Michael Sieburg

I’ll never forget my first day of Vietnamese class. The professor walked in the classroom at Bach Khoa University in Hanoi and wrote a sentence on the board essentially composed of different pronunciations using the spelling, “ban”. Bạn is friend. Bán is to sell. Bàn is table. And so on. I forget the full sentence now; perhaps I’ve repressed it. Ultimately it read something along the lines of, “My friend sells dishes in a dirty mountain village.” And mind you, he used the spelling “ban” for all but one of the words in the sentence, only changing the pronunciation. I despaired. How would I ever learn this language? To comfort myself, I bought a t-shirt that jokingly read, “The Anti-Tones Alliance.”

I know I’m not alone but it’s always nice to be reminded you have company. This is perhaps one of the better descriptions I’ve read of a foreigner trying to learn Vietnamese:

For seven weeks now, I’ve been struggling to understand and utter the difficult, surprising, and devilish phonemes that make up the Vietnamese language. Nothing in my 46 years of speaking languages has prepared me to make these sounds. It’s been like watching an alien attempt to squeeze itself out of my mouth; as surprising when successful as when it fails.