tone-oholic

so today i got my first actual vietnamese lesson, i was so enthusiastic it was scary! at one point about 20 minutes into the lesson, i just pleaded with the thuey, who teaches foreigners all the time, to just tell me the most important thing about learning vietnamese, which is found below:



that's right, the tones! in fact i knew that the key for me to learn vietnamese is not being able to hear the tones (since knowing thai gives you a leg up in that department) but simply ...




... knowing what the tones actually are (because they are different among tonal languages such as thai, various kinds of chinese, and vietnamese), in fact if you don't know how to use the tones then it doesn't matter how well you can grasp all of these other elements of the language, such as:



grammar, vocabulary, or classifiers (words used to classify things when we are counting, such as a "loaf" of bread), if you can't pronounce the tones correctly nothing will make sense, like this for instance:




tomorrow, i will be having dinner with members of the sociology department at the national university of vietnam, where i will be giving a talk tomorrow afternoon, which means an official end to my getting settled into my new kitchen, and more eating out!
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on a non-food/language related note, it was a chilly 50 degrees here in hanoi today, while in bangkok it was an equally as chilly 88!