Archived entry from our February 2007 trip
Hi All, it's Ilene.
The old enthusiasm is returning. *This* will be the time a second language finally sticks. After
three years of French in high school
a summer in Japan
three years of Ancient Greek in college
three years of Latin in college
another year in Japan
one semester of Spanish in graduate school
and two previous three week trips to Vietnam
none of which I can honestly say has lead to long-term foreign retention, unless you count the swirling polyglot they now produce in my head when I sit down to practice any of them. . .
Si, j'aime sushi tabemas.
O helios c'est tres atsui ce matin, desu ne?
J'ai mucho livres parce que j'adore legere.
Etc.
But, as the song goes, I'm a believer, and its Ms. Multilingual that I can't quite leave. Vietnamese is great in many ways--it's monosyllabic, its verbs are regular and have no tenses (there are particles to indicate past and present actions), its nouns are stable (no gender! no declensions!), it has a roman alphabet of sorts.
But. Complications have ensued this time around.
Sudden inexplicable hearing loss (both the loss and its inexplicability confirmed by Dr. Lee) in the left ear (I can't complain, it is minor in the grand scheme of things and plenty of people, my own sister for example, has it far worse in both ears), but still, it's making the process of dealing with a tonal language more of a challenge. . .
Because it isn't just hearing less in one ear, it's more like having a speaker on your car stereo go out. You're not left with all of the sounds half as loud. You're left with some sounds and not others. Bass is lost, but treble not, for example. It's more like that. Low tones are gone. I was trying to watch Robert Altman's *Mrs. Miller and McCabe* tonight and had to give up because I just couldn't hear enough of the sounds several of the rather important characters were making to piece their speech together.
Well, that is a bit of a dramatic example. But sound rings in the left side of my head differently now, so some sounds can get in and cause a racket and others not penetrate at all.
Younger readers will have to take my word for this, but hubcaps used to be made of metal (shortly after the invention of the telegraph), and when you dropped the lugnuts into an upturned hubcap, they made a certain metalic pinging sound. I am reminded of this sound fairly often these days in environments with a lot of background noise--say, Circuit City the other day--and suddenly a child's voice will get in the left side of my head and richoche around, but the murmurings of the teenage salesboy will fail to penetrate.
So, as I listen intently to my Mot It Tieng Viet CD-ROM, trying to hear and reproduce the six tones for each of the Vietnamese alphabet's three"A"s, I worry about this.
But I believe. I know it's going to work this time.
Ilene
