Experdize Vietnamese Home - Applied

How to play: this is a language game wearing a Vietnamese house. You are mẹ, and you are not running the household — the house runs itself: she walks to the stove, the sink, the washing machine, the ironing board and the medicine cabinet on her own, and potters about sweeping and tending the bàn thờ when nothing is wanted. What you do is read Vietnamese and answer two questions.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a day is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and the whole house stands still whenever anybody is talking — nobody walks, nobody asks for anything 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 house 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 day is kept.

1 — Which job? Somebody says what is wanted: Áo của anh Minh nhăn quá ạ. — “Minh’s shirt is terribly creased.” Pick the chore off the row along the bottom. ⚠ The wrong answers are not random, they are the mistakes worth making once: pha trà make tea against pha sữa make up a bottle — one verb, two objects — and giặt wash, phơi hang out, là iron, all three taking quần áo — one object, three verbs. Read half a phrase and it is a coin toss. Pick the wrong job and she is not stopped: she does it, sees it is not what was asked for, and starts again — which costs her the walk and the work, in front of you.

2 — Who is it for? She finishes and asks herself Mang áo sơ mi cho ai đây nhỉ? The answer is the name in the same sentence, and the row offers the household: bố Dad, mẹ Mum, ông Grandad, bà Grandma, anh Minh big brother, em Lan little sister and em bé the baby. Take it to the wrong person and they hand it back, kindly, and she walks on to the right one.

⚠ The pronouns ARE the lesson. Vietnamese has no neutral “I” and no neutral “you”: you call yourself by your kinship word to whoever you are speaking to. So a child asking for something says con — “the child is hungry”, not “I am hungry” — Grandma says bà and Dad says bố. When the sentence says con, the answer is whoever said it, and knowing that is the whole of the second read. Every line ends ạ or nhé too — the politeness particles, and leaving them off is the commonest way a foreigner sounds curt while saying nothing wrong.

The days are the words, and the household is the day. 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 Day row is who is at home and what there is to do: day 1 is the two children and the school run, day 2 brings bố and his breakfast before work, day 3 bà and her tea and medicine, day 4 em bé and the washing, and day 5 ông and supper for the whole house. From day 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. The children go to school and come back, and bố goes to work and comes home before supper.

You cannot lose a day. Somebody who waits too long gives up and does it themselves — that costs you the happiness and your streak, and somebody says so — but nothing ends the day except answering its last question. What varies is your time and how many you got right.