Vietnamese Social Event: Make Small Talk

How to play: you are at a bar in Saigon with a drink in your hand and nobody you know. Somebody crosses the room to you, or you cross it to them, and the small talk begins — hello and how are you, what is your name, where are you from, what do you do, what do you do for fun, may I buy you a drink, calling the server over, and would you like to dance. Three things can be wanted of you. Sometimes you have to say what they said, in English, so the four options are English. Sometimes you have to answer them, so the four options are Vietnamese. And sometimes it is YOU who wants to ask something — the prompt is your own intent, in English — so the four options are Vietnamese questions and the near misses ask something else entirely. What the whole evening is really teaching is the thing you cannot avoid for one sentence in this language: what to call somebody you have never met. anh, chị, em, bạn, cô and chú are a guess about somebody's age made out loud in your first sentence, and whichever you pick decides what you have to call yourself for the rest of the night. Every line is spoken aloud, with the pronunciation guide and the English written underneath at the easier difficulties. A wrong pick shows what would have worked, teaches why, and the question comes round again later, so a night always ends well however it goes. Five nights make the game: saying hello, where you are from, what you do, what you do for fun, and the drinks and the toast. There is no losing and no time limit; the clock only remembers how long the night took, and the glasses at the top how many people you got on with first time.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The Level row is where on the Lesson 9 scale the next evening sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. Each level plays the night the lesson has reached: the lesson's early levels open the bar's gentler conversations, and from level five the evening 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 ninth lesson of the Vietnamese course.