Vietnamese Airport: Check In the Passengers

How to play: you are the ground agent at the Experdize Air check-in at Tân Sơn Nhất, and every passenger speaks Vietnamese — this game teaches the language of checking in for a flight. Passengers file through the stanchion ropes to the one desk, and every check comes up on the panel as a question in Vietnamese. The terminal stands still while a question is up, so read at your own pace: the level is ten reads, there is no clock to beat, and the record is how long they take you and how many you got right first time. The terminal is built up a level at a time, and every passenger takes their own way through it. At level 1 there is one desk and a roped queue, and every check-in opens with the booking against the passport — Nguyễn Văn An against NGUYỄN VĂN AN. ⚠ A tone mark in Vietnamese is a letter, not an accent: Dũng is a man's name and Dung is a woman's; Thúy and Thùy are two different people; Nguyễn is the surname two-fifths of the country carries and Nguyên is a given name meaning "original". Getting one wrong is not a typo. ⚠ And the strip along the bottom of the passport is plain A–Z, so all of them go into it as NGUYEN — which is exactly why airline systems mangle Vietnamese names and why the desk reads the printed line instead. The family name also comes first, and the middle name (Văn for a man, Thị for a woman) is doing work rather than decorating. Then they ask for a seat — ghế cạnh cửa sổ the window, ghế cạnh lối đi the aisle, ghế nào cũng được either. Level 2 opens the self check-in kiosks by the doors: some passengers print a boarding pass and pick their seat there, some checked in online and walk straight in. Level 3 brings checked bags and the bag drop — the kiosk prints the bag tag, the scale reads the weight in words against Giới hạn hai mươi ba ký, and ⚠ twenty-one is hai mươi mốt and twenty-four hai mươi tư, and an overweight case is repacked before it goes down the belt, because only a carry-on goes past the desk. Somebody who forgot the kiosk is sent back for a tag. Level 4 turns the body scanner on — bật lửa and cái kéo are confiscated, chìa khóa and tiền lẻ are legal; ⚠ the classifier (cái, chai) is part of every one of them — and level 5 the X-ray, where chai nước and bình xịt do not fly. Level 6 opens the information booth: people ask the way — Khu an ninh ở đâu ạ?, Hải quan ở đâu ạ? — and you tell them where it is; a few are not flying at all and only want arrivals. Level 7 adds the gate podium, where passengers ask ra cửa số mấy and you read the departures board — đi Hà Nội, đi Đà Nẵng — for cửa số hai, cửa số mười hai or cửa số ba mươi hai. From level 12 the board shows each flight's status — đúng giờ, trễ, hủy, đang lên máy bay, gọi lần cuối — and passengers ask the booth what it says: a cancellation sends them home, a delay to the seats, a final call has them hurrying. Trolleys, seats, signs, a café and flight screens fill the hall on the way. Wrong answers are taken or answered back, never refused — they cost the streak or a fine, a walk the wrong way or a protest, and the read settles as wrong. The Difficulty row on the setup card decides how much help is written under each line: Sơ cấp adds the say-it-like-this and English, Trung cấp the say-it-like-this alone, Cao cấp the Vietnamese by itself. What is spoken out loud is always the Vietnamese.