The Vietnamese language was originally represented by Chinese-style characters until Portuguese missionaries translated the written form into modified Roman script.

I’d like to buy a vowel.

Whereas the sound of the vowels in English is dictated by the structure of the word in which they reside, the VN alphabet includes several additional forms of Roman vowels, modified by diacritics which specifically determine their sound.

Because the Vietnamese (VN) alphabet does not include f, j, w, or z VN learners must become familiar with the sound of these consonants. To complicate the matter the letter ‘t’ represents a sound somewhere between an English ‘d’ and ‘t’ while ‘th’ at the beginning of a VN word is closer to the English ‘t’. There are two versions of ‘d’, both of which are only found at the beginning of a word. The ‘d’ with a line crossing the upstroke like a ‘t’ is similar to the English ‘d’ but the uncrossed ‘d’ has a ‘y’ sound. Throw in combinations such as ‘gi’which is a ‘y’ sound in the south of the country and a ‘z’ sound in the north, and the VN learner has a lot of habits to break.

Tree is my favourite number.

The English ‘thr’( three, through, threadbare) is a particularly difficult sound for the VN learner and without pronunciation coaching and practice it will always be ‘t’.

VN words do not end in voiced consonants and learners find it difficult to end a word with a harsh plosive like ’p’ or ‘t’ and consequently many English words remain unfinished.

Don’t take that tone.

Unlike English VN is a tonal language. This means that the pitch of a word is dictated by tone markings, in addition to the diacritics found above modified vowels. Two words spelt the same will have entirely different meanings depending on their markings. Each word is at the mercy of its tone marking, or lack thereof, to determine whether its pitch rises, falls, dips then rises, includes a glottal stop, remains high and even or stops suddenly with the final consonant remaining unvoiced. In English, tone is usually spread throughout the sentence and is contingent on the message of the whole sentence. With no tonal markers as guides, VN learners can struggle to find the appropriate pitch and the result can sound unusual to the native English speaker.

To compound the problem most VN question words, usually found at the end of a sentence, have a falling tone whereas in English it is not uncommon for a question to end with a rising tone.

We’re too tense.

Whereas English is riddled with tenses VN has only three and of these the present tense is the most commonly used. VN words cannot be altered which means sentences are constructed like a mosaic with additional words added to modify verbs. There is no ‘ing’ or ‘ed’ but an extra word (‘dang’ with a crossed ‘d’ for present tense) is positioned in front of the verb to indicate tense. To avoid using past or present tense the Vietnamese will include a time reference e.g. ‘Today at 3 o’clock I swim’, or ‘I meet him already’. As a result, the extremely complex nature of English tenses and the resultant verb structures present a nightmare to the VN learner.

Soup tasty very.

In VN, adjectives follow the noun so a ‘small town’ becomes a ‘town small’. Pronouns (usually kinship terms) don’t change form even when possessive, however when used in a possessive sense they follow the object of possession e.g. ‘my name’ would be ‘name I (my)’.

VN is a mono - syllabic language which means that many words are compounds e.g. ‘now’ in English is ‘bay gio’, plus diacritics and tone markers, in VN.

VN does not have infinitives in the English sense and there are no plurals.

Because of these and a host of other grammatical differences, early VN learners struggle when translating back and forth between their native tongue and English, until they learn to think in English.

I would if I could.

Vietnam is a relatively poor country and English lessons can be prohibitively expensive.

The main forms of private transport are the bicycle and the motorbike. Because of the country’s monsoonal climate and appallingly chaotic traffic conditions, it can sometimes be a life threatening ordeal simply to get to school.

English and Vietnamese evolved in isolation to each other and represent two uniquely different approaches to language. The conversion of VN into Roman script gives VN learners of English a significant advantage over their Thai, Lao and Chinese neighbours who must also deal with an alien alphabet. Regardless of this, English is still a tough nut to crack, and with social and complex cultural issues in the mix, the Vietnamese learner has a lot on his mind.

I have lived and travelled with a Vietnamese family in southern Vietnam, and have witnessed some of the problems facing Vietnamese students. I am currently learning Vietnamese at the Asian Language Centre in Adelaide, Australia and the knowledge gained has been useful for this assignment. I have also spoken to Vietnamese born residents of Australia regarding the difficulties they have encountered learning English.

John Pedler