bad Vietnamese and other august things
by mikka
SIDECAR!
Last week I was lucky enough to have my friend Josh from Oberlin visit me on his way back home from Japan; we spent a few days in Hanoi before making a whirlwind trip down to Hoi An, I had a great time and it was awesome getting to see someone from home, though today I am weirdly homesick and missing the Bay Area in particular, which may explain the sudden rush of blog posts (that and I'm not working this week, which means I'm approaching a state of being well-rested for the first time in months). At any rate, I love getting the chance to show someone around Hanoi and drive them around on my motorbike, even if we didn't really manage to do anything particularly touristy while in town.
At any rate, Josh is gone and everyone else is working, so I am weirdly aimless today; I learned how to fumblingly talk about the weather in Vietnamese today (hot; rainy; spring-rainy; really rainy), and also that apparently me and my teacher's definitions of "mind-crushingly hot" apparently do not coincide. My Vietnamese, by the way, barely deserves to be called that - I'm not good at languages on a good day (see: posts way back in November about my wasted four years of Spanish) and Vietnamese, with its various and sundry new vowel sounds and six tones, is entirely different from anything else I've ever tried to wrap my brain around. I'm trying to practice more these days, though mostly on little kids (if they laugh at me, at least I'm still bigger than them); the best response so far was telling a little girl in Hoi An that her shoes were beautiful (dep qua!) and randomly receiving a giant hug, though whether this was in response to my crazy impressive Vietnamese skills or because she felt that bad for me that I could be so old and still barely able to speak still isn't entirely clear.
We did, however, manage to get Josh set up with a lifetime supply of stickers.
At any rate, Josh is gone and everyone else is working, so I am weirdly aimless today; I learned how to fumblingly talk about the weather in Vietnamese today (hot; rainy; spring-rainy; really rainy), and also that apparently me and my teacher's definitions of "mind-crushingly hot" apparently do not coincide. My Vietnamese, by the way, barely deserves to be called that - I'm not good at languages on a good day (see: posts way back in November about my wasted four years of Spanish) and Vietnamese, with its various and sundry new vowel sounds and six tones, is entirely different from anything else I've ever tried to wrap my brain around. I'm trying to practice more these days, though mostly on little kids (if they laugh at me, at least I'm still bigger than them); the best response so far was telling a little girl in Hoi An that her shoes were beautiful (dep qua!) and randomly receiving a giant hug, though whether this was in response to my crazy impressive Vietnamese skills or because she felt that bad for me that I could be so old and still barely able to speak still isn't entirely clear.
