For the past week, my partner and I have spent more time on free talks. He often has me explain things like classwork, cooking direction, work duties, and et cetera to him to the best of my ability. Then he would fix whatever he feels would have been better for me to say. We watched a couple of shows online together in order for me to be familiarize with certain dialects. As it turns out, I actually find it easier to understand people that have the “central dialect” rather than those that are Saigon natives. However, as expected, I still don’t understand people that speaks the northern dialect as they stress vowels and accents much more wildly than I am used to.
Additionally, over the past week, we actually went out to eat at Mekong, a Vietnamese restaurant nearby. He had me order in Vietnamese, which I found to be extremely awkward because I rarely use Vietnamese in those kinds of settings. I eventually muttered Mì Hoành Thánh (Vietnamese Egg Noodles Soup) at the waitress while internally screamed at my incompetence. Over the meal, we talked about school and various classes in Vietnamese. My partner had me explain what my Environmental Economics class was about in Vietnamese. It was extremely difficult to talk about that class as I didn’t know that many economics words in Vietnamese nor did I know any words involving the environment. This led me to realize that I need to focus more on less commonly used words.
As part of my lesson plan, I have also started to listen to Vietnamese music more often. My partner and I found that we have pretty similar taste in Vietnamese music because of our family. We like to listen to the older, more folk-like songs than the new Vietnamese pop music nowadays. I personally really liked the song Duyên Phận (fate in love or fate in marriage) by Như Quỳnh. While I understand the underlying message of the song, it is quite difficult to explain the meaning of the song because of the various idioms that are used throughout the song – which is often the case with most Vietnamese folk songs that I like. However, in general, it is about a girl wondering if her fate to be married in the near future is right for her as she thinks she had not matured enough to know about love. It’s a bit sad, but so are most Vietnamese folk songs.
Recently, I have started to look into Vietnamese textbooks, which I found to be extremely difficult as there are not that many textbook resources for the southern Vietnamese dialect. This is because in Vietnam, the northern dialect is considered to be “true” dialect. As a result, finding good resources for the dialect that I use and want to learn is like finding a needle in a haystack. So, I have turned to reading Vietnamese translated books, that is books that have been translated into Vietnamese. I am reading Cirque du Freak, an English vampire fiction series that I used to read as a child. Since the series is meant for children, I find the books easy to read and quite interesting.
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