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[sethness]

Sorry to take up your time with a lot of newbie questions about Vietnam....
(In return, if you have questions about life in Japan, America, Saipan, Guam, Philippines, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Australia...ask away! I'll be happy to respond.)

After 6 years in Japan, I'm considering moving to VietNam to teach English & IT.

The big attraction is that the salaries are similar to Japan's English teachers', but VietNam has a far lower cost-of-living, has rapidly rising Internet connectivity, and is warm enough to SCUBA year-round.

But...that's about all I know about VietNam.

1)
Can anyone tell me about the SCUBA scene, there? Are there decent SCUBA sites within an hour's drive from teaching centers? Are diving prices based on emptying tourists' pockets at the standard international rate of $70 for a pair of boat dives, or are prices very low & fixed to the local economy, as they are in the Philippines?
Where's the best place in VN to teach English & IT for profit, while SCUBA diving in one's free time?

2)
How about opportunities to practice Japanese and German? With languages, if you don't use it, you lose it... so I'm worried that moving there, my Japanese skills will evaporate.

3)
Is Vietnamese hard to learn, compared to Japanese or Thai?

4)
How's the food... is there a lot of Italian/American/German-type food, or is it 99.9% Asian noodles, rice, and fish?

5)
How are locals, and the government, toward foreigners-- as friendly and extroverted as the Philippines, or hostile, or cool and reserved, or... ?

6)
How restricted is the Internet there? I've heard that the Communist party keeps a tight control over all newsmedia...does that apply to the Internet as well? Would I find that some news sites are inaccessible, or would I land in legal difficulties if I drew & uploaded political cartoons to websites outside VietNam?

7)
In Japan, an English teacher is seldom called upon to teach more than 6 students at once. I've heard that Vietnamese classes have 20~25 sudents. How do you conduct a class like that-- lecture, pair-practice, vocalizing like a choral rehearsal...?


Is it hard to get recent software (Photoshop, Linux, etc.) and hardware (scanners, monitors, etc.) in Vietnam? How're the prices?

[sethness]

Where I live now (Japan), it's near impossible to get average American size shoes or clothing, except at silly prices in "big and tall" specialty boutiques, or ordered off of Amazon.com.

Is clothing-shopping in VietNam the same, or is it pretty easy to find reasonably priced size-10/size-11 shoes, etc etc?

[moot point]

How do you figure the salaries in Vietnam are simliar to Japan?

[sethness]

Well, in Japan, entry-level foreign teachers at an English school work about 25 classroom hours a week, for which they're usually paid $20~25. Cost of living, though, is extremely high, as are taxes.

In Vietnam, I gather that the hours are similar, the cost of living is much much lower, and the hourly pay is between $14 and $20.

So you're right, the salaries aren't entirely equal, but they're at least better than the $600~800 per month that teachers are paid in Thailand (for example).

The relative cost of living in Japan versus Vietnam means a teacher could conceivably be putting the same amount of $ in the bank at the end of each month. So while the salaries aren't exactly the same, the savings might be similar.

[BedTiger]

Hey, All my answers are based in life in Hanoi. No offense but if you spent an hour reading some of the post on here your answers would be answered.

[kparsons]

1) You might have a better time w/the SCUBA in Saigon -- you'd be closer to some calmer oceans. There is some decent diving around Nha Trang (about 5-6 hours from Saigon) and I've heard the same of Phu Quoc Island in the far SW of the country (a short plane ride from Saigon).

2) Here in Hanoi, one of the teachers I work w/is taking German lessons at the Goethe Institute (part of the German embassy, I believe), so it is around -- I just don't think you're going to run into too many people on the street who speak it.

3) I can't compare it to the languages you mentioned b/c my knowledge of Thai is extremely basic -- I was always thrown off by the written language, which seemed too daunting. Anyhow, I find Vietnamese quite difficult to learn. It's a tonal language, so there may be three words that are more or less spelled the same, but are pronounced slightly differently, and then have different meanings. I do however think that once you get that aspect down, the language would be pretty easy to learn. There are only three tenses, so it seems to me the grammar is pretty easy to handle. Also, the written langauge uses the Roman alphabet, so it's easy to pick up words and recognize things.

4) Throughout Vietnam (in the larger cities, at least), you'll find foods from all over the world -- no worries on that front. In Hanoi there are a number of great Indian restaurants, western food, etc.

5) As mentioned above, there is a bit of debate about this. Most people think the S Vietnamese are much friendlier than the N Vietnamese. I thought the same was true, but now I don't even think about it -- I have so many students who are so smiley, warm, and friendly, that I've forgotten this stereotype exists.

6) I haven't found anything that I have been denied access to. I understand there is something that monitors the traffic, but nothing that I've noticed as an internet user.

7) None of my classes have more than 18 students, and that's pretty rare. I actually like the bigger classes -- I feel you have more bodies, people are more willing to speak, easier to do group activities, etc. I have taught one-on-one and small groups as well, and the strategy is a bit different, but not terribly.

Hope that answsers everything for you!

[Micro67]

[sethness]

Thank you all VERY much for the insights into life in VietNam.

re: SCUBA.
When you say folks complain about the visibility, just how bad is it? In Hawaii, beach-diving only had about 10m horizontal viz, but in Saipan, it was closer to 20~30m. 10m wasn't bad, though-- is VN worse than that?

I'm sorry to hear that SCUBA sites are so far from where the jobs are.
I was hoping to put together a lifestyle where I could drive an hour or less to a dive site, when not working, and drop in the water.
(re: flying after SCUBA: that's actually dangerous, medically, unless one stays rather shallow or there's a hefty gap of time between diving and flying.)

re: cheap software
Yay! What can I say... I'll be like a kid in a candy store. Thanks for the good news.

re: attitude of locals toward foreigners:
Well, I cruised around this forum and read a few threads, but opinions seemed deeply divided. I wasn't/am not clear on whether the differences are attributable to the foreigner's personality, luck-of-the-draw, or geographic region. I wouldn't say it's "like everywhere else" as someone else suggested...because I've found that the differences from country to country can be quite dramatic. In Japan, for example, close friendships are rare, and strangers on the street are quite cool and distant. Philippines, on the other hand, was quite the reverse-- walking around a park on a Saturday afternoon, perfect strangers smile to one another, and it's quite common to be invited to a perfect stranger's picnic. If anyone can compare Vietnam folks to the folks I have experience with...?

re: food
Again, YAY! That's great news, that there's a diversity of food and that restaurants catering to international tastes are growing more common. I like Vietnamese food, but if that had been the only option, it might've grown monotonous. Are the Western-style cuisine restaurants expensive tourist traps, or cheap enough that middle-income local Vietnamese eat there regularly?

re: language:
H'mmm. That's a mixed bag. Tonal variations are difficult to remember, but it's good to hear that the alphabet is a variant of ABCs. In Japanese, the Kanji (Chinese ideographs) take enormous effort to memorize...1800 or so are needed to read a newspaper!
Aside from teh tonal variations, are there difficult consonants? (That was a nice part about Japanese-- all the consonants and vowels are also part of normal English sounds.)


re: big classes:
In Japan, if one's teaching in a public school (elementary, junior high, high school) then yes, classes tend to be quite large, on the order of 15~40 people. It's hard to give people individial attention, in a class that size.

However, the majority of English teachers in Japan are teaching in "eikaiwa" schools, which are private specialty businesses, usually open evenings and weekends, and which have quite small classrooms. In those schools the teacher commonly faces 1~8 students per class.

I personally have taught as many as 40 students at once, but only with assistance.

Are you generally teaching grammar, vocabulary, writing, reading, talking, or listening?

re: Japanese:
*whew*... I'm glad to hear that there're lots of opportunities in Hanoi to speak with Japanese. I've studied it for over a decade... it'd be tragic to start forgetting. Are there many Japanese in Saigon as well?

I'm not surprised that the Japanese were a bit standoffish or shy. Typically, they learn English in high school and get scared to death of all the reading/writing/grammar tests that're thrown at them, but they get precious little chance to practice conversation, so many Japanese can feel quite shy about speaking in English to a foreigner. Like you, I see that look of shy panic all the time in stangers' eyes, before they realize I speak Japanese.

re: monitored Internet:
How much does that affect your Internet habits? Do you know of anyone who's been contacted because of anything political they said on an international website? (I notice that in this forum, people openly grouse about bribery and traffic... I guess then that the gov't monitoring isn't much of a problem?)

It's encouraging to hear that you haven't found any (news, etc.) websites blocked. I'd feel very uncomfortable if the reverse were true.

Do you feel like there's much censorship or onesided reporting in the newspapers, or are they fairly open and objective? (Sorry to keep at that issue-- I have a specific reason for asking. Political cartooning is a hobby of mine... if it's allowed there, so much the better! If I can't post it to favorite sites on the Internet, I think I'll feel a bit shut-down.)