sky bears a full moon. Last night was a lunar eclipse, but it was overcast in Saigon, as it has been every night. In Vietnam, the custom is to eat no meat on the new and full moons. But I was not a vegetarian today. I chowed down on an enormous bowl of phở, that trademark dish of Vietnamese cuisine. Phở has two common purposes: breakfast, and remedy for hangover. Today, my first bowl of pho since arriving in Vietnam served both purposes.

Rewind 24 hours. Mike and I were walking to a dance when we dropped into a street market for some dinner. At first, we tried taking a seat at a curbside vendor. But suddenly, the wind came up so hard that signs fell over and branches snapped and dropped out of the trees. Considering we were sitting directly beneath Saigon's notorious power lines, we decided to seek some indoor place to wait out the wind and the rain.

We took shelter from the storm and sat down in a room with grimy walls, plastic chairs, and the sorrowful crying of soap opera actresses on the television. Mike poured 333 brand beer into a plastic mug brimming with ice. I set to work on a bowl of chicken soup with yellow rice-noodle macaroni. The rain outside continued to beat down on scooters and taxis. We watched two drenched guards change watch at the British consulate across the street. I finished the last of the soup, but the deluge showed no sign of stopping. The choice: stay or face the torrential downpour.

Fast forward two hours and now I've been instructed on the way to order beer. I've used this newly-learned verbage twice. The rain has subsided to a drizzle, so we've begun our walk home, and have been snacking on tasty shredded coconut and black sesame wrapped in tender rice-flour crêpes. Once home, Mike has himself a hankering for hot cocoa, makes two, and applies a shot of Amarula to each. It's been several months since I've had a drink, and now I've had three. To make matters worse, I've mixed drink types. This bodes poorly for my noggin. When the morning comes, I'm gonna need that phở. "Nature's perfect hangover food," Mike calls it.

Phở

It was the most delicious remedy--a bowl of expertly assembled fresh noodles, assorted beef cuts, sprouts, onions, herbs, chilis, all swimming in richly seasoned oxtail broth, sprinkled with squeeze of lime. Mostly cured of my fat head, I climbed on the scooter behind Mike, and we scooted across town, through sunshowers and shopping districts. We arrived in Cho Lon, a famous market in central Saigon.

We parked the bike. The lady at parking charged us 25 percent more than her other customers because "it was an expensive bike." Mike hates when he asks a price and the vendor pauses, as if to size us up, before responding with some inflated amount. It seems to happen wherever we go, so he's stopped asking. Unless the price is marked, we get hit up for more money than the locals pay. Lu calls it the foreigners' tax. Apparently, at one point the disparity was government sanctioned. As the story goes, at government used to require two ticket prices for its tourist destinations, one for locals and one for foreigners like westerners, Japanese and Koreans--the wealthy folks who can afford to be gouged. Whether or not that story's true, a lot of vendors I run into seem to be quite content with the policy.

Quả gấc

In the cho, Mike and I did a double take when we spotted a fruit that looked like red jackfruit. We asked about it, found out that it's called quả gấc, bought a small one, split it open and found lobes of bright red fruit inside. The segments looked looked like hemoglobin-enriched organs. We had no utensils, so a couple bites later our fingers looked greusome, as if we were doing thoracic surgery with bare hands.

We walked through the market. As we did, people stared at us. I didn't see any other westerners, so I normally wouldn't be surprised. But today, our onlookers snatched quick, knowing glances at each other, laughed hard, and pointed in our direction. A lady shouted at us, asking if the fruit, which clung to our fingers like gore, was sweet. Mike said, she's asking if it's sweet. I said, no, but I thought it was still tasty. We meandered among stalls of stainless steel, grass, and dried food products and contemplated the fruit's bright sanguine color. The reason for it, Mike said, was the carotenoids, like lycopene and beta carotene that the body uses to synthesize vitamin A.

People still couldnt get enough of the sight of us, strolling through the market with our bloody-fruit soaked fingers like we were casually departing from a violent crime scene. A grey haired vendor in a nón lá couldn't seem to take it anymore. She abandoned her stall, waddled up to us and waggled her finger no, as if to say, stop eating that right now. She chattered excitedly at us. Mike understood some of it. In Vietnamese medicine, the fruit is hot food. Bad to eat. Mike said thanks and we walked away.

We didn't walk another ten feet before some other ladies stopped us. They warned us, if we keep eating that fruit, we'll get stomach aches. To emphasize their sincerity, one of the ladies jabbed a plastic bag toward me to put the gấc inside.

I haven't been sick since I got here, and in no mood to break my stride. I still don't know why the fruit was supposedly bad to eat. Wikipedia has nothing but good things to say about it, (unlike the soursop, which I had last week and is allegedly linked to Parkinsons). Better safe than otherwise, I bagged remaining gấc and threw it on a pile of trash in the sunny gutter outside. I ducked back into the market, found Mike, and then found the old lady. She looked so relieved to see us without the gấc that she gave us six lychees. Another hot food. And for some reason, they were the best I have ever tasted. No stomach ache, either.

Provender

- breakfast: rice and omlette

- lunch : rice and xa pô chê (This was the bitter fruit I tried a few days ago; when it's actually ripe, it's heavenly)

- dinner: Nui, coconut rolls and beer.

Vietnamese Pronunciation: Part 2 -- Vowels

When trying to speak any language, knowing how to pronounce vowels is of utmost importance, because when you mispronounce a vowel, well, hilarity ensues.

What I meant to say was:	What I said was:
No, I'm full.	No, I'm fool.
He beat me in the end.	He bit me in the end.
I'll go today.	I'll go to die.

More often than not, I make the frustrating error of switching the vowels "o" and "ow" when I try talking in Mandarin. I say yào (want) when I mean to say yǒu (have). When I duck into a tea shop and try to order, I end up asking the clerk if she wants any milk tea. She just gawks, "Um, wha?" Oh what a difference a vowel makes.

For the next few posts, I'm giving myself a crash course in the phonetics of Vietnamese. I know being able to speak a language well depends on whether I can say the vowels properly, so I began with a brief investigation into the vowels of the Vietnamese alphabet.

First, the letters themselves. Compared with English, which has five or sometimes six vowels, Vietnamese has eleven. Include the y and the total of vowel letters amounts to a nice even number twelve.

a	e	o	u
ă	ê	ô	ư
â	i	ơ	y

Vietnamese vowels look a lot like ours. Half of them are embellished with diacritics. Floating above or dangling from the side of the vowel, diacritcal marks differentiate the sounds the letters make. These marks indicate the exact pronunciation of that vowel, a specificity we're not entitled to in English. For example, look at the words wind, lead, tear, desert, and number. These words can be pronounced two different ways, and you don't know the word's meaning until you know its context. Some other ambiguous vowels in action:

The learned rebel learned to rebel.

Bambi does live with live does.

The minute dove dove in a minute.

Unlike in English, the pronunciation of each Vietnamese vowel is fixed. You always know how it sounds. According to the International Phonetic Association, or IPA, most of the Vietnamese vowels are also used in American English. Note: vowels marked by * are an approximate and have no real English equivalent.

a = spa	e = bed	o = law	u = boot
ă = stock	ê = play	ô = row	ư = eh*
â = hut	i = fee	ơ = uh*	y = fee

You can combine single vowel sounds, or monophthongs, into combinations of two (dipthongs) or three (tripthongs). Unfortunately, there's not a lot of information out there on how to pronounce these combinations. I scoured the internets to find English equivalents, but many have none. This is all I found so far:

ai = aisle	eo = ?	ua, uô = ?	ieâ = deal
ao = bough	êu = ?	ui = bouy	iêu, yêu = ?
au = about	ia, ya, iê, yê = ?	ưi = *	uôi = ?
âu = ?	iu, yu = ?	ưu = *	ươi = *
ay = bite	oi = boy	ưa, ươ = *	ươu = *
ây = ?	ôi = ?
aê = hat	ơi = *

I really wish I could find English equivalents for all of these sounds. Alas, this is as far as I can go for now. The only tool I can find that would help me are the the phonetic codes used in the IPA vowels chart. With this chart, I could stitch the vowels together in my mind and make subjective approximations. Of course, my results would be biased by my Northeastern US accent. It seems like a lot of work with a very good chance of failure. So, I think I'll consult some multi-lingual friends, see what they have to say, then come back and update this post. Coming up next post: consonants.

1. Tim Bowyer. American English. www.fonetiks.org/engsou2am.html


Provender
- breakfast: mì at the noodle shop next to our apartment
- lunch: home cooking -- lāo miàn
- dinner: home cooking -- Korean-style soup noodles with green beans, tofu skin, and egg

Vietnamese Pronunciation: Part I

The national written language of Vietnam is called Chữ Quốc Ngữ. An earlier post touched briefly on the origins of the Romanized letters. Delving a little deeper, I learned that Portuguese missionaries who journeyed to Asia in the 15th century were the first to impose the Latin alphabet onto the Vietnamese language. Therefore, the pronunciation of quốc ngữ is based on Portuguese--furthermore, it's based on 15th century Portuguese. Ever try reading a piece of 15th century English? It sounds...quite different. Verily, forsooth, by my troth 'tis so. So the pronunciation of written Vietnamese is pretty far removed from not only English, but modern Portuguese.

Words in Vietnamese are not often pronounced the way they would be said in English. A word that starts with d, like dat, is pronounced "yat." At least that's how it's pronounced in Southern Vietnam. In the north, it sounds like "zat." (Herein lies yet another complication; pronunciation of Vietnamese words varies extensively from region to region, most notoriously between the northern and southern dialects.) Maybe the pronunciation of d as a "y" or "z" is a holdout from Portuguese, or maybe it isn't. I imagine a strong grasp of 15th century Portuguese could facilitate intuitive pronunciation of some Vietnamese words. Um. Or maybe not.

The three phonetic aspects of Vietnamese language are vowels, consonants, and tones. To capture these aspects in written form, the Portuguese developed a 29-letter alphabet. This alphabet is unique to Vietnamese. One of the language's trademarks is the set of diacritic marks that determine the sound of the vowels and set the tone of the syllable. Six tones and twelve vowels may seem overwhelming, but at least the Vietnamese alphabet is consistent. Let's just say it's clearer than English, which is one of the most Godawful languages ever in terms of trying to pronounce words you've never seen. I feel a tangent coming on.

In English, we have a bunch of words based on the letter sequence "-ough." Thought, bough, through, though, rough, thorough. Realistically, if you had never heard any of those words before, you'd be lucky if you pronounced any one of them right. Because they all have the same letter combination, you would intuitively think pronouncing them would be easy. Yet none of these words sound the same. They don't rhyme. They don't even come close.

Gei3 or Jì.

The incompatibility between English and Vietnamese is all too familiar to me. It was hard in Hong Kong, where the English convention for pronouncing Chinese was so wrong, it was useless. For example, you often saw the same Chinese character in the name of many markets and diners. The character is pronounced "gei" in Cantonese, the lingua franca of Hong Kong, and pronounced "ji" in Mandarin. Your standard tour guide book doesn't tell you this. It just spells it in English letters. The character gei is spelled kee, as in Lee Kum Kee, the sauce brand. To me, kee (key) doesn't sound like gei (gay) at all. As if it weren't bad enough that some English-lettered Chinese words don't have the right vowel or consonant, the entire convention disregards tone. Good luck getting directions to that store when both the consonant and the vowel are wrong, and there's no tone to boot.

The moral of the story: pronouncing words the way you would in English will steer you into a headlong collision with confusion. Rather, it's important to learn the conventions of the local language, wherever you are. For the next three posts, I'll explore the phonetics of Vietnamese, and share with you what I learn about how to pronounce the tones, consonants, and vowels. For the most part, I'll be looking at whatever internet sources I can use. And I think I'll generally avoid dialectical differences. That means, given a choice, the Hanoi dialect will be the one I select, since it's considered to be proper Vietnamese. Tomorrow we start with vowels.


Provender
- breakfast: cơm bình dân
- snack: hồng xiêm (note: it was not ripe. Big mistake. So bitter.)
- supper: home cookin -- rice noodles with onion and green beans

Sofa to go...

I'll just... leave this... here...

Provender

- breakfast: green bean and onion stir fry

- lunch: catfish and shrimp

- dinner: porridge and onion

Where Do You Want To Go Today?

Status update:

1. Comments are working again. I'm not sure what went wrong, but the problem's been fixed. Now it seems like I owe someone a potato.
2. My old jade-colored world traveling guitar was put out to pasture. I picked up a new one for dimes on the dollar. It is auburn brown, and handmade right here in Saigon.
3. Held a lesson Saturday. It was great. Got another lesson lined up for Wednesday.

Today, I'm just gonna finish up a blog entry I started two years ago. Better late than never, I hope. The subject addresses the question: what kinds of people should study abroad?

I met a lot of international exchange students during my year abroad--mostly from India and Europe, also Australia and Japan. In my entire program in Asia, spanning three universities, I met a whopping grand total of only three U.S. citizens. We tend to be predisposed to stay at home, to which I say, phui. Anyway, certain people seem to "get more" out of a cultural immersion. Study abroad programs are excellent opportunities for the following sorts of folks:

1. People who like to try new kinds of food.
This is the one that practically started this list. If you want amazing Chinese food, what better place to go to than China? There'll be primo pasta waiting for you to mangia if you study in Italy, I imagine. Crêpes et café? You'll always have Paris. A study abroad experience is great for people who want to eat and maybe learn to cook the foods of that culture. I was delighted to discover that the hot and sour soup I've loved since I was a kid is a Taiwanese recipe--I found it there, and it was superb. And sometimes, the foreign interpretation of a familiar dish is a nice surprise, like a cheeseburger patty sandwiched between ricecakes. Just do yourself a favor. Don't fall for the temptation to eat at a fast food chain (unless you're just interested in seeing the differences between the overseas chains and the ones back home). The worst food mistake I ever made was to follow hungry yet gastronomically timid exchange classmates into a western sandwich shop, where we stood online for 40 minutes to buy food that I could have gotten back in the states.

2. People who like shopping.
In another country, there are all kinds of incredible stores. You can spend ages browsing through products you won't believe. Some have familiar labels, but there's just something different about the brand and you can't put your finger on it (perhaps because it's written in another language). Finding a thing you want can be hard, especially if you want a specialty product that has to be imported. But if you know what to look for in terms of local products, you'll find deals that can't be beat.

3. People who want to learn history.
Nothing that ever happened ever occurred in isolation. Like the butterfly chaos theory applied to ethnohistography, the effects of conflicts in one part of the world had, and have, effects on the other side. Study abroad opportunites offer explanation for cultural exchanges, migration patterns, and economic fluctuations. Going somewhere else in the world to study allows you to see how small the world really is.

4. People who want to experience new cultures.
Find yourself enamored with the travel channel? Do you look at guys like Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves and think to yourself, I'd give an arm and a leg to do what they do for a living? Do you own a dog-eared and tattered copy of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die? Then studying abroad is a perfect opportunity. The country you study in can be your launching platform from which you travel to adjacent countries on the long weekends and holidays. The world is your oyster.

5. People who want to learn another language.
What can I say? Practice makes perfect. And when you're in another country, you'll have plenty of opportunities to practice. And invariably, local students would love to make a deal. You teach them English, and they'll teach you the language you want to learn. Learning a language makes you more marketable as an employee, so studying abroad and honing your verbal skills as a polyglot is just the thing to turn a "we'll call you" into a "welcome aboard."

Happy trails to you.


Provender
- breakfast: thanh long, măng cụt
- lunch: bánh cuốn