Half-baked foreign language - Ap Bac Electronic Newspaper

Mixing a few foreign words in conversation, writing a 10-word Vietnamese sentence with 3-4 foreign words… is a common phenomenon among many young people today. The popularity of foreign languages is necessary in the process of international exchange and integration, but is it necessary to speak and write half-heartedly when the mother tongue still has many beautiful and interesting words?

Being careful in expressing and using words is how young people create their own strengths and impressions.

Use foreign language for... elegance

From movies and music, the way of speaking with a little foreign language has appeared too much, but there are also many cases of both anger and love. Opening a spa in the suburbs of the city, but the way of speaking with customers with a "half-fat, half-lean" foreign language has made Khanh Ha (28 years old, living in Binh Chanh district, Ho Chi Minh City) laugh out loud many times.

Make an appointment before coming to the service to avoid the shop being too crowded and unable to serve customers, but instead of "making an appointment", many people call it "booking calendar", "booking ticket"... This way of speaking is quite common in big cities, but in the suburbs, customers who do not understand also imitate the way the shop owner speaks, they read it as "peeling calendar". Khanh Ha said: "My customer is nearly 60 years old, every time she makes an appointment for skin care, she calls to say "peeling calendar" at 9 o'clock tomorrow, and "peeling staff" to do the service. I couldn't help but laugh when I heard it, but then I thought again that it was my fault, instead of just saying "booking calendar", there would be no such awkward pronunciation. It's true that Vietnamese doesn't lack words, and it's not like I'm communicating with foreigners."

Not only “book tickets”, “book schedules”, Vietnamese has enough words to express life issues, but many people prefer to use foreign words to... look fancy. For example, the word “menu” is available in Vietnamese, but for some reason “menu” has always been a foreign word. As a result, there is a video clip of a customer coming to a repair shop, needing to replace a part, asking the staff to show him the “menu”, leaving the mechanic bewildered because he did not understand.

After the Covid-19 pandemic, Huynh Minh Sang (32 years old, from Tien Giang ) chose to return to his hometown to start a business, opening a drink shop at the gate of an industrial park near his house. The shop was beautiful, with affordable prices, but it almost closed for a somewhat silly reason. “At first, when I opened the shop, my friends came to support me, and then I asked this person to introduce that person, and I sold quite well. But later, customers were hesitant to come to the shop, and they just pointed to the image of whatever drink they bought. I asked a few customers and they understood that because the name of the drink I wrote was half English and half Vietnamese, they were hesitant to read it, so they just pointed to the image, and many customers were hesitant to come to the shop,” Minh Sang said.

Western languages are known but Vietnamese is strange.

Because his family had oriented him to study abroad since he was young, Nguyen Thanh H. (23 years old, living in District 3, Ho Chi Minh City) learned almost all of his English in class and Vietnamese at home with his mother. H. shared: “When studying abroad, giving presentations and writing theses in English, I was very confident, but when it came to writing standard Vietnamese, there were many shortcomings. That was an advantage when studying abroad, but also my weakness, not being fluent in my mother tongue, so I continued to study Vietnamese by myself.”

Many times the mass media has spoken out against the lyrics in songs or movies that are too foreign in their dialogue. But perhaps this has not stopped, but continues in a direction where both Vietnamese and Westerners are grammatically incorrect. For example: “thu hai” becomes “thu high” or “thu ba” becomes “thu bar”… This way of writing/speaking is wrong in both Vietnamese and English, however, it is the trending language on social networks. Under many posts on forums sharing about literature and language, talking about this “half-fat, half-lean” foreign language, there are many comments such as: “mix a little English to make it trendy”, “everyone speaks this way, me too, otherwise it would be very rustic”…

Working in the field of brand communications, Tran Thi Thuy Tien (28 years old, living in District 4, Ho Chi Minh City) shared: “At my company, every time I assign new employees to draft documents and contracts, I often encounter the phenomenon of using both Vietnamese and English in one document. When I remind them, they say it is because they are used to communicating on social networks. Regarding this issue, I consider myself a picky person, documents for foreign customers are sometimes easily filled with technical terms in English. As for domestic customers, I always explain in Vietnamese, except for some overly technical terms. For me, that is a way to maintain my identity and respect my working partners.”

In the trend of integration and multi-dimensional exchange, the influence of foreign languages on social communication is an understandable story. However, let yourself have a deep understanding of your mother tongue and a professional understanding of foreign languages. Don't create half-baked words in the style of "half-baked foreign languages".

According to sggp.org.vn

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