Language Lessons and Mexican Food

This entry is primarily about our language study. Unfortunately language lessons don't make for very interesting pictures...and yet a blog entry without pictures is like a burrito without guacamole: far below its real potential. So I've just tossed in a few random, unrelated pictures from our life here in Vietnam. They have little or nothing to do with language study, so don't get confused.

Our blog posts to date have, admittedly, been about things of a rather silly nature (swan boats and wardrobes and such). Fearing that some like our friend Erek might begin to believe that we've got too much time on our hands here in Hanoi it's time to let you know some of the less silly things that we've been up to.

Our primary purpose in being here has been to learn as much Vietnamese as we can in four and a half months. So far we've had ten lessons and have learned somewhere in the vicinity of 22o different words which (we're told) is pretty good. For many, the term "language class" probably conjures up images of sitting in a stuffy high school classroom with 30 other drowsy teenagers listening to a teacher explain irregular verb conjugation and such. That's not the case with us, fortunately.

Officially we are students at the Hanoi University Vietnamese Language Center. What that boils down to in reality is two very nice ladies--one a mother of two and a former Russian teacher, the other a student getting her masters in economics--who take turns coming over to our apartment for three hours of language instruction each day.

A typical day of instruction has us involved in six or seven different activities. We learn new nouns and verbs by pulling out pictures of various objects and actions. Our instructor will say (in Vietnamese, of course) "This is a dog. This is a dog. This is a cat. This is a cat. Where is the dog?" And Joelle and I--like the linguistic infants that we are--will do the only thing we can which is point to the one we think is the dog. We proceed like this until we have a table full of pictures of various animals and can at least semi-accurately point to the ones our teacher calls out. Our lessons also involve playing with dolls, Pictionary-style games, counting and eating M&Ms, and a fair bit of laughter. We record key parts of each activity so that we can go back and review them on our own.

All in all it's been a more enjoyable, less painful process than we had thought it would be. Our first 100 hours of instruction involve no speaking at all on our part which can be a bit frustrating at times but which will (it is hoped) help us in the long run, since we'll be better able to distinguish and mimic some of the trickier sounds and tones of Vietnamese.

But no matter how good our Vietnamese gets, we will probably never be able to order quality Mexican food in Hanoi because it simply doesn't exist. But by shopping at three different stores and the veggie lady down the alley (and walking a total of about three miles in the process) we were able to find enough ingredients to whip up a fair approximation of fajitas-minus-sour-cream. We leave you now with a picture that has nothing to do with language study, but which warms my heart nonetheless.