My neighborhood and the local park

I haven't done "Tieng Viet Tuesday" this week, and there are other posts I keep meaning to make, but for now, here's a photo collection of my neighborhood and the park, which I call "Wedding Shoot Park."

Tiếng Việt Tuesday - the verbs "to want," "to need," and "to like."

Today's Tiếng Việt lesson introduces three common verbs that allow us to play with the basic subject->verb->object sentence structure.


muốn = to want
cần = to need
thích = to like

 I like these verbs because they are useful for studying nouns. One of the problems with learning a new language is that to practice verbs you need nouns, and to practice nouns you need verbs. So I start with a coupe of serviceable verbs, and then when I've built up a vocabulary of nouns, I can expand.

So let's do a few.

Tôi muốn sữa = I want milk.
Tôi muốn gà = I want chicken.
Tôi muốn ghế = I want the chair.
Tôi muốn bút = I want the pen.
Tôi muốn trà = I want tea.

Tôi cần chuối = I need the banana.
Tôi cần xe buýt = I need the bus.
Tôi cần chìa khóa = I need the key.
Tôi cần nước = I need water.

Tôi thích mèo = I like cats.
Tôi thích xe hơi = I like cars.
Tôi thích trái cây = I like fruits.
Tôi thích cà phê = I like coffee.
Tôi thích những người = I like people.

If you keep doing this exercise, the nouns won't all stick in your memory, but the verbs hopefully will. Repetition is key.

Tiếng Việt Tuesday

This is my new feature. Every Tuesday I will post something I've learned from my Vietnamese self-studies. Aside from the fact that I live in Vietnam, I'm not using any out-of-the-ordinary resources - just a pocket phrasebook and dictionary, and YouTube. I also have some Pimsleur files that I will occasionally tap into. Everything I use is for beginners. I'm hoping that after I squeeze everything I can from the beginner materials, the cultural immersion will take care of the rest.

Today I will address pronouns. Pronouns are hard. There are many of them, and they cover different age groups and combinations for speaker in relation to addressee. I'm a woman in my 40's, which means I don't have a lot of age groups above me, so it's a little simpler for me. Younger people have it tougher - they can't use the same pronoun for someone their mother's age and for a retiree, but I totally can.

There are also some little quirks, like the pronoun for one's mother, me, which you use to address your mother and which your mother uses for herself when talking to you.

To make it more complicated, North Vietnam and South Vietnam have different standards for whom each pronoun is used, and by which speaker. And different levels of forgiveness for using pronouns that are slightly off. Therefore, the tutorials each say something different about pronouns. For instance, Pimsleur uses "bá" for many of its exercises and claim that it is for a slightly older woman, up to the age of our parents. But I haven't seen much of "bá" beyond that. Foreign Language Institute loves to use "cô" for a woman about your age.  My phrasebook, however, assures me that I can limit myself to "em" for anyone fairly young (not just a child) "chi" for a woman slightly younger to slightl older than me, and "anh" for a man slightly younger to slightly older than me. I'm going to go with that set.

This phrasebook also gives me a handy-dandy age-to-pronoun guide:

Youngest to oldest male: Em - Anh - Chú - Bác - Ông
Youngest to oldest female: Em - Chi - Cô - Bác - Bá

I will try to remember to use the last two, Ông and Bá, for the elderly, and to address the very young like equals in appropriate situations, like a teenage waitress.

I can also 'cheat' when greeting people by just saying "Xin chào" which is a polite "hello" that does not contain any pronouns. Most times you say hello, according to all the study guides, you greet people using their pronouns, like "Chào em" to a child or "Chào anh" to a man your age.

You are also supposed to refer to yourself using the same pronoun that a person uses for you. I, as a woman in my 40's, could be expected to use "Cô" for "I". But because I am a beginner, and because my husband and son are learning from my example, I'm going to use the generic "Tôi" to mean "I."

It seems to be all right. The phrasebook uses "Tôi" in all its examples.

But because I'm only just beginning to learn the Vietnamese culture, my sense of appropriate pronouns is still very hazy. I probably won't get familiar with pronoun usage patterns in daily life until I speak well enough to have conversations with local people and can listen to what they say. And that's going to be awhile.

Things I've noticed about my neighborhood

• There are a lot of gardeners and maintenance workers. The government pays a lot of people small salaries to keep the area looking nice. I wonder if they are livable salaries. I don't know what the unemployment rate is here, but it appears that Vietnam ensures that a large number of the poor are at least working poor, rather than desperately poor.
• The greater neighborhood is called Phú Mỹ Hưng, owned and developed by a corporation called Phú Mỹ Hưng. Properties within Phú Mỹ Hưng seem to frequently have names that begin with "Mỹ." "Mỹ" means "fine" in Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese language) as far as I can tell. Our apartment complex is called "Mỹ Phúc*" which means "fine-being".... I think...
• There are four buildings under construction in my block. None of them seem to be progressing very far. They have doors with locks installed already, though, so they don't need night guards.
• Some other homes under construction have night guards. Nice gig if you can get it.
• Our restaurant-per-square-km ratio seems to be one of the highest in the city, rivaling only the tourist areas of District 1, AFAIK.
• There's a Dunkin Donuts a few blocks from my home, but it doesn't sell anything novel aside from Boston cremes decorated like footballs (soccer balls). However, I found some very tasty red bean donuts at Tous Les Jours. They are only 14,000Ð ($.70) each.
• It is almost not worthwhile to cook at home, because the kitchen gets so hot and hard to clean, and restaurant food (or street food) is real cheap if you know where to look. 
• The only real cheap cuisines seem to be Vietnamese and Chinese, although the other ethnic restaurants are still far cheaper than their US equivalents.
• And anyway, with this heat, sometimes you only want a smoothie and maybe some crunchy rice paper snacks. I found a great place to get rice paper snacks - the Co-op - which is an easy walk through the quiet part of the neighborhood, but it's crowded and dingy so I tend to shop at Citimart (which is a small supermarket with some locations that are as small as a convenience store) instead.
• Instead of starlings, we have mynah birds. I love mynah birds.

*Because of course it is! Why wouldn't I move into a building called Mỹ Phúc?