Tieng Viet lovers club

[naemlo]

Originally Posted by lovesprout

Good question. Because there was a girl who shows no interest in me, no matter how hard I KC her. So I wants to confirm whether she is lesbian or not. If she is, then that will make me feel better. hahaha..

There 101 reasons y a ger dun like a guy. Y bother knowing the reason? U r making yourself miserable... Will u accept when she say, "I just dun like your face" or a better reject quote, "we are not compatible"...

[Hurricane88]

Originally Posted by naemlo

u forget good boy, Naemlo....

ump...can consider because din read alot about your cheonging....

Anybody who objects that Bro Naemlo is a good man and qualify as good man...

So you are not married, no em yeu,...???

[naemlo]

Originally Posted by Hurricane88

Anybody who objects that Bro Naemlo is a good man and qualify as good man...

So you are not married, no em yeu,...???

But she needs to come to Hanoi... cos I'm in Hanoi most of my time now.

[Hurricane88]

Originally Posted by naemlo

But she needs to come to Hanoi... cos I'm in Hanoi most of my time now.

It's not up to me to decide...it's up to fate...

[Thom07]

Originally Posted by Hurricane88

dun qualify because cheong vb daily or weekly...so who else qualify...

Time to self-reflect.

[jackbl]

FOOD : Pungent culinary prize
====================================
France has its cheese, Italy its olive oil and balsamic vinegar and Spain its ham, but the one product that defines Vietnam's diverse cuisine is by far the smelliest: sauce made from fermented fish.


Nuoc mam, or fish sauce, is a fixture at almost every Vietnamese meal and the pride of the province of Binh Thuan, one of the country's leading sources of fish sauce and where around 600 factories of varying size produce 36 million liters a year.

The distinct, and pungent, substance can be used as a marinade, a stock base, a flavor enhancer or diluted to create a dipping sauce, and is a major industry in the beach towns of Phan Thiet and Mui Ne, where its production is taken as seriously as vinters take their winemaking.

The quality ranges from simple kitchen standard to high-end connoisseur specialities, depending on when in the fermentation process the liquid is drawn off.

Prices, however, do not vary much, starting at about VND10,000 (US$0.56) and going up to VND20,000. But competition between producers is fierce, with the Sao Vang Dat Viet, or Gold Star, award given to the finest product.

While there is no official tour of the factories, the first stop for curious gourmands is often Phan Thiet's Fish Sauce Joint Stock Company (FISACO), the biggest operation of all, producing 16 million liters of nuoc mam under four brand names a year.

The company gives a somewhat smellier take on a tasting tour, offering a guided walk through the processing compound and the opportunity to sample some of the end products. A stomach strong enough to tolerate the stench is an advantage.

"Anchovies or salmon are best, but you can use pretty much any fish. We collect ours from the port or market as soon as the fishermen dock every morning," said company guide Van Nhi, as he meandered between jars and barrels.

Washed by the sea

The factory makes the fish sauce in two ways. The traditional method entails covering fresh fish with salt and then placing it in earthen jars that are then left out in the sun to basically rot for up to three months.

And then there's the quicker option of replacing the jars with huge, cylindrical wooden tanks, where the liquid that comes out is placed back into the mixture at regular intervals, and then the first sauce is ready to be decanted five days later.

"We don't wash the fish first. They have already been washed by the sea," Nhi added.

At FISACO, visitors can try a selection of sauces, much like at a wine-tasting, and also purchase bottles.

For a more rustic experience, visit almost any house in Phan Thiet and Mui Ne, where yards are more often than not filled with brown earthen jars containing the olfactory-challenging fish mixture and where the air seems to shimmer more from the stench than the midday heat.

"It's very important to keep the temperature constantly high for the first few months," explained Nhu Nguyen, whose family runs a small fish sauce factory in Mui Ne.

"A higher temperature means better fish sauce. Then after a few months, you draw it off and filter it."

Once the first, high-grade sauce has been decanted, manufacturers will add more salt and water to produce a lower grade product, but like olive oil, the first collection is the best quality, and this "black gold" earns around $2 a liter.

Source: Reuters

[deptrai4u]

Originally Posted by jackbl

FOOD : Pungent culinary prize
====================================
France has its cheese, Italy its olive oil and balsamic vinegar and Spain its ham, but the one product that defines Vietnam's diverse cuisine is by far the smelliest: sauce made from fermented fish.


Nuoc mam, or fish sauce, is a fixture at almost every Vietnamese meal and the pride of the province of Binh Thuan, one of the country's leading sources of fish sauce and where around 600 factories of varying size produce 36 million liters a year.

Source: Reuters

Reuters surely did not employ a Vietnamese to write this... because OBVIOUSLY Nuoc Mam is definitely FAR FROM being the smelliest sauce in Vietnam!

[jackbl]

Telecom charges to fall further
======================================

VietNamNet Bridge – From January 15th 2010, the set national charge for phone calls made between different mobile networks will fall by around 30 percent, hopefully allowing telecom service providers to further reduce charges.


Under a new regulation from the Ministry of Information and Communications, charges that a telecom network has to pay for receiving the calls made by its subscribers will reduce by around 30% with the exact amount depending on the market share of the phone provider.

For example, if Viettel holds the major market share, calls made by S-Fone’s subscribers to Viettel’s subscribers, S-Fone will have to pay the connection fees of only 500 dong per minute, instead of 700 dong as the current level.

A charge of 550 dong/minute is also applied to the direct connection between international fixed telephone networks and inner provincial fixed phone networks. The charges for calls will be paid by the subscribers of the international fixed phone network.

When an inner provincial fixed phone network is directly connected with an inter-provincial fixed phone network and a mobile network, the inter-provincial fixed phone network and the mobile network will have to pay connection fees of 270 dong per minute.

Thanks to the new regulation, which will take effect as of January 15, 2010, connection fees will reduce remarkably. The reduction will speed up the process to narrow the gap of telecom charges between Vietnam and the world and enable telecom service providers to further slash their charges.

At present, connection fees account for 50-70 percent of the total cost of mobile service. For example, in a mobile call of 1080 dong made by a subscriber of VinaPhone to a Viettel’s subscriber, the connection fees that VinaPhone has to pay Viettel is up to 770 dong.

Representatives of VinaPhone, Viettel and MobiFone, the three largest mobile networks in Vietnam, said that the reduction of connection fees by 30 percent is significant because they have to pay 3-5 trillion dong ($176.4-294 million) of connection fees a year to partners.

Mobile networks are encouraging subscribers to make inner-network calls, hoping to reduce the connection fees they have to pay to their partners.

Beeline offers a free-charge service package for calls made between its subscribers, named Bigzero. Vinamobile has a service that allows subscribers to make free calls within three hours a day at the charge of only 5,000 dong. MobiFone and VinaPhone also allow customers in Hanoi to make nine minute of calls free of charge, meaning that for a 10-minute call, subscribers will be charged for only one minute.

With the fall of connection fees, customers can hope that they will enjoy cheaper telecom services in 2010.

PV

[jackbl]

Is this man deeply in love with his wife?????

Le Van, the man who sleeps with death
=========================================

VietNamNet Bridge – Newspaper readers around the world have been amazed by the story of a 55 year-old farmer who has been sleeping with his wife’s remains for five years.

This man is Le Van. He lives in a small house with his three younger children and the remains of his wife in Thang Binh district, Quang Nam province. Next to his house are the houses of his two eldest children and their families.

On the afternoon of November 24, this strange man agreed to meet a VietNamNet reporter to tell his story, and opened his bedroom so the reporter could take photos of the statue containing his wife’s bones.

Pointing, Van said: “That’s my wife, Sang. I have held her in my arms every night for the last five years”.

He carried the statue to the living room carefully and asked the reporter if he wanted to see his wife’s remains.

The man then brought the statue back to his bed. Sitting next to it, he said: “She has been with me for several years. Only her body died, her soul is still alive.”

Van’s youngest son, Le Quoc Hoang Tuan, 12, also shares the bed with the statue contining his mother’s bones. The VietNamNet reporter asked him if he was scared or not. “Not at all,” Tuan said: “My father and I hold my mother while we sleep every night. My mother didn’t die. She was reincarnated!”

“Our house was full of kids,” Van related, “so life was hard, but our marriage was good. We were both from this village. To feed our seven children, I often had to work far away. When my wife died in February 2003, I was working in the Central Highlands. I came back immediately to organize her funeral.

“After burying my wife, I slept on the top of her tomb every night. Nearly twenty months after she passed away, I decided to dig a tunnel to share the tomb with her. However, my children discovered me and they insisted that I stop sleeping with her at the tomb,” Van explained. “I still snuck out there to sleep at the tomb, but it was too hard, so one night I dug up the coffin to bring my wife’s remains home. That was in November 2004.”

“Weren’t you afraid,” the reporter asked. “She was my wife,” Van replied. “Why should I be scared?”

Van’s older children didn’t agree with him and they alerted the local authorities. Officials and police officers forbade Van to keep the remains at home so he had to rebury the coffin.

Four months later, however, Van made a statue of his wife of gypsum and clay and put her bones inside it. When it had dried, he dressed the statue and put it on his bed.

“I spent over one month to make this statue. It is as tall as my wife was when she was alive,” Van said. “Since that time, I hug my wife every night and sleep well.”

Van said his neighbours who knew what he had done were very fearful and they didn’t visit him for over two years after he brought his wife’s bones home.

The man related that he earns his living by breaking up rocks. Van is living with his three youngest children. Two of them have quit school. The youngest son, Tuan, is a sixth grader.

The VietNamNet reporter also met with Tran Trong Sanh, Chairman of the Ha Lam Town Peoples Committee, to ask about the case. Sanh was very surprised when he heard the reporter’s story. He recalled that in 2004, after discovering Mr. Van had dug up his wife’s coffin, local officials consoled him but warned him not to dig into the tomb. They explained that he should not pollute the environment. Van said he understood.

“That’s the last I heard about Mr. Van until now,” Sanh said. “We didn’t know that he brought the remains home.

Some neighbours told the reporter that just seeing Van scares them.

Before they said goodbye, Van gripped the reporter’s hand tightly and said: “I’m a person who does things others don’t do. I’m different from others.” His pride to be a faithful husband was evident.

Since VietNamNet reported Van’s story, local police have investigated this case. Lieutenant Colonel Duong Van Dien, chief of police at Ha Lam Town, said that officers met with Van and heard his explanation. According to the police officer’s report, Van admitted to a breach of the environmental regulations. Yes, he was wrong to bring his wife’s remains home, Van said, but he couldn’t explain the depth of his love for his wife.

Dien said that police are still seeking to confirm if the statue contains bones or not.

On November 28, while many reporters looked on, Van “operated” on the gypsum statue. After cutting and removing the gypsum, cloth and paper layers from one of its arms, two brown bars were exposed. Van said they were his wife’s bones.

As of 30 November, the local authorities still haven’t reached an official judgment whether the statue contains the remains of Van’s wife or not.

Meanwhile, Ha Lam Town, where the strange man lives, has been stirred by this case. A neighbor, Vo Van Phuoc, said that many curious people have come to Van’s house to see the statue. Some people have embellished extraordinary stories about Van.

Phuoc called Van’s decision to put his wife’s remains into the statue and live with it “ghastly.” Like other local people, he wanted the local government to quickly resolve this case to stabilize the situation in Ha Lam.

Local government officials have visited Van’s house and invited him to come to the People’s Committee for a meeting, but Van has refused. He is determined to stay at home to protect the statue.

Local police and officials said that Van’s act is contrary to Vietnamese customs and habits as well as illegal. However, Van has stated that he would “live or die” with the statue so the local government hesitates to use force, afraid that Van may have an extreme reaction.

Local officials say it is very difficult for them to solve this case – that is, to verify if Van’s wife’s bones are still inside the statue and then act accordingly -- because there is no precedent in Vietnam and it is also rare in the world.

Some scientists speculate that Van suffers from a syndrome called “pseudonecrophilia,” and he needs to be cured.

Vu Trung

[jackbl]

December to be climax for 3G market
==============================================

VietNamNet Bridge – Viettel and MobiFone have joined the race to provide three generation (3G) services, both hoping to institute service by December 2009.

In its contract, MobiFone committed to supply 3G services in 100 percent of populated cities in 63 provinces of Vietnam as of December 2009. This firm reported it is in the final stages of meeting its commitment, with installation of 2400 3G base transceiver stations and 7700 more stations planned within three years.

When launched, MobiFone promises to offer 3G service for over 52 percent of the population, using the HSPA technology which permits clients to have access to the internet, send or receive email and use content services at 7.2Mbps. The firm will also provide 3G roaming services with at least 50 3G networks worldwide.

MobiFone confirmed that the 3G band would help it improve the quality of the 2G network and reduce jams. On September 2, the company conducted its first 3G call.

MobiFone’s recent efforts reflect its goal to surpass other rivals and become the second provider of the 3G services in Vietnam.

At the same time, Viettel stated to complete its 3G tests in HCM City and will also supply 3G services in December, six months earlier than scheduled.

According to its 3G contract, Viettel had promised to launch 3G services by June 2010. The company will invest up to 12.8 trillion dong (over $711 million) in the 3G network within three years. Upon its launch, Viettel’s 3G service will cover 100 percent of the population, with 15,000 BTS.

However, Viettel is aiming to make shortcuts. A Viettel official said the company may provide 3G service by December 2009. It introduced 3G services at trading centres in HCM City from October 10-15.

VinaPhone was the first telecom network offering 3G services, beginning October 12, 2009, but in the first month, faced problems in terms of quality and coverage. These matters were resolved in November and the 3G quality is now stable.

PV

Originally Posted by jackbl

Telecom charges to fall further
======================================

VietNamNet Bridge – From January 15th 2010, the set national charge for phone calls made between different mobile networks will fall by around 30 percent, hopefully allowing telecom service providers to further reduce charges.

[chanyboy]

Originally Posted by Hurricane88

I just want to define that i dun qualify as good man is because i had em yeu in hcm...so bro KT sure dun qualify as good man...bro Thomo and Adguy oso dun qualify because cheong vb daily or weekly...so who else qualify...so anyone willing to forgo the forest for one tree..

...cannot speak TViet..so no qualify?

[jackbl]

Something similar to sgp currently, chinese student very bad in mandarin.

Vietnamese children said to ‘lose roots’ at international schools
================================================== =======

VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese parents who send their children to ‘international schools’ dream they will gain the skills there to become ‘world citizens.’ Must this be at the cost of their ability to function effectively within a Vietnamese cultural context?

Students of Horizon International School in HCM City are learning Vietnamese

“I was astonished to realize that many of my nine and ten year-old students can speak English very well, but find it difficult to express their ideas in Vietnamese,” said a teacher at one of HCM City’s ‘international schools.’ “If you shut your eyes and listen, you’d think they were foreigners, not Vietnamese children.”

“One of my students whispered to me that his father had been keen for him to study at international school. However, now that he cannot speak Vietnamese easily with his father, his father has gotten angry and forces him to go to learn Vietnamese,” the teacher added.

The Tuoi Tre reporters to whom the teacher confided then decided to find out if it’s true that some Vietnamese children may grow up into foreigners.

Vietnamese is not a core subject at international schools

At many international schools in HCM City, students study foreign curriculums in the morning. In the afternoon, they have a few periods of instruction in the Vietnamese language as well as more English practice.

Trang, a teacher who teaches subjects in the national curriculum as set by the Ministry of Education and Training, said: “At my school, Vietnamese language, history, geography and morality are treated as extracurricular subjects. Therefore, the students’ results in these subjects is not used to assess or grade them.”

“I teach only one period each day to every class,” she added. It’s impossible to go into details in such a short time. Because the school doesn’t assign much importance to these subjects, the school management board does not examine the lessons regularly. I get no professional training and little in the way of teaching materials. Moreover, because these are regarded as “extracurricular” subjects, the students do not give them their whole mind.”

Le Ngoc Diep, Head of the Primary Division at the HCM City Department of Education, insists that under the current regulations, international schools which teach foreign curriculums can only enroll foreign students.

However, as an ‘experiment,’ the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has allowed international schools to enroll Vietnamese students in recent years, provided that the schools teach the Vietnamese students certain subjects stipulated by MOET. These include Vietnamese language, morality, and social studies.

Diep said that there are some 15 such international schools in HCM City. However, it is his Department’s view that many of them either fail to teach in accordance with MOET’s curriculums, or just teach the subjects in a cursory way.

Tuoi Tre’s investigation found that some schools cut the number of classes and lessons for the “Vietnamese” subjects, lack learning materials and don’t support the teachers the way they should.


Tongue-tied in their mother tongue

A father who requested anonymity related that when he enrolled his son in an international school in HCM City’s District 5, he had to sign a commitment that the child will study there until he graduates.

“They warned me that students will learn in English in the morning, and that they will have only one period of Vietnamese per day,” the man said. “At that time, I did not much care about this. As far as I was concerned, the important thing was that my child could study in a good environment and within a modern education scheme which allows him to create and play.

“However, I feel sad now, having realized that my son is very bad at Vietnamese. Though he is at fourth grade, he cannot read fluently the worlds on signs in the supermarket,” he said.

Loan, mother of a student at Horizon School, said she knows some parents who cannot communicate with their children because they cannot speak English, while their children are not good at Vietnamese.

Fearing that her child “might lose her roots,” Loan said, she investigated the schools carefully before choosing a school that teaches the Cambridge curriculum in the morning and the MOET curriculum in the afternoon. “However ‘up-to-date’ they may be, children must know their origins,” she said.



Is truly bilingual education hopeless?

Some international schools have admitted that they find it hard to follow the current regulations on teaching a Vietnamese curriculum.

Le Thi Hong Lien at the new Canadian International School (Binh Chanh district, HCMC) said time pressure prevents the school from providing as many periods as MOET requires. And if the children had to learn all the required lessons, she speculated, parents will complain and even transfer their children to more lenient schools.

Huynh Van Ngon from APU International School (Binh Chanh) explained that the students will be overloaded if they have to follow both curriculums. He said it’s natural that students of international schools are not as good at the Vietnamese language as the students at state-run schools

The Deputy Director of the HCM City Education and Training Department, Nguyen Hoai Chuong, doesn’t buy these excuses.

“I’ve been to lots of countries; Vietnam is like none other. Though in other countries children are taught foreign languages from an early age, they aren’t taught a foreign language in place of their mother tongue.”

“Sure, we can learn international technologies, but we must retain a Vietnamese spirit,” he said. “Schools that want to develop and endure must follow the requirements of Vietnamese law.”

VietNamNet/TT

[jackbl]

VietNamNet launches VietNamNet mobile service
================================================== =

VietNamNet Bridge – VietNamNet newspaper initiated the VietNamNet Mobile application on December 6, which allows mobile subscribers to read VietNamNet on their phones.

From their mobile phones, users can visit mobi.vietnamnet.vn to download the application to receive information from VietNamNet anywhere, anytime.

VietNamNet Mobile can be downloaded and installed on over 80 percent of mobile phones in Vietnam, even the low-cost brands. This application only requires Java support and a GPRS connection for download.

Articles on VietNamNet Mobile are suitably shortened for mobile users to receive the latest updates on Vietnam and the world.

VietNamNet Mobile readers will be exempt from service and content fees during the initial period. Later, fees will be only 500 dong per day.

As of today, you can reach VietNamNet on your cellular phone at VietNamNet Mobile.

Huy Phong

Originally Posted by jackbl

December to be climax for 3G market
==============================================

VietNamNet Bridge – Viettel and MobiFone have joined the race to provide three generation (3G) services, both hoping to institute service by December 2009.

[jackbl]

Tension builds between students and teachers
================================================== =

VietNamNet Bridge – The stories of teachers punishing students, creating deep psychological and physical wounds, have been reported by Vietnamese media recently.

DTT, who teaches living skills at a high school in Tan Binh District in HCM City, said students nowadays do not have basic skills. They do not know how to take care of themselves and how to react to every day situations.

Dr of Psychology Dinh Phuong Duy, chairman of the HCM City Psychology-Education Association, agreed, saying some students do not have the skills to protect themselves. “It explains why some students dare not disobey teachers. As the result, they can become so sick that they need medical help”.

In some cases, however, teachers feel students are too rebellious and teachers find themselves powerless.

N, a chemistry teacher at a school in Binh Thanh District, said: “They are so bad that they do not listen to anybody. They and their parents seem to think nothing of teachers’ words. Some have told me that if I expel them, they will simply move to study at a better school”.

Dr Duy believes it is necessary to have more thorough research about young students’ psychology.

Meanwhile, teachers have complained that they are now under too much pressure which can lead to them losing their temper in class.

An official of the HCM City Education and Training Department said that in Finland, every primary class only has 20-25 students, and has two teachers with master degrees. He also said that a group of teachers in France went on a strike recently, because their school put 27 students into one class - two more than the allowed number.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese teachers now have 58-60 students per class and they have to work 10-12 hours per day to get very low wage.

Le Ngoc Diep, head of the Primary Education Department under the HCM City Education and Training Department, said people now demand teachers have higher qualifications and, on top of that, they wanted teachers to genuinely care and look after students’ wellbeing.

However, they do not care if teachers’ salaries are enough and how hard teachers have to work

Nguyen Minh An, a well known researcher from the HCM City Development Research Institute, said teachers nowadays meet too many challenges - overloaded curriculums, overly high numbers of students and limited wages.

“It is understandable that teachers sometimes cannot control themselves when students make mistakes. The heavy burden on teachers’ shoulders is obviously a reason behind the abuse,” he said.


VietNamNet/TT

Originally Posted by jackbl

Teachers respond to reports of abuse
============================================
VietNamNet Bridge – The stories of teachers punishing students, creating deep psychological and physical wounds, have been reported by the local media recently. People have criticized teachers heavily in response, but they have not asked themselves why teachers use such methods.

[jackbl]

Where is our Vietnamese language?
================================================== =

VietNamNet Bridge – Is the Vietnamese language inferior to foreign languages in Vietnam itself? This has become a burning topic of discussion in Tuoi Tre Daily after a reader sent his complaint about this phenomenon to the newspaper.


The reader, named Minh Long, complained about this fact when he read a story about the construction of a tourist centre to serve the Miss World 2010 pageant in Thoi Son islent in the Mekong Delta province of Tien Giang on Tuoi Tre in October.

This article went accompanied with some photos about the site. In the photos were banners with English words: “Welcome to the home of Miss World 2010” and “Sorry for any inconvenience caused”.

“Looking these words, I thought I was living in an English-speaking country like America, Britain or India and Singapore, but these banners are hung in Thoi Son islet in Tien Giang province in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta,” Long wrote.

He questioned who can understand that language when beauties and guests will go to this small islet next year, not now, and the local people are poor farmers who don’t know English.

Based on his experience, Long said that not many places in the world that he has traveled to use English rampantly like in Vietnam.

“In big cities like Hanoi and HCM City, I feel like I travel in Europe or America when store boards are in English. Even products for Vietnamese have labels in English. Who can understand them when over 75 percent of Vietnamese people are farmers? The rampant use of English is an erosion of culture?” Long questioned again.

When Vietnamese people don’t care of their own language, how guests respect it? He asked.

Long’s opinion has stirred up controvery and Tuoi Tre received many more opinions from readers.

A reader named Truong Dung wrote: “Watching a TV show named “The Key to Success” on the national VTV1 channel about CEO. I wondered what is CEO? I googled and founded out that it is chief executive officer. I questioned myshelf why Vietnamese people loves English so much, even the national TV channel”.

Dung worried that Vietnamese language will gradually Dung worried that Vietnamese language will gradually lose in oblivion.

He cited an example. Once Dung and his Belgium boss traveled to Da Nang. At the Da Nang airport, they saw a tourism information stall, where all pamphlets are in English. The Belgium man asked the receptionist in Vietnamese: “Tai sao khong co Tieng Viet” (Why you don’t have Vietnamese pamphlets). She answered in English: “Because this is an international airport”.

Dung questioned: why a foreigner asks us in Vietnamese but we answer him in Vietnamese? That is the national sense.

“Some may think that this is a minor thing but if we don’t care about it from now on, Vietnamese language may become a dead one,” he worried.

Reader Xuan Uyen wrote: “Most of the people prefer to add English words to their conversations and I don’t like it. I’m a 8X (was born in the 1980s) and I have to use English in my job everyday but I feel angry whenever I talk or chat with my friends who use English”.

According to Uyen, many people don’t use Vietnamese correctly but they like using English, also wrong in both gramma and spelling.

“I see that this is a common mistake of Vietnamese people, especially the youth. Consequently, their Vietnamese gets worse while their English is not improved much,” she wrote.

Many readers reported lot of examples in using English rampantly on Vietnamese radios and TV channels.

Reader My Duyen said that in a cable channel for the youth named Yeah1TV of the Saigon Cable TV Company (SCTV), up to 90 percent of programmes completely use English. If one reads the names of these shows, they would think that these shows are produced by a foreign channel: 51Job, Style& star, Hot music, Teen sport, Yeah1 countdown, Teen diary, Imusic, 2!Idol, Imovie, K-pop Zone, Yeah1 city...(!)

“Even the host of the 51job show said “MyHa would like to say hello to everybody”. Belows was a line of introducition “MC MyHa”. I tried to add accents to guess her name M? Hà, My H? or M? H?. Doest that girl change her name to sound like a foreign name?”

A cable music channel on SCTV also used English as the names of its shows: Yan live, Yan me, Hey Yo!, Rock on Yan, Rew while a TV channel of Dong Nai province has “It’s me…” show, My Duyen reported.

“Some young TV audience told me that Vietnamese TV channel abuse English to make their shows stylist and fashionable to serve modern young people in cities. But TV channels are not for these people only,” Duyen wrote.

“For any purpose, the consequence of this is the losing of Vietnamese and encouraging the ludicrous half-Vietnamese, half-English way of speaking of some people,” she commented.

Reader Cao Thi said: “I work for a foreign company but I only speak English when it is really necessary. My colleagues often speak English at work. When I asked them why, they said sometimes they couldn’t find out the suitable Vietnamese words to explain to others and speaking English has become their habit”.

“I’m sad when I read or listen to English words like ‘kool, cute, hot, etc.’ on the local media. Even Vietnamese songs have English “Mat em because I am stupid” (I lost you because I’m stupid). Vietnamese is our mother tounge. I hope we will not have to launch a campaign “Vietnamese speak Vietnamese”.

An old reader named Dang Khoi complained that whenever he told his first-grade grandchild anything, the kid, 6, replaced “Vang ah” (yes, grandfather) by “ok”.

“For some young people, ok, thank you, bye bye and sorry have become the words at their lips,” he wrote.

“This is not the first time the media reporting the rampant use of English in Vietnam. The abuse of English is not only reflecting in banners, advertisements, labels, boards, etc. but also in daily conversations at offices, on the road and in markets. You raised the question ‘Where is Vietnamese language?’ Let me ask one more question ‘Where are linguists and the authorities?” a reader named Trung Hieu wrote.

“As a student studying in the US, I have a different point of view regarding using language and in particular the differences between Vietnam and the US,” wrote a student named Minh.

“In my opinion, American considers language as a standard for learning. Their language is used in different contexts and in certain contexts, it is used at high standards. Through the use of language, spoken and written, you can know a specific person’s knowledge and understanding.”

“It is unfair to say that a standard of language doesn’t exist in our country but it is obvious that our concern over linguistic standards is not as high as in the US. Our students often compete for ability in natural sciences but not in language. Even high-ranking events in Vietnam don’t reach high standards of language so we should not blame youth or ordinary people when they use language in unofficial environments,” Minh added.

Another reader wrote: “The beauty of the Vietnamese language is the six accents, which make the melody in our language. Foreigners like Vietnamese speaking Vietnamese because they think that we are singing and they try to pronounce accurately our accents. But Vietnamese don’t.”

“I believe that the love of our country and nation must originate from the national pride. Vietnamese people have to be proud of and respect their language,” she wrote.

A reader at hoanhkhanhhoa@yahoo suggested: “To preserve and highlight Vietnamese language, we should start from the media and the statements of state agencies”.

This reader cited an example: “Around one year ago, leaders spoke about a plan to build subway routes in Vietnam. I don’t understand why they always used the word ‘metro’. Does our dictionary have a word for metro? My wife – a university lecturer who was busy in the kitchen - heard some words from the TV so she asked me “Do they plan to build another Metro supermarket?”

“Not only officials, the media also used the word ‘metro’. I can assure you that many people don’t understand the meaning of ‘metro”.

An elderly reader wondered: “I have two grandchildren at the age of 7 and 10. They are studying at an international primary school, where they speak English very often. At home, they also watch cartoons in English. When they play with each other, they often use English to speak, such as “I hate you”, “No”, “Thanks”. Their mother doesn’t speak English but they still talk to her in English!”

“Looking at my grandchildren and thinking about the future and whether they can speak their mother tongue fluently when their mark for English at the primary school is 10 but the mark for their Vietnamese is only 5-6?”

Reader Anh Thu complained that even young singers abuse foreign languages. Some of them use nicknames in English, Japanese or Korean, such as Yuong Uno, Akira and Midu.

Reader Minh Hai said that Vietnam still lacks agencies and websites guiding the use of Vietnamese language while students no longer learn how to use their mother language after general schools.

VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre