Vietnamese Tour Guide: Give the Commentary

How to play: you are the guide on a coach running the length of Vietnam, and you are the only person on board who has both languages. Three things are asked of you. You give the commentary over the microphone in Vietnamese — where the coach is going, what is out of the window and its history — and then say it in English for the group, because your passengers have not a word of it. A passenger asks you a question in Vietnamese, and you pick the Vietnamese answer. And they ask you things in English that only you can put to the driver, the ticket window or a woman in a boat — so you pick the Vietnamese to say for them. Every line is spoken aloud, with the pronunciation guide and the English written underneath at the easier difficulties. A wrong pick shows you what would have worked, teaches why, and the moment comes round again later, so every stop ends well however it goes. Five stops make the tour: Hanoi and the Temple of Literature, Ha Long Bay, the imperial citadel at Hue, the old town of Hoi An, and Saigon with the Mekong delta. There is no losing and no time limit; the clock only remembers how long the stop took, and the flags how many things you got right first time.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The Level row is where on the Lesson 12 scale the next stop sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. Each level plays the stop the lesson has reached: the lesson's early levels open the tour's gentler stops, and from level five the city 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 twelfth lesson of the Vietnamese course — everything said on this coach is built from the words the earlier lessons teach.