Although this isn’t a post on learning the Vietnamese language it should be of interest to those foreigners in Saigon who are learning Vietnamese. Especially Americans. The Vietnam dong is one of the few currencies that has depreciated against the dollar. Right now Vietnam is experiencing a high inflation rate of around 25% and the government wants to keep exports to the US competitive by keeping the dong undervalued. But the official exchange rate is out of balance with the open market rate. In recent days a rate of 17,750 Vietnam dong to one US dollar have been seen on the black market. Yet if you go to the bank to exchange dollars for dongs you’d only get around one US dollar for every 16,100 dong.

Banks in Vietnam are allowed to trade the currency within a band of plus or minus 2% per day. But economists are forecasting that the Vietnam dong will continue to devalue against the dollar.

So what should people be holding, dollars or dongs? Right now if you have dongs you can open a savings account with an interest rate of up to 15% which is up from around 12% a few weeks ago after the government uncapped the rate banks are allowed to offer. But if you’re deposit is in dollars you will only get 6% which is unchanged from when interest rates were uncapped. So right now if you have $100 you will get 1,610,000 Vietnam dong and after one year in the bank you would have 1,851,500 dong. But if you instead put the $100 in the bank after one year you would have $106 which could be worth between 2,347,900 and 2,453,900. But that’s only if the government allows the dong to be devalued that much, nearly 40% in a year. But if the government only allows a change of 2 to 3% then it’s much better to have your money in Vietnam dong in a savings account earning 15%.

Knowing the Vietnamese alphabet isn’t just for fun. There will be times when you will be trying to communicate with somebody and have to spell out a word or have them spell it out for you without writing it down. Luckily, learning the Vietnamese alphabet isn’t difficult if you already know the English alphabet and especially easy if you know the French alphabet.

The Vietnamese alphabet is based on the French alphabet. According to Omniglot:

“During the 17th century, Roman Catholic missionaries introduced a Latin-based orthography for Vietnamese, Quốc Ngữ (national language),which has been used ever since. Until the early 20th century, Quốc Ngữ was used in parallel with Chữ-nôm. Today only Quốc Ngữ is used.”

As you can see a lot of it makes sense and corresponds with the French alphabet and its pronunciation but there are a few letters to be careful of. First, there are the three variations of the letter a: a, ă, â pronounced like ah, ah! (rising tone), u! (rising tone á»›). Secondly, there are two i’s, i “i ngắn” (short) and y “i dài” (long), also “i-cờ-rét” based on French “i grec”. Thirdly, the Vietnamese pronunciation of the letter h is neither English nor quite French. They pronounce it “hát” so the Vietnamese spelling of ch will sound like “say hat”. One last thing to be careful of in both of the Vietnamese and French alphabet’s are the letters g and j which in English are pronounced like “jee” and “jay” but are the opposite in Vietnamese and French. However, note that in the southern Vietnamese dialect they start with a y sound instead of the z sound. This also holds for the letters d and v which are both pronounced y in the South.

“Tufala i stap yet long Betlehem, nao i kam kasem stret taem blong Meri i bonem pikinini. Nao hem i bonem fasbon pikinin blong hem we hem i boe. Hem i kavremapgud long kaliko, nao i putum hem i slip long wan bokis we oltaim ol man oli stap putum gras long hem, blong ol anamol oli kakae. Tufala i mekem olsem, from we long hotel, i no gat ples blong tufala i stap.”

Is it Old English? A lost Germanic language closely related to English perhaps?  No, of course it’s Bislama, an urban English Creole based on a pidgin.  It’s spoken on the tiny archipelago of Vanuatu by 6200 native speakers (national motto “Long God yumi stanap”, “In God we stand) but many more in that region as a lingua franca. Vanuatu is also well known for being a tax haven and some filesharing companies are incorporated there, again because of favorable laws.

According to Wikipedia: More than 95% of Bislama words are of English origin; the remainder combines a few dozen words from French, as well as some vocabulary inherited from various languages of Vanuatu, essentially limited to flora and fauna terminology. While the influence of these vernacular languages is low on the vocabulary side, it is very high in the morphosyntax. Essentially speaking, Bislama can be described as a language with an English vocabulary and an Austronesian  grammar.

A video made by some French guys about motorbikes in Saigon. All traffic signals are just for show including red lights. The horn is often used to warn people ahead that you are coming up quickly. Traffic is always crazy due to the sheer number of people on motorbikes. Very few are in cars because it’s so impractical. Not only are automobiles very expensive to Vietnamese people, even without the almost 100% import tax, there’s no place to park them! And of course the best is when it rains. And as it is now the rainy season in Saigon it rains almost everyday yet people still have to go about their daily lives. What this means is millions of motorbikes and millions of raincoats. The rain jackets are worn not only over the driver but also the front of the motor bike and any passengers. And since the raincoat would cover the headlight of the bike they now have raincoats with translucent windows for the headlight to shine through.

How about some light humor this weekend for those studying foreign languages. Russel Peters is an Indian Canadian comedian from Toronto who often jokes about other ethnicities. In this act Russell peters talks about Vietnamese speaking English, funny Vietnamese restaurant names, and the name of Vietnam’s national currency, the dong.

Russell Peters talking about Chinese names and starting to talk about the Chinese and Indian language, both of which do not exist.

Russell Peters continues talking about the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese. Cantonese is the more fun sounding language spoken in Hong Kong and Mandarin is a serious language spoken in Beijing through clenched teeth.

I said before how it’s useful to learn a foreign language by reading material in your mother tongue and the foreign language at the same time. It helps if the subject matter is interesting. I just learned that the Vietnamese government’s visa extension website for overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) has finally been translated into English. In overseas Vietnamese visa exemption allows, for example, children of former Vietnamese nationals to visit Vietnam without a visa, own a house, and have some other rights that regular Vietnamese have.

More than 3.2 million Vietnamese are currently living and working in some 100 countries and territories in the world.
Hiện nay có hơn 3,2 triệu người Việt Nam đang sinh sống và làm ăn ở trên 100 nước và vùng lãnh thổ trên thế giới.
Wherever they are and irrespective of generations, young or old, male or female, political views, religions, ethnicity, and stories of the past, Vietnamese expatriates always turn to their country of origin.
Ở bất cứ nơi đâu, không phân biệt thế hệ già trẻ, gái trai, không phân biệt tôn giáo, dân tộc, và quá khứ trước đây, tuyệt đại đa số người Việt Nam định cư ở nước ngoài đều hướng về đất nước, hướng về cội nguồn, có tình cảm gắn bó với gia đình, quê hương, xứ sở.
No matter where, all the sons and daughters of the Vietnamese nation long to be back to their motherland and reunite with family, friends to engulf themselves in and share all the successes of the country’s cause of “Doi Moi” (reform and renovation).
Dù ở đâu, những người con của dân tộc Việt Nam đều mong muốn được về thăm Tổ quốc, sống lại những kỷ niệm xưa, đoàn tụ với gia đình, bạn bè, được hòa mình và chia sẻ với đồng bào trong nước những thành quả trong công cuộc đổi mới của đất nước.
In seeing the Vietnamese community abroad as an inseparable section of the Vietnamese nation, Resolution 36-NQ/TW of the CPV Politburo on overseas Vietnamese affairs made it clear that it would be necessary “to create the favourable conditions for overseas Vietnamese to come back, visit their homeland and relatives and worship their ancestors”.
Trên tinh thần coi cộng đồng người Việt Nam ở nước ngoài là một bộ phận không thể tách rời của dân tộc Việt Nam, Nghị quyết 36-NQ/TW của Bộ Chính trị, Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam về công tác đối với người Việt Nam ở nước ngoài đã nêu rõ “tạo điều kiện thuận lợi để người Việt Nam ở nước ngoài về thăm quê hương, thân nhân, thờ cúng tổ tiên”.
In carrying out the said resolution and the announcement of President Nguyen Minh Triet at the meeting with overseas Vietnamese during his official visit to the United States of America, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dzung signed on 17/08/2007 Decision No. 135/2007/QĐ-TTg announcing the Regulations on Visa Exemption for Vietnamese people residing abroad.
Thực hiện chủ trương trên và thông báo của Chủ tịch nước Nguyễn Minh Triết tại cuộc gặp với bà con Việt Kiều nhân chuyến thăm chính thức Hoa Kỳ, ngày 17/08/2007 Thủ tướng Chính phủ Nguyễn Tấn Dũng đã ký Quyết định số 135/2007/QĐ-TTg ban hành Quy chế về miễn thị thực cho người Việt Nam định cư ở nước ngoài.
To help all Vietnamese residing abroad understand more clearly the above policy and decision and to facilitate our compatriots’ application of visa exemption certificate, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has launched the link to give instruction on regulations and procedures, thus assisting them in getting the certificate of visa exemption.
Để tạo điều kiện cho những người Việt Nam đang định cư ở nước ngoài hiểu rõ hơn về Chủ trương và Quyết định trên cũng như tạo điều kiện thuận lợi để đồng bào ta được cấp Giấy miễn thị thực, Bộ Ngoại giao đã xây dựng trang Web theo địa chỉ: nhằm hướng dẫn các quy định về thủ tục, hồ sơ cấp Giấy miễn thị thực.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomes all feedbacks and comments from compatriots in regard to the site’s look and content. All feedbacks and comments could be sent to this Ministry via the following address: mienthithucvk@mofa.gov.vn
Bộ Ngoại giao mong muốn nhận được nhiều ý kiến, nhận xét của bà con đối với hình thức và nội dung của trang web. Mọi ý kiến, nhận xét xin gửi về Bộ Ngoại giao theo địa chỉ email: mienthithucvk@mofa.gov.vn

Some things I’ve noticed about Vietnamese vowels in the Saigon dialect:
‘u’ is like the pure vowel in European languages but can be closer to ‘o’. To me it sounds more like ‘u’ when the final sound is a stop t/c/p then when it’s an open vowel ending word so for example ngủ sounds closer to ngo. It can be hard to differentiate đủ and đổ.

I mentioned before about Vietnamese vowels that â and Æ¡ are basically long and short versions of the same vowel as some linguists have said. According to Wikipedia they are /Éœ/ vs. /əː/ and I don’t think there is anything in English exactly like them. In the Hanoi dialect â is pronounced as /Éœ/ whereas in the Saigonese dialect it’s pronounced /ɨ/ or /Éœ/, the same as đến which I mentioned before. I was told that Æ¡ was pronounced by spreading the lips outward laterally like a smile.
Many vowels have phonetic offglides in open syllables, meaning that they changed slightly into another vowel in the end. This happens with i and e but not a so “tri” will sounds sort of like “tri-y” and “tre” will sound like “tre-uh”.

Many people who learn Vietnamese will learn or will want to learn the Vietnamese of the northern dialect (Hanoi) but when they encounter people from the South there may be some confusion such as with the way some tones and vowels are pronounced. Here are some things I have noticed at least among some people in the South.

I think that in the North they pronounce ‘ô’ as more or less the pure European ‘o’ and they pronounce ‘o’ as Americans pronounce ‘aw’ as in “law”. In the South when the vowels aren’t at the end of the word the two vowels are pronounced more similarly with the ‘o’ being pronounced closer to ‘ô’.
In words that end with ‘nh’ such as “anh” it is pronounced like “ANgst” in the North and “lAWN” in the South. And in the South words like “tin” and “tinh” are both pronounced like Americans pronounce “tin” although much shorter whereas in the South the first would be pronounced “teen” and the second would be pronounced “ting”. The same happens when ‘i’ is followed by ‘t’ or ‘ch’.   And some people pronounce the vowel in ‘ic’ somewhat differently from the rest.

And sometimes in words like “tên”, “hết”, “nên”, or “trệt” the vowel is pronounced slightly differently in the South. In these situations the ê sounds closer to Æ¡ or â.

yên: in the South I hear “een” and in the north I hear “eyen”.

There is also some difference in the way the tones are pronounced.  In the South the hỏi and the ngã tones are pronounced similarly.  I also think that the nặng tone is much less distinct from the huyền tone in the South whereas in the North the nặng tone results in much more pronounced glottal stops.  I also think that the rising and falling tones are slower to rise and fall in the North.

I’m sure I’ve left out some differences so please feel free to leave a note in the comments. Next time I will talk about Vietnamese consonants and the differences between consonant sounds in the North and South.

If you’ve ever used any speech recognition software you’ll know that the state of the art in this field is still far from perfect, far from the performance of a real human being. Even with big players like IBM and Microsoft, with the latter including speech recognition in its Vista operating system, speech recognition software still requires significant amounts of training by the person using it yet still makes many mistakes.

Why is this? Why do computers make such seemingly trivial mistakes that even a child wouldn’t make? Part of it is that we don’t speak as clearly as we think we do. Fortunately, given appropriate context the listener can figure out what we’re saying quite seamlessly. Homophones, words that have the same pronunciation but are spelled differently, are generally not a problem in spoken language. But computers have trouble distinguishing words and phrases that to us seem very different. Sometimes we are lazy about properly enunciating each word. And often times words run together without us noticing but computers have a hard time deciding who wear one word ends and another word begins.

What does this have to do with learning a foreign language? Well, humans have the same problem when listening to a foreign language that they don’t know. We don’t know where one word ends and one word begins. When listening to French, with its liaison connecting the often unpronounced end of one word, it’s especially difficult although there are some tricks. For example, in French words almost never begin with a ‘z’ sound and rarely have it in the middle of a word so usually when you hear that sound it is an ’s’ or ‘z’ at the end of a word.

But in general when listening to French you have to know 90% of which words are being spoken in a sentence even if you don’t know the meaning otherwise you will just hear a stream of random syllables. Many languages are like this although in monosyllabic languages like Chinese and Vietnamese (nominally) it’s less of a problem because every “word” is just a vowel (or diphthong, etc.) surrounded by optional single consonant sounds.

And in any language the more grammar you know the more you can place words in context by category and the more vocabulary you know the more complete context you will have two separate the words you don’t know. In the beginning though when you don’t know most of the words its difficulty even repeat or write down a spoken sentence because it’s just a jumble of sounds rather than a smaller number of distinct words. And this is the problem that speech recognition software has because computers mostly rely on sound and the probability that two or more words go together. Beyond that computers generally don’t “understand” a sentence in order to distinguish homophones and the similar sounding phrases. So when we as humans try to understand a foreign language we must strive to go beyond that and understand enough of what’s being said to guess the meaning of the words we don’t know.

It is now the new year in Vietnam, Tết Nguyên Đán, Feast of the First Morning.  It is a huge holiday celebrated for several days and much time is spent with family making it somewhat of a lonely time for foreigners in Vietnam.  However, everybody, Happy New Year!

In Vietnamese they would say Chúc Mừng Năm Má»›i which glosses as “wish happy year new” or Chúc Mừng Tân Niên which means the same thing.  They may also “chúc” you to have Sức Khỏe which means good health.  Mừng tuổi is another way to wish a happy new year.  In this case tuổi means year of age and since everybody turns one year older on this lunar new year rather than their birthday they are wishing you a happy birthday.

It is now the year of the rat.