Experdize Vietnamese Doctor - Applied

How to play: this is a language game wearing a Vietnamese phòng khám. You are the bác sĩ, and you are not running the surgery — the surgery runs itself: she walks to the couch, the monitor, the laboratory bench and the medicine cabinet on her own, and files cards at reception and washes her hands when nobody is waiting. What you do is read Vietnamese and answer two questions for every patient.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a session is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and the whole surgery stands still whenever anybody is talking — nobody walks, nobody comes in and no patience bar moves — so you can read every line as slowly as you need. If a row of answers is up, choosing one starts the surgery again; if there is no row — she says she is on it, somebody grumbles, somebody says thank you — tap the play button on the speech bubble when you have finished reading it. The stopwatch at the top counts up rather than down: it is your result, not your deadline, and your fastest run at each session is kept.

1 — What is wrong with them? A patient describes their symptoms: Em nuốt nước bọt thấy rát lắm ạ. — “it really burns when I swallow.” Pick the diagnosis off the row along the bottom. ⚠ Half the complaints name the illness and half only describe it, so you cannot get through by matching words alone. And the wrong answers are not random, they are the mistakes worth making once: đau đầu headache, đau bụng stomach ache, đau lưng back pain and đau răng toothache — one word of pain and four parts of the body, so reading only the first word is a one-in-four guess. Pick the wrong one and she is not stopped: she examines for it, finds it is not that, and walks back to look again — which costs her the trip, in front of you.

⚠ And the say-it crib cannot save you here. Vietnamese tells đau and đầu apart by the TONE, and a pronunciation written for an English eye cannot carry a tone — so đau đầu is spelled dow dow. It looks like a mistake and it is the most useful line on the card: on that row the only way through is the marks on the letters, or the voice.

2 — What do you prescribe? She examines and asks herself Bệnh nhân bị viêm họng. Kê gì đây nhỉ? — “the patient has a sore throat; what shall I prescribe?” Pick the medicine. ⚠ Eight of the twelve begin with the same word: thuốc hạ sốt something for a fever, thuốc ho cough medicine, thuốc kháng sinh antibiotics, thuốc giảm đau a painkiller. It is thuốc — medicine — and then what it is for, which is how a Vietnamese pharmacy names everything on its shelves, and it means you have to read past the first word every time. Four of the twelve are not medicines at all (truyền nước a drip, bó bột a plaster cast, băng bó a dressing, nghỉ ngơi rest), so looking for thuốc and stopping does not work either.

⚠ The pronouns come free. Vietnamese has no neutral “I”: you call yourself by your kinship word to whoever you are speaking to, and a doctor is senior to nearly everybody. So the schoolboy says cháu — “the nephew has a stomach ache”, not “I have a stomach ache” — the little girl says con, the young adults say em, and old Mr Tám, who is older than you, says tôi. Every line ends ạ as well, the politeness particle, and leaving it off is the commonest way a foreigner sounds curt while saying nothing wrong.

The sessions are the words, and the waiting room is the session. They climb together. The Difficulty row is how much of each line is written: Beginner writes the say-it-like-this and the English under every line, Intermediate the say-it alone, Advanced the Vietnamese with nothing under it. The Session row is who is in the waiting room and what can be wrong with them: session 1 is chị Hoa and anh Tuấn with fevers, coughs and aches; session 2 brings cháu Bảo, sore throats and flu; session 3 bà cụ Sáu, cuts, dizziness and toothache; session 4 bé Mai, food poisoning and allergies; and session 5 ông cụ Tám, broken bones and blood pressure. From session 3 what was said fades a few seconds later — tap whoever said it to hear it again, free but for the time, which is the one tap left on the floor. And somebody is sent down the corridor for a blood test and comes back with the slip.

You cannot lose a session. Somebody who waits too long gives up and goes to the pharmacy instead — that costs you the care and your streak, and they say so — but nothing ends the session except answering its last question. What varies is your time and how many you got right.