Hi there, here is Pedro again. Chi and I had our meeting on March 16th. This time, as agreed at the meeting before we talked about our alphabet and some basic greetings in our languages.
As opposed to what we had in the last meeting where our culture and food where kind of similar, this time we found out how different the alphabets can be. Even though the Vietnamese alphabet has 29 letters and the Spanish one has 27 letters, there are significant differences among them. First, there are some consonants that one has and the other doesn’t as well some differences in the vowels. The Vietnamese alphabet having three types of accent in contrast with the Spanish that only has one type. Chi showed me the difference in the pronunciation of these accents that, to be honest, at first I didn’t find any difference but after repeating it for a couple of times I got it.
Concerning the greetings, it was interesting the fact that for Vietnamese people is not that common to say “good morning” or “good afternoon”, they prefer the use of a “hello” or a “bye” instead. Another curious thing I could realize in this meeting is, finally, a similarity. This was not in the content of the language itself but in the way we use it. In Spanish, when we talk to an elder person or a person that is older than us we change the pronoun “you” for a more formal one in order to express our respect towards them and in Vietnam they do something quite similar to the mentioned before, changing the pronoun according to whom you are talking.
On the left, the Vietnamese alphabet. On the right the Spanish alphabet.
This meeting was really productive since in the short time we had we could cover different aspects of our languages. Those were basic but I found them useful and interesting. Looking forward to having the next meeting, hopefully, we will be doing some outdoor activity or something similar.
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