Sitting around at the start of a two-week holiday thanks to Tết, and I realised how late I am with my next post here, so thought it would be good to at least get one more done before the month is over.

This would be an ideal time to get out of town, under most circumstances… and indeed, the majority of friends are off exploring other places, or ( Read more... )

It’s a bad pun to begin with, given that the vowels are not quite right, but it’s confounded by the fact that even as a tenuous pun, it only works in the southern dialect - in the south, the d character is pronounced like a y, whereas in the north, it’s pronounced like a z. If you want your actual English d sound, you need a đ. But now that’s out ( Read more... )

Happy New Year, everyone! Not that it’s Vietnamese New Year yet… we’re still on the lead-up to it, but Vietnam uses the Western calendar like most countries (actually it uses the Western and the Chinese calendars, for different purposes, but that’s a topic for another post), and so even while Tết is the most significant holiday in Vietnam, the ( Read more... )