The grammar is ridiculously simple. Subject, verb, object. “Want eat what.” “Want eat noodle.” Pronunciation is an obstacle but I’m past it. But my hearing isn’t great either and spoken Vietnamese is just too fast for me. Half the time I’m dumbfounded it turns out that every word I didn’t understand is in my vocabulary.
The grammar is ridiculously simple. Subject, verb, object. “Want eat what.” “Want eat noodle.” Pronunciation is an obstacle but I’m past it. But my hearing isn’t great either and spoken Vietnamese is just too fast for me. Half the time I’m dumbfounded it turns out that every word I didn’t understand is in my vocabulary.
I had a few students whose English was astonishingly fluent. Idiomatic, clear American regional accent, never been outside Vietnam.
I experienced the same in Japan. American night at a hotel, two stupefyingly beautiful hostesses. I commented to one that her (American) English was perfectly unaccented Midwestern and asked how long she had lived in America. "Oh, you flatter me. I have never been outside of Japan and learned entirely in a university" Holy wow!
The grammar is ridiculously simple. Subject, verb, object. “Want eat what.” “Want eat noodle.” Pronunciation is an obstacle but I’m past it. But my hearing isn’t great either and spoken Vietnamese is just too fast for me. Half the time I’m dumbfounded it turns out that every word I didn’t understand is in my vocabulary.
I had a few students whose English was astonishingly fluent. Idiomatic, clear American regional accent, never been outside Vietnam.
I experienced the same in Japan. American night at a hotel, two stupefyingly beautiful hostesses. I commented to one that her (American) English was perfectly unaccented Midwestern and asked how long she had lived in America. "Oh, you flatter me. I have never been outside of Japan and learned entirely in a university" Holy wow!