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Introduction

Making Out in Vietnamese is your guide to the trendy, upbeat, and colloquial Vietnamese spoken on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

In eleven easy chapters, this book will introduce you to the simple language you need to meet people, eat out, shop—even paint the town red or fall in love. There are no long-winded exercises, no complex rules, no verb drills! Whether you are a novice in Vietnamese or already have some working knowledge of the language, this book will put hundreds of handy expressions at your fingertips.

Making Out in Vietnamese goes a step beyond textbook Vietnamese. Besides teaching you what to say in your day-today dealings, it also tells you what expressions are too risqué to handle. This is the first book to candidly print some of the sharpest insults on the Vietnamese scene, insults that would easily throw a New York or London taxi driver.

As language lives, breathes, and changes with the times, it remains in every sense a mirror of a culture. Making Out in Vietnamese captures the living language of a country that is only now opening to the West: in Ho Chi Minh City you might take a sip of three-lizard liquor while listening to nhac rap— Vietnamese rap music. The words and phrases used by Vietnam's younger generation gives us a glimpse into the everyday life of an old, rich culture attuning itself to the modern world.

The standard southern dialect used throughout the book, although different from the Hanoi dialect, is readily understood throughout Vietnam.

Hanoi, for example, says bwít (bwéet) for "bus," while Ho Chi Minh City says béet.

Hanoi says chúk (chóok) "a little," Ho Chi Minh City says chút (chóot).