Learning Like A Child

If we are going to be honest, I don’t know a lick of Vietnamese.

Yes, I aced my language final. Yes, I can order correctly at restaurants (usually). Yes, I can tell you my name, my age, my country of origin, what my family does for a living, and I can explain that I am a student and don’t have any money so when the cops/market sellers/taxi drivers try to rip me off I can make them understand that I’m really a terrible target. Sometimes I get cocky with these few paragraphs I know how to repeat. Sometimes I pretend I know what I’m doing. I can listen to the Vietnamese roommates’ conversations, and even though I can only pick up on a few words, it’s not as if they’re discussing theoretical physics, I can get the gist of any conversation.

Every so often, however, I am humbled. It’s not by the roommates, or my professors, or the market sellers who make fun of me. It is always the same. It is always by children.

Today I was sitting outside enjoying what is sure to be one of my last avocado smoothies, just taking in the afternoon, trying to not count the hours until my flight home. The heat had receded a bit, and it was only in the low 90s thankfully. The afternoon rain helped to cool things off. I watched the children playing in the street, and they of course watched me right back.

After a few minutes of observing from afar they started circling, almost like sharks. Finally one of them had the guts to come up to me. In rapid fire Vietnamese she asked me a question. I looked at her with a completely blank stare. She saw me order my smoothie (sin to bo) in Vietnamese so she assumed I must speak at least a little bit of her language. I replied to her question with “I speak a little bit of Vietnamese. Just a little”. She tried another question. And another. Then she got frustrated. I’m pretty sure she yelled something along the lines of “How can you say you know a little bit of Vietnamese? You can’t understand me, and  I’m  only 9!” With a frustrated hurumph she pulled up a plastic chair and sat right down next to me. She now had a mission. She was going to teach this oversized foreigner how to really speak Vietnamese. She called for some paper and pen.

I spent the next hour and a half being quizzed by a 9 year old. She wanted to make sure I understood the basics before I got too advanced. Please note that she spoke three words of English: “love”, “tomorrow”, “Sunday”. We struggled. We pantomimed. We pointed. We drew. We yelled “troi oi!” (my goodness) every so often when I finally got something right.

This little 9 year old girl lined up all of her friends on the street to come up to me and say all the English words they knew to make sure I could translate them properly into Vietnamese.

The greatest teachers are the ones who look at a student and decide “You. I will do everything in my power to help you learn, and we will work together until you get it”. I didn’t realize that sometimes the greatest teachers are very determined 9 year old girls.

You can only learn so much in a classroom.