Happy New Year

So I learned something new today. The "Happy New Year" song played on Vietnamese radio was made by ABBA, the American disco group. I had no clue, I thought it was a song made popular on Paris by Night or something. Second thing, from reading Tet traditions on wikipedia, this song is super popular in Vietnam during Tet. I didn't really believe it I saw the comments on the below video. Things like "Happy New Year from Hai Phong City". This is pretty funny, it's almost kinda like Borat and "Everybody Dance Now".

Twilight in Vietnam

Breaking Dawn is called Hung Dong in Vietnam. Is this version X rated? Do Edward and Jacob go for each other? So tempting... but must resist .... urge... to watch ....

Finishing a Promise I Made Two Years Ago

http://ballersinarms.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-era.html

On the first day of existence of BiA, I said I would provide a lesson on how to speak with a Vietnamese fob accent. Well here it is! I read a few pages of some random books, and wrote down every sound that is not used in Vietnamese phonetics. Here are some of them (because I know I probably didn't catch all of the "non-Viet English sounds")

"TH" The T sound in English is the "th" sound in Vietnamese. The fricative TH sound in English has no equivalent in Vietnamese. Therefore a Viet fob would say "thank you" as "tank you".

"R" sound at the end of a consonant. Vietnamese have R at the beginning of words, but not at the end. So what the Viet fob does when reading such words is ignore the "R" sound and end the word with the vowel sound. So anniversary is read as "anni-vuh-suh-ry"

"S" at the end of a word. I'm not sure what the convention is here: sometimes fobs drop the S sound and end with the vowel, but the funny thing is sometimes they add in a completely different sound. For example tennis is tennit. And they add in the dau sach (up tone) for the "nit" lol

S followed by a non-vowel. Examples are school, stamp, smart. A fob would call these "si-kool, si-tam, si-mart"

B at the end of word or P at the beginning of a word. I am pretty certain Viet words never end in B. As for never starting with P, I'm not so sure but I only see words start with PH but never P itself. This means that the Viet fob substitutes B for P and vice versa in different situations. Crab sounds like "crap" and paper sounds like "ba-buh"

There is no W sound. I looked at a Viet map once. Hawaii is spelled Ha-Oai.

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Anyway, those are just some sounds I can think of, there's gotta be many more. Here's some more advice on sounding like a Viet fob: make your tone vary as you speak each word. And for word ending sounds that Viet people can't speak, make alot of guttural sounds:

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