It was bound to happen...

I knew it was never a matter of if I make an embarrassing Vietnamese mistake but rather, when...and after last week I can say that I know the when (well, one of the many “when”s to come) :)

Last week was a great week as I began to meet some of our neighbors. One night Robin and I were walking back from school and about 4 of the neighbor ladies beckoned us over to come sit with them. (Something that is so great about Vietnam during the summer time, is that everyone is outside at night. Literally, everywhere you go, the streets are lined with little plastic tables and chairs filled with people chatting and eating.) I was a bit sheepish but Robin encouraged me to go, so we ended up joining them and talking for about 45 minutes. We used our broken Vietnamese, they used their broken English...and we made it work. Meanwhile, they kept buying more and more food from the street vendor to feed us during the conversation. I left that evening, so excited, thinking too myself “gosh, this is what it is all about”.

Fast forward 24 hours, the next evening...Ashleigh and I were walking home from school. I saw that some of the ladies that I had met the previous night were once again out. I couldn’t stay and chat that night but I was so excited to greet them using their names! I eagerly started waving and called out the first two women’s names...and then, I called out a third name. My third greeting was met with fits...no...tantrums of laughter from all the surrounding neighbor children. I think I immediately began to walk a little quicker as Ashleigh and I exchanged confused glances.

Later that evening, I asked one of our Vietnamese friends from school, Xuan, what I had said. She asked me what I thought the neighbor lady’s name was and I showed her how it was spelled (I had had the 4 women write their names in the notebook that I carry around with me). To the best of my ability, I then tried to tell her what I said. She immediately said “oh”...to which I said “crap” :) Xuan went on to explain to me that the tone that I had used to say my neighbors name in fact caused me to say the Vietnamese equivalent of the word “rape”. Yes, ladies and gentlemen...I walked down my street one night last week waving and saying “rape, rape, rape”. Wow. Talk about embarrassing! My face immediately turned bright red. I covered my mouth and tried to recover from the shock of my tonal mistake!

Vietnamese is a hard language to learn! It is comprised of 6 different tones...in other words, the same “word” said 6 different ways, could potentially mean 6 different things. It is amazing to me (in the short amount of time that I have been learning the language) to experience how my ear is just not trained to hear the differences in those tones and my tongue is not trained to make those different tones. It is quite the adventure to learn...lets just put it that way.

The past few days when I have passed by that particular neighbor...I have kept my greeting to a smile and hello...nothing more. But don’t worry...I am working on it :)

Grace and peace,

Kait