Hooray Henry was delighted with his 'fuzzy-face Asian child T-shirt'
“I’m an alien. I’m a legal alien.” – Sting, Englishman in New York
Periodically the travel press comes up with another statistic that makes one ashamed to be an Englishperson abroad. 97% of all Greeks think that Brits are immoral, drunken animals, for example (who would blame them). Or, 20% of all French chateaux owners would rather open up their hotel to a pack of wild dogs than people from the UK.
The latest statistics aren’t particularly surprising, but are no less embarrassing. According to a new TravelSupermarket.com survey, more than 50% of Brits never even attempt to speak a foreign language while abroad. This doesn’t even include the millions who, like me, shamefacedly consider learning a dozen muttered words as ‘trying to speak the lingo’. These are people who don’t even say Bon Jour or Auf Wiedersehen (pet).
The survey did at least ascertain that 60 per cent of us do at least feel embarrassed by their lack of linguistic ability. But the worst offenders are the ‘more than one in ten’ who apparently “believe there is no point making an effort abroad as everyone speaks English”. Well hooray for the colonial overlords I say! I’m sure that for every one who will admit to that shameful statement to other human beings there must be at least one more who thinks it.
But even if we don’t have to try, why shouldn’t we? It’s tremendously galling to sit chatting to half a dozen Europeans and Vietnamese in a bar or cafe, when they can bicker knowledgeably about everything from geography and politics, to shopping or the local live music scene, and in English, when you have just about mastered the local words for Thank you, but still have to mime the word toilet.
You do have to ask though whether other nationalities would bother to learn English if they didn’t have to. If Vietnamese was the language of international business, then we would all be learning that quick smart too.
The study of English over here is enormous business. Wannabe English teachers with little or no experience are in great demand. Backpackers are postponing their routes out of town to join in the tutoring revolution. Even those with no desire to make money from this scholarly obsession will find themselves turning down private pupils left, right and centre – co-workers, busboys, hotel receptionists, all whose main aim is to hone their English skills and boost their chances of making headway in this furiously competitive society.
Life in Saigon for the army of new teachers is sweet. Even the least experienced will be making $15 an hour, in a country where everything is four or five times cheaper than in the west, and living among a group of similar peers. But for the pupils, learning English must be impossibly difficult, if trying to learn Vietnamese as an English speaker is anything to go by.
Unlike European languages, Vietnamese is a tonal language where each syllable can be pronounced in up to 6 different ways, depending on what and where the accent is placed on it. Letters are pronounced differently too. G is pronounced yeh, C pronounced like a hard ‘G’ (gah), and there’s an additional letter Đ, which sounds like a cross between a T and a D. The language doesn’t even have letters for F, J, W and Z.
And these complicated distinctions between Vietnamese and English only take into account pronunciation, not even the additional problems of writing a new language or the dreaded English grammar.
English speakers abroad have life so easy, nowhere more so than in the new Vietnam, where burgeoning capitalism and lust for the free market makes our language so valuable. But we shouldn’t ever forget to try a few words of another language. Who knows? We might just learn something.
*Do you speak English?
that’s interesting..