#don't learn vietnamese with squeakygeeky

[squeakygeeky]

In Vietnamese when you want to refer to someone in the third person you would generally use whatever you would use as the second person pronoun if talking to them and just add ‘ấy.‘ So ‘anh’ becomes ‘anh ấy.’ It’s pretty straightforward if you’ve grasped first and second person pronouns.

Except I just learned that in the south when speaking people don’t do that, instead they change the tone of the pronoun, so ‘anh’ becomes ‘ảnh.’ But for some reason not with ‘chú’ (a man slightly younger than your parents) specifically.

So anyway I’ll be going back to studying Thai now.

[squeakygeeky]

Pronoun Use in Stupid Boys, Stupid Love

f you haven’t seen this one, it’s one of my genuine recommendations, it’s lighthearted and adorable. Despite the title, there’s a GL couple. It’s about 5 high school friends and they all use rude pronouns (tao/mày) with each other. But what I thought it would be interesting to post about, inspired by a recent post about using first names as pronouns in Thai, is the character Kim.

The main character, Nghĩa, is a boy who suddenly finds himself crushing on his best friend. Nghĩa seems well aware that the friend in question likes boys. Thanh is a girl with short hair who wears the boys version of the uniform. When Nghĩa is trying to figure out how he feels about his crush, it’s made clear that he views Thanh as a girl for purposes of his hugging experiments (just a scary girl he’s not willing to risk hugging). Thanh has a crush on her more feminine friend, who sounds open to dating any gender.

Kim wears the boy’s uniform, but in the last episode in the English subtitles, Thanh refers to Kim being the younger sister of a teacher (who is played by Ba Vinh because what VBL would be complete without him?). The subtitles switch from using ‘he’ to ‘she’ to refer to Kim in that episode. I think Thanh said ‘em gai,’ which is indeed ‘younger sister,’ but I’m not 100% sure, maybe it was just ‘em’ which is ‘younger sibling.’ So I honestly can’t tell you whether a translator went rogue or not. If any native speakers want to help me out, here’s the clip. Both Nghĩa and Thanh view Kim as a serious romantic rival, so in a more typical show, Kim would be a male character.

Kim, literally coming between not one but two couples:

I have absolutely no idea what gender, if any, we’re supposed to assume that Kim has. Everyone always uses ‘Kim’ as the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person pronoun for Kim. It’s not unusual to use first names and 1st and 2nd person pronouns in Vietnamese. It’s especially common for conversations between men and women. I’ve also seen it used in another drama so a group of students in different grades could talk to each other without being rude but also without implying a senior/junior relationship. But it does stand out in this show because of the way that Kim seems to exclusively use Kim as a pronoun, except of course with Kim’s elder brother, where ‘em’ is used.

All I have to add as a final note is that Kim (second from right) is very tall and for some reason boys at this school wear male ao dai for their uniforms, when it’s not even common irl for girls to have to wear ao dai all the time.

[squeakygeeky]

Thanks, I feel validated.

[squeakygeeky]

Love Bill Episode 3

I love Loc and Minh, especially Minh. I don’t even remember seeing them in the trailer, they just suddenly appeared to create an only one bed situation and get the main characters a bit hot and bothered. They apparently had a best friends-to-lovers thing going on, and maybe pretty recently if Thien didn’t know about it. And they’re already doing the divide-and-conquer couples thing. Good on Loc for promoting safe sex. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a case where friends were this straightforwardly pushing the couple together while shouting ‘now kiss.’ Minh referring to Nghia as ‘that stupid younger top’ like it was his title made me laugh. Neck kiss!

I don’t know why this show is suddenly obsessed with imaginary handjobs but there were two of those and on actual sex scene with Loc and Minh and O2 Production did not add the porno music even once, not even during the intentionally comedic scene. I never thought I’d see the day.

I was not expecting my girl Pink to be quoted in a BL but I can’t fault Nghia’s taste in pop stars. I forgot Thien was writing a ghost BL and I love him for that. Dalat continues to be the prettiest possible filming location. Anyway, that’s all my normal comments, on to linguistics!

This is the episode where The Thing happened aka a shift in how the main characters address each other. The Eng sub gives us:

Nghia: I address you as my senior, but can I be addressed as your junior? Thien: Well...do whatever you want. Just don’t do it in a rude way. Nghia: I might be a bit rude, but I’d never be discourteous to the elderly.

Who ever is doing these subs, 10/10. This translation conveys the spirit of this exchange really well, in a way that a machine translation never could.

Nghia says something along the lines of, “I call you ‘anh,’ but can I be referred to as ‘em’?” Thien says he can do whatever he likes as long as he doesn’t use ‘tao/mày’ (rude pronouns). And then Nghia is a sarcastic little shit in return. What you can’t get from the subs is that Thien starts to call him ‘câu’ when responding, but corrects himself to ‘em’ instead.

At 22, Thien is older than Nghia (not sure how old Nghia is but my guess is only 18). Nghia has been addressing Thien properly as ‘anh,’ older brother, and himself as ‘tôi,’ which is the most neutral version of ‘I.’ Thien addresses himself as ‘anh’ and calls Nghia ‘cậu’ which I think is technically a kind of uncle but can be used as a pronoun for someone around the same age or younger, generally it seems to me either because you’re close enough in age to want to avoid sounding like senior/junior, or because your relationship is a little distant. Nghia is asking to use ‘em,’ younger sibling. Anh/em would be typical senior/junior pronouns but also have a romantic implication.

Sort of significant here is that in another show I talked about a while ago, the toppy younger character started addressing the older character as ‘em,’ which was meant as a come on. I can’t see Thien responding well to that, and there is also 100% no way Nghia would know that was a thing, the boy can’t even recognize a condom package.

[squeakygeeky]

The non-romantic side of ‘anh’ and ‘em’ pronoun complications.

[squeakygeeky]

I watched Mr Cinderella S2 so you don't have to

I'm probably World's #1 Mr. Cinderella Enjoyer, but I knew I would hate S2 from the trailer alone and I was correct. Let's actually start with the ending, because the ending was a full two minutes of Dung and Khoa slow dancing on pier. I clipped it so you can watch some of that and not the actual show.

The rest was baaaaad bad. I've watched Truong Minh Thao in weirder things, but this was the least fun. IDK why anyone thought fans of a mostly fluffy show about two people from different worlds falling in love would want to watch a show about extremely tedious villain characters attempt to break up an established couple in the most soap opera angsty way possible. But like bad soap opera, you know I love me some good melodrama. Like, even if it had been well done and the villain characters had been vaguely charismatic about it, it would not have been an enjoyable watch for me. Plus without the post-credits scenes it seems like the villains had succeeded and suffered no consequences, which confused me a lot, but by then I was very confused by the basics of what was going on and not just the characters. Nobody even got the hose this time, disappointing!

You can tell Ba Vinh and Truong Minh Thao were enjoying returning to these characters and they're so comfortable playing off each other that the part so of Episode 1 before the plot starting happening were fun. But that made it worse when the rest of the show was just Everyone Suffers. I did not want to watch my favorite characters suffer.

At least we got a proposal flashback before everyone suffered.

There was Khoa's adoptive brother returning to reveal they had been previously in love, a shady doctor, framing for medical malpractice, sex pollen perfume, and possibly black magic. IDEK man. It had a happy ending technically, as long as you watch past the credits, unless that dancing scene was supposed to be a flashback, in which case it was an open ending from the previous post-credit scene.

I guess between seasons they decided Ba Vinh's character was the bottom and I mean literally not just linguistically. My only other linguistic note is that the proposal and a later scene both used what translates as 'life partner' or maybe 'soulmate' and it's cropped up in at least two other BLs. Feels weird to be listening to Vietnamese again, maybe someday I'll have a go at properly learning it, not just learning about it if you know what I mean.

[squeakygeeky]

Pronouns in translation because I can’t be stopped, send help

I blame someone from discord for this, since I was rambling about Vietnamese pronouns (no one is safe from me) and they had the brilliant idea to check the Vietnamese subtitles of Thai shows to see how the pronouns got translated. For more on Thai BL pronouns see the post by @absolutebl​ here and for more on Vietnamese BL pronouns see my own post here. Because of reasons I pay the most attention when the word ‘yêu’ (love) comes out.

Kinn and Porche use the rude/informal ‘guu/mueng.’ This gets translated as the pretty much equivalent ‘tao/mày.’

Kim and Chay have a phi/nong dynamic, so Chay is politely using ‘pom’ and ‘phi’ to declare his love. Their pronouns get translated as ‘anh/em,’ which are the most typical pronouns to use for saying ‘I love you.’

Tawan pretty much uses names for pronouns which works fine in Vietnamese. It sounds to me like Vegas uses ‘pom’ or just leaves out the first person pronoun, as in the particular line. In the subs the neutral (and non-intimate) first person pronoun ‘tôi’ is used. So this is an example of ‘pom’ being translated differently in a different context, as it should be. Using ‘tôi’ in a declaration of love would be weird if the original language was Vietnamese, though.

[squeakygeeky]

Pronoun Use in Vietnamese BL

Chào bạn! Hello! Welcome to ‘Don’t learn Vietnamese with Squeakygeeky.’ I am your host, an obsessed weirdo who does not actually speak Vietnamese. I’m trying, though. Please remember that this is intended to look at linguistics within the world of Vietnamese Boy’s Love Drama and not as actual language education for speaking to other humans. Specifically, we’re going to be looking at pronouns.

The best thing I ever did for myself was google ‘Vietnamese pronoun meme.’

[id: Meme with text ‘therapist: vietnamese pronouns aren’t real they cannot hurt you. vietnamese pronouns:’ followed various vietnamese pronouns superimposed on cats with creepy glowing eyes.]

The Vietnamese language doesn’t use pronouns so much as it avoids true pronouns and the way you refer to yourself and your conversational partner depends on the relationship between you. In this particular series of posts, I’m going to focus on the words used for ‘I’ and ‘you’ between friends and romantic partners in various BLs. It was inspired by @absolutebl‘s posts on the Thai language in BL. You can’t really think of ‘I’ and ‘you’ separately, you have to think of them as I - you pairs.

I used a lot of sources when trying to learn Vietnamese pronouns, but here I’m relying heavily on 3 posts about pronouns on the blog ‘Learn Vietnamese With Linh!’ I would link them, but apparently tumblr hates when you cite your sources and will hide you from the tags.

Textbook Pronouns:

Tôi = I Bạn = You

These are the most neutral possible pronouns. They don’t really imply superiority, inferiority, or equality. They don’t really imply anything about the relationship between the people speaking. They are what Duolingo will teach you. They are also not that common in real conversation, or in fictional conversations intended for a Vietnamese-speaking audience, which is all we care about here.

‘Tôi’ is used for ‘I’ when writing a novel in the first person. It’s used when you don’t know enough about the person you’re talking about to be able to choose a more appropriate pronoun, including with colleagues and acquaintances. Apparently if your spouse suddenly starts dropping ‘tôi’ to refer to themselves it means they're mad at you. It’s not rude but it can be distant. There’s a sense of disconnect from the person you’re talking to. You can pair ‘tôi’ with other versions of ‘you’ besides ‘bạn.’

‘Bạn’ is also the word for ‘friend.’ ‘Bạn’ is the ‘you’ you use for the unknown reader which is why I used it to say hi to you at the beginning of this post. It’s a little too friendly for government forms, but otherwise it’s the most neutral you. It wouldn’t really make sense to pair ‘bạn’ with anything except ‘tôi’ and our next vocab word ‘mình.’

Mình:

‘Mình’ gets its own category because it does a few things. ‘Mình’ is like ‘tôi’ but also functions a little more like ‘self’ (the literal meaning being ‘self/body’). When posting to social media it’s common to use ‘mình’ for I. If I were writing this post in Vietnamese I’d refer to myself using ‘mình.’ ‘Mình’ is also used when talking to yourself. ‘Mình’ can be ‘we’ but I’m just not ready to face plural pronouns yet. Oh, and you can use it as ‘you’ for your beloved who is like your own self, but I think that’s an old-fashioned thing?

Names:

Real names and pet names can be used for ‘I - you.’ This is totally normal and not the equivalent of talking about yourself in the third person. It’s respectful and maybe a little cute to use your own name for ‘I.’ But if someone is a lot older/higher status than you, you should use their kinship term as a title followed by their name. Celebrities tend to use their own name for ‘I.’ I’ve noticed Bá Vinh, that one actor from every Vietnamese BL, refer to himself using Vinh (Vinh being his given name, not family name. Family names go first, but don’t really get used. Bá is his middle name). 

Friend Pronouns:

Tớ - cậu = a nice thing to use with friends. Unisex, but favored by girls. Tao - mày = a rude thing to use with friends. Unisex, but favored by boys. If used with someone who’s not your friend, it will cause a fight. Ta - mi/ngươi = for close friends, kind of teasing and just weird in any other context because it’s other use is by royalty in historical dramas

In all these cases they don’t switch around, both people use the same thing for I and the same thing for you. 

Kinship Terms:

This means you use words for actual family relationships as pronouns for people you're not related to, based on age (sort of). These words can also be used as third person pronouns for he/she but we won’t worry about that. There are A LOT, but all I’m going to cover are: 

Anh = older brother Chị = older sister Em = younger sibling

This can be used with your actual siblings, but also people around the age to be a younger or older sibling. So a man who is older than you, but not old enough to be your uncle, is ‘Anh’ and a woman who is older, but not auntie-old, is ‘chị.’ You would be ‘em.’ Anh/chị might imply that they’re like a sibling to you, but it might be like using ‘Mr./Ms.’ Context is key. Unlike with friends, the words for ‘I’ and ‘you’ switch depending on who is speaking.

Technically you can use ‘tôi’ (or less formally ‘em’) with ‘anh/chị’ in a way that functions like the friend pronouns with no switching, where you call the other person ‘anh/chị’ even if they call you ‘anh/chị’ in return. This is respectful, and means you don’t have to find out the other person’s age, but kind of makes it sound like you work in an office together. ‘Anh/chị’ is definitely functioning as ‘Mr./Ms.’ here.

Further complicating the situation, a man may be ‘anh’ to a woman’s ‘em’ even if the woman is technically older because, well, the patriarchy, but let’s just go with the fact that it’s cuter to go by ‘em.’ A heterosexual couple will definitely go by ‘anh’ for the man and ‘em’ for the woman. ‘Anh yêu em’ means ‘I love you’ if a man is speaking, but ‘you love me’ if a woman is speaking. Here ‘Anh - em’ has the added connotation of an exchange of endearments, and will occasionally get translated as things like ‘honey’ or ‘dear.’

Okay, you’re thinking, but this was supposed to be a post about BL?!?! The whole point of the genre is that the boy loves another boy! Welp, here we go. Buckle up.

The Use of Anh - Em Pronouns in BL:

Let’s start by acknowledging that masculine/top/dominant and feminine/bottom/submissive gets conflated in general. It especially gets conflated in Vietnamese media (I’m trying to avoid touching the real world with a 10 foot pole except I kind of can’t), because there is no way in the Vietnamese language to discuss biological sex, gender, and sexual orientation as separate concepts unless you use loan words, directly translate concepts from the English term, or are very, very, very careful in how you explain things. (See comments.) Combine that with the linguistic expectation that in a romantic relationship someone has to be the ‘anh’ and someone has to be the ‘em,’ and you get ‘anh - em’ being used in Vietnamese media between fictional male couples in a way that tracks with stereotypical expectations. 

(See: Black, Joshua James Croft (2017) Queer male identities in modern Vietnamese literature. PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London. )

The creators of any BL have to wrestle with the degree to which their choices will conform to the audience’s stereotypical expectations of a male couple as well as their expectations for who will get seme/uke tropes within the narrative. And if you don’t understand what I mean by seme/uke you sure are on the wrong tumblr post, but I’m basically using the same definition @absolutebl does in that the seme is the active pursuer in a romantic narrative, who wants to be the protector and who gets similar tropes that the male would in a heterosexual romantic narrative. For example, the seme will save the uke from physical danger. 

The creators of a Vietnamese BL also have to decide who will be ‘anh’ and who will be ‘em.’ For reasons that I hope are obvious at this point, the use of ‘anh - em’ can be expected to track with seme/uke tropes. When all of this stops tracking together it’s time to sit up and take notice. I suspect that in some cases no one really thought about ‘anh - em’ usage because it just seemed obvious, but in others very deliberate choices were made. I suspect all of this also ties into the modern Vietnamese LGBT+ community’s activism and conceptualization of identity (as well as that of the international target audience) combined with the general genre-savviness of the Vietnamese BL industry and the close attention it pays to Thai BL.

But wait, there’s a wrinkle! A magical get out of jail free card! Younger men always call older (but not too much older) men ‘anh.’ So make one character older, or at least make it possible that he could be older, and then that can be the full explanation for ‘anh - em’ assignment and you can act like it doesn’t have broader implications. Just don’t make the uke older or then you’ll really have problems.  

The funniest example of this is Minh Anh, the main character of Nation’s Brother (Anh Trai Quốc Dân, ‘anh trai’ is for when you need to make it clear you’re referring to a biological brother). Yes, Anh can also be a name, and for added confusion it can be part of a man’s name or a woman’s name. He’s ‘anh’ to his actual younger sister and to his love interest, Tâm, who is also clearly younger than him. He’s also shown on top in bed. He is ‘anh’ in every possible way you can be ‘anh,’ truly the nation’s brother. 

The thing is, BL loves a classmate romance, so you can’t always count on an age difference. Phùc and Tùng in The Most Peaceful Place have a friends to lovers arc and as friends they use ‘tao - mày.’ There is an actual pronoun-based scene. Just before this scene, they get back together, put their couple bracelets back on, and sleep together with Phùc being shown on top. In the scene in question, they are still in bed and start their conversation using ‘tao - mày.’ Phùc tells Tùng to refer to himself as ‘em.’ Tùng laughs and refuses until Phùc playfully wrestles him into submission. They do actually stick to ‘anh - em’ after that. This is Phùc asserting linguistic dominance, but also getting them out of the linguistic friendzone. The friends to lovers arc is both narrative and linguistic.

https://youtu.be/krrk48ixqHQ?t=847

The translator made the smart decision not to even try to translate ‘em’ here. It’s just not possible. The translator makes a note that ‘em’ is how a wife or uke would address themselves. Of course uke is a BL/yaoi trope term not a real world thing, so that makes me think the translator wanted to get their point across without touching the masculine/top/dominant and feminine/bottom/submissive conflation with a 10 foot pole.

In The Most Peaceful Place, the use of ‘anh’ and ‘em’ tracks perfectly with the audience expectations for that use the narrative just set up and the physical appearance of the actors cast in these roles. The anomalous thing about The Most Peaceful Place compared to other BLs is that the switch to ‘anh - em’ is very directly initiated by one character, so I think it’s pretty clear the creators know they were making A Choice and went ahead and put a lampshade on it.

I’m planning to do more posts looking at pronoun use in specific BLs, beyond just ‘anh - em.’ Feel free to suggest what you want me to cover next or to guess who is ‘anh’ and who is ‘em.’ I will definitely post about Hey Rival, I Love You, My Lascivious Boss and eventually Mr. Cinderella. I want to post about Stupid Boys, Stupid Love but there are no Vietnamese subs and I’m struggling with the accents and the sheer number of characters interacting with other characters. Tagging @heretherebedork​ because who knows if I fixed truly fixed the issue and whether anyone can even see this, I love tumblr but I hate tumblr.

[id: Gia Lam, the sister from Nation’s Brother, saying, ‘I watch them to learn foreign languages...’]

Pronoun use by drama:

Hey Rival, I Love You! My Lascivious Boss Mr. Cinderella Hey! First Love Want to See You

Other BL linguistics:

Husband/wife language Coming out/identity

[squeakygeeky]

Pronoun Use in Want to See You

I was originally going to wait until the end to post, but it’s Episode 2 and we’ve already gotten the pronoun scene in Want to See You so here we go. 

The monster pronoun post is here, but to review the relevant Vietnamese pronoun:

tôi = the most neutral way to say ‘I’ cậu = young man, but as a pronoun it gets used for and by both males and females when talking with same-age friends and only as ‘you,’ not ‘I’. anh = older brother. Used for any older male who isn’t a full generation older. Functions as both ‘I’ and ‘you.’ em = younger sibling. Used for someone younger who isn’t a full generation younger. Functions as both ‘I’ and ‘you.’

‘Anh-em’ gets used by actual siblings, friends, and romantic couples (if the woman is older she will go by ‘em’). 

Plotwise, all you really need to know is that Thạch is the boss character, Phúc is his caregiver. Thạch was in an accident and is now blind, but has some hope of regaining his vision. Thạch is older than Phúc. Also, this is a BL so we know they’re going to get together.

Pronoun-wise Thạch has been using ‘anh’ for himself and ‘cậu’ for Phúc. Meanwhile Phúc uses ‘anh’ for Thạch and ‘tôi’ for himself. It’s interesting to me because usually the pronouns match, either as a reciprocal pair or both using the same, but I’ve seen this pattern in other places. It’s the same in the The Ring Goes Missing and in My Lascivious Boss, both of which have boss/employee characters. Something similar is also going on in the older woman/younger man romance ‘Sweet Business’ except with the female equivalent ‘chị’ instead of ‘anh.’ She’s not the boss of the younger man, but they meet in the workplace. I’m guessing it’s a way to avoid the use of ‘em’ for a younger male who you’re not that close to.

Anyway, there’s a scene where Thạch says to Phúc that if his blindness is cured, “At that moment, I want to see you.” This is the first time he uses ‘em’ for you.

I really wish there were Vietnamese subs for the next bit because I wish I knew exactly what got said but my listening comprehension is just not there, although I’m guessing it was translated as well as it could have been. The English subs have Phúc saying, “If you want to call me that way, use another tone because your tone doesn’t sound suitable.”

 [Edit: Commenter came through for me. Thạch actually said, “Tôi muốn nhìn thấy em.” Phúc replied something along the lines of, “If you want to call me ‘em,’ you should use 'anh’ and ‘em;’ 'tôi’ and ‘em’ is very strange.”] Thạch’s little smile at this point is excellent.

And then when the doorbell ringing interrupts them and Phúc says he’s going to get the door, he starts using ‘tôi’ as the pronoun for ‘I,’ but then switches to using ‘em.’ So he’s accepting a closer relationship.

Also he sprayed Linh with the garden hose so we are all on Team Phúc, even Duy.

@heretherebedork @absolutebl​

[squeakygeeky]

Chào bạn, and welcome to what I guess is a combination of a linguistics post and a trash watch recap. Anyway, I watched A Love Song For My Beloved and overall I would consider it a waste of café boys in pink gingham aprons, and why would you waste a thing like that? The uke was pretty good looking, though.

Some things that happened linguistically: 

One of the café boys flirted with his boss and might have been using ‘chú’ instead of ‘anh’ so basically calling him uncle instead of older brother. This is apparently a thing in Vietnamese BL webnovels and maybe webtoons but not really dramas yet. Kind of the equivalent of calling a guy ‘daddy’ I guess, but honestly the boss was mostly confused. The English subs translate this as ‘boss’ but I checked the Vietnamese subs and that has chú not chủ, yes those are different words (pls send help). Either way he drops this for ‘anh’ eventually.

The uke was younger than the seme, and the seme started calling him ‘em’ instead of ‘anh’ and got the uke to call him ‘anh.’ I have a whole post trying to explain this sort of thing, but wow what a headache for translators.

The guy who kept ordering more milk at the cafe said he was bisexual using the English word

Some things that happened in the plot:

an abusive BDSM sex scene, but with a towel on the whole time because this is on YouTube

multiple intersecting love triangles

smol cafe boy gets pushed into a pool

smol cafe boy gets plot-specific amnesia from a stabbing

smol cafe boy wonders who wrote the titular love song while holding a piece of bloody sheet music the props department helpfully(?) put the tall cafe boy’s name on VERY CLEARLY

there was a 2 year time skip

evil ex and milk guy ended up in the same mental hospital

smol cafe boy finally remembered his relationship with tall cafe boy because I guess no one wanted to clue him in or tall cafe boy couldn’t manage to start a fresh round of flirting in TWO WHOLE YEARS

there was A WEDDING. Not actually the first gay marriage in Vietnamese BL but definitely the first wedding. It was the boss/cafe boy side couple. Everyone was there, even evil ex and milk guy. Neither member of the happy couple was involved in any of the most melodramatic events, so good for them. Their vows used ‘bạn đời’ for ‘life partner,’ the second time I’ve seen that used, the first being the Tien Bromance couple.

[squeakygeeky]

Chào các bạn, and welcome back to Pronouns in Vietnamese BL except this time it’s a het couple, because why not. 

So that you don’t have to go back to the monster post, just know that in Vietnamese the pronoun 'chị’ is for a woman old enough to be the older sister. But if they’re a couple the man would be ‘anh’ (older brother) and the woman would be ‘em’ (younger sibling).

In Stage of Love there’s a romance between a boy and a girl who is one year older than him. They have class differences that make it a problem for them to date, or something. I don’t really remember. At the beginning he tries calling her by just her name and she’s makes him call her 'chị’ because she’s one year older. Then later she finally agrees to go out with him and he’s like ‘Can I you ‘em’? ‘Em’ gets translated in the subs as ‘babe.’

The answer is no. 

This scene takes place under a blue umbrella because they are straight. Gay umbrellas are clear. I don’t make the BL rules.

Eventually, she fully warms up to him and lets him hug her and everything, and while we can’t hear it, you can see him shouting ‘Anh yêu em,’ probably the only sentence in Vietnamese I can lipread. 

Kind of related, I was watching Activeboys and a girl calls a guy ‘anh’ and it gets translated as ‘oppa,’ which cracked me up. Like English and Vietnamese are just too incompatible and the subber gave up and was like, ‘I’ll just use Korean, an language we all understand.’ I don’t even think it was a bad choice, the actual Korean word ‘oppa’ gets used in the same show in the same context, it’s just funny. 

[squeakygeeky]

Pronouns in Hey Rival, I Love You!

Chào bạn! Today we’ll look at the short film Hey Rival, I Love You! (Tình địch, anh yêu em!). It’s a really good example of pronoun use changing over the course of a relationship. It also has Vietnamese subtitles which makes this so much easier for me. Not only do the main characters go from rivals to lovers, so do their pronouns. 

This will make no sense without Part 1. 

Today’s vocab:

Tình địch = romantic rival Yêu = love Thương = love Ông = grandpa, but can be used as a ‘you’ pronoun for a man old enough to be your grandpa, or ‘I’ if you are grandpa-old. In southern Vietnam, a casual way to refer to a male friend.

The film is about Dương, a jock, and Phúc, a nerd. They end up dating the same girl (Châu), so I’m actually going to start with how they interact with her. Dương and Châu use their names for ‘I’ and ‘you’ at the beginning. They’ve only just met so this is a polite way to interact. Later they switch to ‘anh - em,’ since they are closer. Phúc and Châu use ‘anh - em’ the whole time, since she was dating him already. Typical het couples (well, except for the cheating).

Dương and Phúc use tao - mày with each other at first. I mentioned in the last post that friends use this, but it can also be rude, and here it’s obviously rude. Later when they unite to take revenge on Châu for two-timing them, they switch. They both start using ‘tôi’ for ‘I’ but Dương uses both ‘cậu’ and ‘ông’ for ‘you’ referring to Phúc, and Phúc uses ‘Anh’ in return and this highlights the differences in their personalities. Phúc isn’t nerdy in a shy or awkward sense, but he’s not bro-y like Dương, so he speaks more respectfully (but still with ‘tôi,’ not the more feminine/subordinate ‘em’). 

Dương uses ‘tôi thương ông’ to confess his love to Phúc. I think this is great because it has an, ‘I’m in love with you, dude’ vibe, and they still speak like friends until the very end when they decide to become a couple and we get an actual ‘anh yêu em’ from Dương to Phúc. Phúc never actually uses ‘em’ for himself, but he doesn’t appear to have any objection.

So...what’s up with that? What makes Dương ‘anh’ and Phúc ‘em?’ @absolutebl​ uses this film as an example of weak seme/uke dynamics. They spend much of the film each pursuing a third party romantically and just kind of realize they didn’t actually want her. Dương is the one who gets to make both love confessions and Phúc seems concerned mostly that Dương will eventually regret becoming involved with him, so I guess he’s more romantically more active? Also Dương is a smidge more traditionally masc, being the aggressive Sports Guy. But like, a tiny smidge.

However, these actors have an actual series together, My Monster in Law. This is NOT a prequel to that, even though I’ve seen that stated in a few places, it’s just the same actor pairing. Totally different characters, different names, different dynamics, just some advertising getting lost in translation. I’ve only watched the first couple episodes of that series, but what matters is the ‘anh - em’ seems to have carried over from that. So I think what happened was branding as much as anything, expectations carrying over from their main acting roles.

I wish they would have gone with ‘tôi yêu ông,’ though.

[squeakygeeky]

Pronoun use in My Lascivious Boss

Chào bạn! Let’s take a moment to thank My Lascivious Boss (Ông chủ, đừng đến đây!) for having Vietnamese subs, as well as excellent English subs. That made this so much easier and helped me learn important vocabulary like ‘tình một đêm mà’ (one-night stand). This won’t make sense without Part 1 and it probably won’t make a ton of sense if you haven’t seen the series. 

This one has two great examples of using ‘mình’ for ‘I’ when a character is talking to themselves. The main character, Minh Hoàng, uses that when talking out loud to himself and later the boss, Long, uses it in an internal monolog. He also uses ‘mày’ for ‘you’ when talking to himself, so I guess he rudely addresses himself? Which, same.

Long uses ‘tôi’ for himself a lot. He and Minh Hoàng do not get along well at first. He calls Minh Hoàng ‘cậu’ but since they are clearly not friends, it’s not friendly. I think it’s like calling him ‘kid.’ Minh Hoàng also uses ‘tôi’ for at this point, but with ‘anh’ since he’s talking to his boss. This is contrast to how Minh Hoàng uses ‘em - anh’ with Long’s younger brother, who he mistook for his boss and initially had a crush on. It’s also in contrast to how Long uses ‘anh - em’ with Minh Hằng, who he is kind of obsessively in love with (please note: Minh Hằng is Minh Hoàng in drag).

Long uses ‘tôi - bạn’ with the random one-night stand who has gone stage 5 clinger on him (you know, as opposed to the one-night stand he’s stalking) because he wants to get rid of her, while she uses ‘em - anh.’ This is such an extreme disconnect I don’t know why she’s even trying. Similarly, Minh Hoàng’s evil ex uses ‘anh - em’ on him and gets ‘tôi - anh’ in return, while in the flashbacks Minh Hoàng was of course using ‘em - anh.’

There’s a confrontation between Long and Minh Hoàng (about the whole pretending to be his fake sister thing) where long uses ‘tôi - cậu’ as usual, but gets back ‘em - anh,’ since Minh Hoàng likes Long at this point and is very apologetic. 

[id: Minh Hoàng telling Long “em rất rất rất thích anh”] 

He really, really, really likes him.

There’s never a direct conversation between Long and Minh Hoàng after they get together and are being lovey-dovey, but presumably Long will switch to ‘anh - em.’ He’s older, he’s aggressive, he dates girls, he’s not the one in the dress.

[id: Minh Hoàng stomping on Long’s foot while wearing a wig, dress and heels. Long is holding his had to face because he’s just been slapped.]

However, I am not remotely finished! There is another romantic ‘anh’ in this story. And it’s…dun dun dun…Lâm! I feel like even if you’ve seen the show, you will require a visual reference at this point. 

[id: Bảo is wearing glasses, an orange shirt that say ‘SUNDAYS’, and a silver necklace. Lâm is to his left wearing the same thing except his shirt is black. Their arms are crossed. In front is Minh Hoàng seen from the back, holding a plush toy. ]

Minh Hoàng, Bảo, and Gia Vỹ use ‘tớ - cậu’ together because they’re all adorable café boys. However, Lâm is ‘anh’ to all of their ‘em.’ Minh Hoàng will switch between using ‘tớ’ and ‘em’ for ‘I’ within the same conversation depending on if he’s directly addressing Bảo or Lâm. This could be because Lâm is actually older, but Lâm and Bảo are implied to be in the same class at university, so it kind of makes it seem like they’ve settled on him as the alpha male of the squad.

Even just looking at Lâm and Bảo, well, look at Lâm and Bảo again. They are nearly indistinguishable except that Lâm is shorter.

[id: Bảo on the left and Lâm on the right. They are wearing glasses, striped shirts, silver necklaces, and backpacks. They are linking arms. Lâm is noticeably shorter.]

Heck, they even show Lâm underneath Bảo in bed. 

[id: Lâm lying in bed and reaching up to touch Bảo’s face. Bảo is sitting on top of him and already has his glasses on. They are wearing tank tops and shorts.] 

I am absolutely convinced that the visuals and script are being used to poke fun at this whole ‘anh - em’ thing.

On a tangential but extremely adorable not, Lâm only uses ‘em’ for Bảo like once. Whether he is speaking to Bảo or about him he uses ‘bảo bối’ or ‘bảo bối của ahn,’ which is a pun on his name and means ‘treasure’ or ‘my treasure.’ Once he uses ‘bảo bối của tôi,’ but that doesn’t seem to be a meaningful difference. Yes, ‘bảo bối của ahn’ can function as a pronoun.

EVERYTHING IS PRONOUN.

This picture has nothing to do with anything I just need to look at something cute.

[id: Lâm sitting in bed with Bảo resting his head on his leg. Lâm is holding his phone and pinching Bảo’s nose. Bảo is cuddling a Teddy bear. They are wearing glasses, striped shirts and khaki shorts.]

[squeakygeeky]

Pronoun use in Mr. Cinderella

Chào các bạn! I’m learning plural pronouns, so hello to all of you at once.It’s time for one of my favorite BL’s, Mr. Cinderella (Chàng Lọ Lem). This post will not make sense without Part 1, and you should absolutely watch the show. It’s about Dũng, a man searching for his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Cinderella (lọ lem). Except what he gets instead is a doctor named Khoa who is definitely a guy (chàng). Come for the excellent acting and chemistry of the main leads, stay for the pronouns (at least if you’re me). Unfortunately, there are no Vietnamese subtitles on this one, so I had to rely on my own ears. I hope they did not fail me. 

[id: Dũng reaching over to put flower petals on top of Khoa’s head.]

Before we get to the meaty bits, there’s a ‘chị’ in this story, Khoa's older sister, Danh. She’s not his biological sister or the daughter of his foster parents. Instead they formed a sibling bond at the orphanage. The subtitles have Khoa calling her Ms. Danh, when in English I think  it would make more sense for him to call her by just her given name. Because I know the word ‘chị,’ I know the text at the end is from her. 

There’s a side pair (never an actual couple) that uses ‘anh - em.’ I guess that falls along predictable lines, with Thịnh (the ‘anh’) wanting to have a protector/pursuer role. Except Huỳnh is manipulative as hell and Thịnh is a naive little smoosh, so Thịnh ends up cooking and cleaning for Huỳnh, while Huỳnh pumps him for information. Huỳnh seems to prefer the ‘em’ pronoun for himself, or at least he thinks that’s what others will prefer for him (see: manipulative as hell).

With the main couple, there are two fantasy sequences worth noting. The nurse who has a crush on Khoa imagines him actually marrying Dũng. Imaginary Khoa uses ‘em’ for ‘you’ in his vows to Dũng. I guess since she thinks of Khoa romantically, and he is her boss, in her imagination he has to be ‘anh.’ Then when Dũng finds out Khoa is Cinderella, he imagines Khoa in a dress chasing him around the kitchen. There’s a lot to unpack with that little sequence, but for our purposes Dũng does not like what he pictures, and imaginary Khoa uses ‘em’ for himself and ‘ahn’ for Dũng--the opposite of the other fantasy sequence.

[id: A blurred image of Dũng and Khoa in suits. Khoa is holding a ring box and saying, “Do you agree to stay with me your whole life?”]

For their actual relationship, there seems to be a mix of ‘tôi - anh’ and the more friendly ‘tớ - cậu,’ with Khoa more likely to use ‘tớ - cậu’ and using it earlier (because of his higher status?). I’m pretty sure Dũng uses ‘bác sĩ’ (doctor) as ‘you’ occasionally. They are definitely the same age and even though they keep having conversations about what they are to each other, it’s hard to say when they become an official couple. There isn’t a love confession with the words ‘I like you’ or ‘I love you’ said directly to each other. The closest to that is when Khoa declares them family members, which I think has more of a romantic connotation in Vietnamese than English.

[id: Khoa with his arm around Dũng’s shoulders saying, "We are family members.” They are in the kitchen and Dũng is wearing an apron.]

So, where do we stand? The whole thing this series is playing with is: who is Cinderella and who is the Prince? The tropes are out in force, but all over the place. Khoa gets kissed while he’s sleeping (accidentally). Dũng is the one who gets his face washed with micellar water. Khoa has social standing and money. Dũng is a rough guy who gets into fights. Khoa was made to dress like a girl until the age of six. Dũng takes over the kitchen and housework. Khoa is very confident, even aggressive, sexually. Dũng seems to think he’ll be topping, but who knows with these two. They both call their exes ‘em,’ in Dũng’s case his ex-girlfriend and in Khoa’s case his ex-boyfriend. 

When they end the series as a committed romantic couple, who is the more feminine/subordinate ‘em?’ 

[id: Close up of Dũng and Khoa gazing adoringly at each other.]

Nobody. 

They still use the unisex, equal, (normally) non-romantic ‘tớ - cậu.’ This is a couple that lives together. This is a couple that has touched on the issue of legal marriage. This is a couple that has joked around with ‘prince’ and ‘princess.’ This is a couple that is in the middle of making out in their bathtub and speaking like friends, when an earlier series with the same director and actor had a couple explicitly switching away from friendly language in a similar context. This is pretty significant, right? Right???

[id: Pepe Silvia meme]

[squeakygeeky]

So I decided to learn Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt). Yes, this is because of how much Vietnamese BL I’ve been watching. So, here are my beginning impressions of the Vietnamese language.

Pronunciation: Hard. So hard. Even the sounds that are basically the same just...aren’t. I can hear the difference. I can’t make it. And nothing will really improve this for me except trying to talk to someone in Vietnamese and seeing if they understand me. I don’t have any Vietnamese speaking friends and I barely talk to people in English. Oh, and some consonants are totally different in Northern and Southern dialect, so that’s fun.

Syllables: Vietnamese is sort of monosyllabic in that each syllable can can have its own meaning is written as a separate word and in speech there’s a little separation, but not really in the sense that a single concept that needs to be learned on its own may have multiple syllables. So if you think you see a word you know maybe it’s just serving as part of a different word. This also leads into the next point.

Tones: There are SIX of them. And they are very important because they completely change what word you’re saying. Sure this isn’t a totally unfamiliar concept to me, having learned a (very) little Chinese but SIX. Except in Southern Vietnamese it’s only four. Aghhh.

Listening comprehension: Can be very difficult due to the reasons above, but my sheer amount of Vietnamese media consumption is going to give me an advantage over other learners. I’d already figured out ‘I’m sorry’ before I actually started learning anything.  

Alphabet: This is one is fine, actually. Due to French colonization Vietnam uses the roman alphabet. This is one reason I’ve settled on Vietnamese instead of Thai. You do need to pay close attention to the diacritical marks but I’m already a pro at using the Vietnamese keyboard on my phone. 

Grammar: You don’t conjugate verbs. Yay! I’ve seen vastly differing opinions on whether Vietnamese grammar is easy or hard, but it seems like ultimately the barrier to making yourself understood is pronunciation and poor grammar is fine. It goes subject > verb > object and modifiers go after the thing they modify. I’m not scared of grammar.

Pronouns: I am terrified of pronouns. Or at least I was. Then my terror made me obsessed with them and now they are my favorite aspect of the language. Basically the pronouns that get used are dependent on things like the relative ages, genders, and relationship dynamic between the people who are speaking and even things like whether you want to include people who are standing there but not actively part of the conversation when you say ‘we.’ And it doesn’t just change based on who is speaking together, but as their relationship changes and also sometimes within a single conversation.

[squeakygeeky]

I don’t know why today r/VietNam decided to have a discussion in English about the Vietnamese pronouns people use on Reddit, but thank you, that was educational. Apparently Reddit favors the somewhat rude ‘tao - mày,’ more so than other platforms. The only real alternatives mentioned were ‘cậu - tớ’ or ‘tôi/mình - bạn’ (somehow cringe??). I was wondering about what happens if you’re being anonymous on the internet, so you don’t know (and don’t usually even want to know) the age/gender of people you’re communicating with.