Vietnamese Dating: Say the Right Thing

How to play: you are on a date with Linh, and the whole evening happens in Vietnamese. Linh speaks each line out loud — quốc ngữ on the card, with the pronunciation guide and English underneath at the easier difficulties — and you pick the reply that fits from four choices. A right reply wins a heart; a wrong one shows you the line that would have worked, teaches why, and the moment comes back around later, so every date ends well however it goes. Three dates make the story: the meetup where you ask Linh out, the street-food date of small talk and picking up the bill, and the night of the tỏ tình — the confession by the lake. There is no losing and no time limit; the clock only remembers how long the evening took, and the hearts how smooth you were.

Every level is somewhere new. Level 1 is the plain stage; from Level 2 the date is shown in 3D and moves every level — home, a café, the playground, the movies, a dance club, the fireworks — starting quiet, with more people and more going on around you as the conversation goes on and the levels climb.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The Level row is where on the Lesson 13 scale the next date sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. Each level plays the date the lesson has reached: the lesson's early levels open the first meetings, and from level three the story holds at its fullest while the lesson keeps going. The three difficulties are how much of each line is written down: Beginner puts the respell and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the respell alone, Advanced the Vietnamese by themselves. The difficulty is a free choice at every level. It is the thirteenth lesson of the Vietnamese course — everything Linh says is built from the words the earlier lessons teach.