Grace’s Language Learning Update

What learning!? Originally she had thought about getting a student to tutor her weekly, but ended up not having enough time. So, she’s been asking me for the necessary words the day before she goes to the market, words such as lettuce, bean sprout, noodles, sesame, half, more, less,… and managed to get whatever food she could using those words combined with a lot of hand motions. She usually buys the same stuff every week from the same ladies, so now she really doesn’t have to say much and they would know what to put in the bag for her. Occasionally, some students would try to teach her a few words, but she still has a hard time with the different tones in the Vietnamese language. When I teach her a word, I would give it to her in the southern Vietnamese accent, and then also tell her how it may sound in the northern accent. And a lot of the words are totally different between north and south, making things more complicated. By now, my guess is that she has a vocabulary of maybe 20 words!? Just the other day, she went to the store to get plastic bags, and the Vietnamese word for ‘bags’ here is ‘túi.’ She said it right the night before, but by the next morning when she got to the store, she said something that sounded more like ‘tỏi’ (which means ‘garlic’). So the ladies at the store were puzzled for a long time. But somehow things worked out in the end and she came home with plastic bags! The Vietnamese language can be pretty tricky.