Rice or noodles?

Do you prefer rice or noodles? Sometimes the question is legitimate, like when you are sitting in a restaurant ready to order. But most of the time, it's just another Vietnamese running gag. “Com”, is ‘rice’, as you will no doubt learn very quickly. But it is also used to refer to your wife (or regular partner in Western cultures). “Pho”, is the famous Vietnamese ‘noodle soup’, but in this context, when opposed to rice, it usually refers to a lover (or mistress). Of course, any stated preference will be interpreted as ‘wife’ or ‘lover’ and will get your Vietnamese friends laughing. After they recover from their hysteria, they will usually try and explain the inside Joke and will conclude with the common Vietnamese answer for married men. Literally translated, it goes something like: “In the morning I take my wife (rice) to eat noodles. At noon, I take my lover (noodles) to eat rice. At night, rice and noodles go back to their respective houses.”

The birds and the butterflies!

As in all cultures, Vietnamese have alternate and poetic names to designate the male and female genitals. The most widely used are: “Chim”, meaning 'bird' for the penis, “Buom”, meaning 'butterfly' for the vulva. So anytime you talk about birds or butterflies, expect giggles and innuendoes.

Too much !

Another important family to meet is the qua clan. Qua refers to anything that is too much, too many, excessive, or overflowing. “Dat qua”! - That’s too expensive! Learn this one right away: Vietnamese people will start any bargaining or negotiating like this without hesitation or any prior knowledge of the true value of a product: the first price you hear (except maybe for a postage stamp) is automatically too high, and should be taken as a starting-point, a challenge, an insult, a joke - as anything you like except the actual price to be paid. “Met qua”! - I'm very tired. “Tiec qua”! - What a pity, what a shame “Dep qua”! - How pretty/handsome you are! “Qua khen”! - You’re too kind! (I.e., flattery will get you nowhere ...)

Color blind ?

Mild color blindness is characterized by the inability to distinguish between greens from blues. Does this have anything to do with the peculiar fact that, in Vietnamese, there is only one word to refer to both green and blue? One must use periphrases ‘xanh la cay’ (plant leaf green/blue) for green and ‘xanh da troi’ (sky green/blue) for blue. Were Vietnam's forefathers more prone to color blindness?

Make them laugh and you'll win their hearts!

Vietnamese like to smile and laugh in all situations. A little bit of humor will go a long way. But sometimes you will have them laughing at you without knowing why. Vietnamese language is monosyllabic and tonal, making it ideal for puns plays on words and ... hilarious mistakes by foreigners who are giving it a try. To understand the most common Vietnamese jokes, one must know the following basic analogies.

Student talk

With so many students, from kindergarten to university level, rushing to learn English, there's bound to be some mutual influence between the two languages. Apart from a flurry of new words picked up by the Vietnamese to adjust the language to modernity, a more curious trend is ‘student talk’. It goes like this: you take a common Vietnamese expression and you translate each word in English using, when possible, an alternate but correct meaning. You then constitute a baffling expression. For instance the expression ‘khong sao dau’ means something like 'nothing to it', but ‘khong’ is no, one of the many meanings of ‘sao’ is ‘star’' and ‘dau’ can mean, among other things, ‘where’. Putting it all together you get: ‘No star where!’ which can now be used as a way of saying ‘there's nothing to it!’ DO try to talk with students. They are Vietnam's future and you will learn a great deal from them. It's actually very easy, as most are keen to meet foreigners and practice their English. Just hang around in parks and public places and strike up a conversation as you see them walking by. They'll love it.

The family tree

It does get tricky rather quickly, even for such simple words as 'me' and 'you'. The family model has permeated even the language itself. In Vietnamese, people refer to themselves and to others with words taken from the family analogy: older sister, younger brother, grandfather, maternal uncle... The trick is to guess (or better, to ask) the age of your interlocutor in order to adjust the 'you and I' accordingly. But the nuances are nearly infinite and mastering a dozen versions of ‘I’ in normal speech does not come easily. This is where you will need the family tree. Simply (!) project yourself and your interlocutor in a hypothetical family and use the appropriate, 'you' and ‘I’ pronouns. For instance: (a) you are in your early twenties and meet a woman in her forties. On a first meeting, you would call her chi and would use em as ‘I’. (b) you meet a man in his mid-fifties. On a first meeting, especially in a formal occasion (business, official introduction), you would address him as ong and refer to yourself as toi. Later, should you become much closer to him and his family; you might have to switch to a more personal and appropriate relationship, calling him toi depending on the age of your own father and refer to yourself as bac or chu.