“Có công mài sắt, có ngày nên kim”: “If you work hard enough at sharpening iron, one day you’ll have a needle” (literally “Put effort [into] sharpen[ing] iron, have one day in the end [a] needle”). Basically, insofar as I can tell, the closest equivalent would be that nothing is obtained without hard work. Again, I’m pretty sure of my translation, a lot less sure about my reading of the proverb.

Progress continues apace; I’m turning to vocabulary words that might actually be useful out there, namely: “nhà băng” (bank), “thông hành” (passport), and “khách sạn” (hotel). My vocabulary continues to be overwhelmingly focused on food, though: at the very least, menu-reading isn’t going to be a problem (nor is ordering, at least if they don’t answer back…).

Had last lesson before leaving; if nothing else, it confirmed that boy, I need to work on my neutral and short-descending accent (and my diphtongs and my “th”, and so on, and so forth). Should be fun…

That’s it from me. Don’t know how much internet I’m going to have over there (it’s not that there isn’t any, but rather that we might be busy). See you in two weeks?

“Cái nết đánh chết cái dẹp.”: “Good behaviour trumps [lit. "beat to death"; I'm assuming it means "utterly triumphs over" rather than "bludgeon to death"] beauty”. Again, could be wrong; this was me with a dictionary and the vocab I learnt so far (actually, literally, I think it means something like “the good behaviour thing beats to death the beautiful thing”, but obviously it’s a little awkward that way).

Meaning pretty much self-evident.

Also, I managed to say the equivalent of “I speak a little Vietnamese, here are the words I know” over twitter and not get laughed at! (it did pose a funny set of problems, because the pronoun “I” depends on the perceived age of your interlocutor, and the pronoun “you” depends on their age and gender. Now guess what you do when you have neither? Flounder, quite obviously… [1]) It’s amusing how the internet generates new sorts of language problems that you never really think about…

Words learnt: 150 (plus stuff I don’t consciously learn, such as food and funky pronouns. See “mình”, the pronoun used between husband and wife, which also has the meaning of “body”). It has occurred to me that part of the problem with this %%% language is that it’s the first language I learnt that is so distant from French: English and Spanish both have a striking number of similarities with French, especially for newspaper speak. For instance, I can understand a sentence like “The Prime Minister of Great Britain declared that the crisis in the eurozone…” even if I didn’t know all the words, because so many of them are similar to French. Now, in Vietnamese, “prime minister” is “thủ thống”, “declare” is “tuyên bố”–and let’s not even get into “eurozone”… You do have surprise words: “súp” is “soup”, “phó mát” is “cheese” (aka “fromage”), “nhà ga” is “station” (aka “gare”. “nhà” is just “house, building”); but far fewer you’d have in Spanish (where I can fake understanding of a lot of words, because hey, Romance languages!). I have to reach for the dictionary every two words on a good day (and even more than that, because the grammar is so different from French and the whole act of translating really requires firing neurons in the right mindset. Kind of reminds me of Ancient Greek, actually. In worse…

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[1]Not totally true. There is a neutral and uncomfy pronoun “I”, “tôi”, which I can use for those cases. And, if the speaker is around my age bracket, “bạn” (friend), has the advantage of being genderless (but it’ll piss off someone much older than me really fast). Bit awkward, but hey.

“báo chết để da, người ta chết để tiếng”
A panther when dead leaves behind a skin; a man [lit. people] when dead leaves behind a name/reputation/words.

Pretty. Also, I learnt lots of new words

I’d like to think my vocabulary is improving, but 3 words a day isn’t very efficient to build up vocab (mind you, with me putting in about 15-30 min per day, I don’t reckon I can get more efficient than this). I got myself an Oxford picture dictionary English/Vietnamese; the unfortunate bit being that it’s for Vietnamese immigrants to Western countries, and therefore it uses English concepts: it’s OK for most everyday words, but it lacks Vietnamese syntax, and the concepts that are different just aren’t explained: the various kinds of uncles just get lumped under the same English word (yes, there are four words to describe uncles in Vietnamese: cậu, bác, chú, dượng respectively brother of mother, elder brother of father, younger brother of father, and any uncles that have married into the family rather than being linked to it by blood). So not quite what I want to be studying intensively…

In other news, work has started again on the novella that wouldn’t die (complete redraft), so I’m going to be scarce this week. And, hum, the week after (which is Christmas anyway).

So, not much (other than yummy Bday dinner involving trout, which I can smell cooking). Battling with a short that refuses to lie down, and thinking on revisions to the horrendous novella after my crit group’s been there (and they are truly made of awesome).

And working on a short story that refuses to cooperate, but that’s as expected and should be solved soon.

As far as the Vietnamese goes, my mom finally figured out that I had issues with two tones (the neutral, and the huyền, which is one of the two descending ones. I do fine with the ascending tone if I pay attention, and the falling-ascending ones are pronounced the same way as the accent on “phở”, so I got a lot of practise with it. And the other descending one, for some reason, never really bothers me, at least comparatively). Damn, there goes my last refuge–I can foresee that I will get drilled extensively… On the plus side, I now know a lot of fruit names. Some nice ones are “apple” (“táo tây”, ie “Western jujube”), “asparagus” (“măng tây”, ie “Western bamboo shoot”), and my absolute favorite, “star-apple” (“vú sữa”, ie “mother’s breast milk”, because the fruit is sort of spherical, with a little stem that sort of looks like a nipple, and has a cloudy white juice. Pragmatic, if nothing else).

I also tested out my new-found vocabulary for fruit and various other edibles by translating a Vietnamese recipe into French (the one for bì cuốn, aka rolls with pork skin. I know how to make the rolls, but not the pork). More accurately, I relied on Google translate to do the bulk of the work once we got out of the ingredients stage, and then corrected the thing by hand with the missing vocabulary. But still–I’m irrationally proud. I wouldn’t have been able to do that a year ago.

Tomorrow, London!! Aka the city of perdition where I will spend my birthday allowance on too many books…

-taught myself (not that there’s much involved) how to use VNI to input Vietnamese characters. Basically input numbers in addition to letters in order to add the diacritical marks (slightly non-intuitive, but I prefer numbers to the other method, which involves inputting extra letters/symbols). OK, that’s this week’s distraction, now I have no excuse to go back to my lessons…

-tried a slightly different phở recipe (see, I can use VNI *grin*). H was happy; I, less so. I think using the vegetarian broth as the basis for a phở bò is a bad idea. Yes, kind of obvious, when you think about it. We have veggie broth at home because it’s more versatile, but it’s just not phở without the meat broth… (beef, in this case. Never was a fan of the chicken version). Let’s see if I can find some without MSG… (yes, I could make my own beef broth, but I seldom have 3 hours to cook broth, so shortcuts are nice).

-also, am self-teaching myself Python, on the H’s recommendation that it’s a more versatile language than bash scripting, which is what I used before. I can see his point: it’s more practical, more readable, and it’s portable, which is darn handy. Go Python.

And on a more cheerful topic–we had two lemongrass stalks leftover from a previous meal, and I was looking for a way to use them. Ended up making lemongrass chicken, which tasted awesome. So before I forget how I came to this result, here’s the lowdown.

The recipe is a mix between two Lemongrass Roasted Chicken recipes: one from Wandering Chopsticks’ blog, and the other from Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. They both used a whole chicken, which I couldn’t find at this time of the year (usual provider on holiday, as befits the month of August), so I made do with chicken breasts.

You’ll need:
-4 boneless chicken breasts (about 400-500g)

-5 small onions, or 1 large onion (I used the bottom part of 5 scallions, though the ones I bought had bulbs double the size of “standard” Asian scallions, such as the ones you see in the topmost picture here)
-2 stalks lemongrass, minced
-5-6 garlic cloves, minced
-2 tblsp. fish sauce
-2 tblsp. sugar (or 1 tblsp. sugar, 1 tblsp. honey)
-2 tblsp. soy sauce
-1 tsp. salt

-2 tblsp. fresh chopped coriander (the recipe called for 2 tblsp. The only coriander I could find was at the supermarket and came in one of those little translucid boxes, pre-washed–I’m pretty sure it was 20g, but not 100%. I ended up using all of it, because I’ve found it keeps very badly in the fridge and didn’t want to freeze it. Overall, I’d definitely add more than 2 tablespoons. Maybe 3-4).

Combine all the ingredients except the coriander and the chicken. Put the chicken in the marinade–if you have time, leave it for 1 hour in the fridge. If you don’t, then skip this part.
Pre-heat oven to 180-200°C (thermostat 6-7), put the chicken and about half the marinade, and let it cook for 40 minutes, until top part is starting to turn golden. Then turn chicken over, brush with rest of marinade, and cook for another 40 minutes until golden. Sprinkle coriander on top of the finished product, and serve with steamed rice.

There you go. Shiny and yummy.

EDIT: now with picture!