Shadowing Practice: Debunking Stereotypes about Vietnam - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I'm a Vietnamese living abroad
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and throughout the years I have met many people who have never been to my country
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and wanting to know more about it.
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While talking to them, I realized that my country had quite many myths that were entirely not true at all.
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That's why I wanted to make this video to help debunk some of those myths
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and give you guys like a realistic view of how Vietnam looked like in a modern time.
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Disclaimer, all of this is just my opinion.
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It's just my own experience about my country you might have different opinion
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and experience and you're welcome to discuss about that too so please don't be mad with me let's go
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many people only know vietnam because of the world
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so there is a belief somewhere that my country is a dangerous place
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because it was affected by the world still
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which is not true first of all it's a peaceful country nowadays just a normal country
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and you barely see any military activities in the daily life anyway.
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The war ended 50 years ago and obviously there are still some effect of it in the country till this day.
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My village for example, almost everybody knows someone who has fought in the war.
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Some of them lost their life or part of their body.
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There are monuments everywhere across the country and from time to time we found bombs buried deep in the ground.
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During the war the country was devastated but I have to say that Vietnam bounced incredibly fast back.
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In half a century, they have managed to rebuild the country, have a fairly fast developing economy,
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have a peaceful and safe life for people who live there and also people who want to visit.
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And in general, Vietnamese, we don't like to like linger about the past.
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Like normally we don't talk about the war in our daily life.
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We move on and we look forward for the future.
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So if you want to visit our country, it's safe for you.
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Don't worry.
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The next myth I have heard still about the war is that Vietnamese hate America due to their involvement during the war.
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No, we actually don't have beef with American anymore.
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Most of us, like maybe some, but in general, no, we actually like Americans.
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We like their culture.
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We love Hollywood movie.
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We love their music.
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We care about their celebrity.
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When I was in school and learned about history, we were not getting taught to like hate American or something.
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America along with other European country, western country, are considered in Vietnam a developed, cool, wealthy place.
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Many parents wish to send their kids to America to study, so don't worry, you are welcome to Vietnam.
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Vietnam is like fairly friendly to foreigners anyway.
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Vietnam is a place only for cheap travel and budget tourism.
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Listen, there is truth on it why do you think a bunch of backpackers come to Vietnam every year?
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It's not just cheap and then you have like mediocre food and mediocre experience.
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The food is one of the best food you could find in the world.
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I am biased.
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I don't care.
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It is awesome.
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The nature is kind of getting destroyed a little bit over the year but in general it's still beautiful.
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So please go and have a look at it.
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But if you want to do fancy trip and stuff like that Vietnam is a perfect place as well.
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We have so many villas, fancy resorts and things like that near the beach.
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I just love Vietnam for traveling.
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Honestly, even when I live in Germany, all of the money I have, I just want to use it to go back to Vietnam and travel.
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All Vietnamese drive motorbikes.
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First of all, if you are a foreigner coming to Vietnam for traveling and you thought, you know what, the whole country, they drive motorbike anyway.
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I want to jump on a motorbike and enjoy the traffic.
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Do not ever do that.
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But I cannot tell you the amount of foreigners I have seen getting into accidents because of driving a motorbike.
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Do you know how dangerous it is to drive over there?
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Whenever I heard of a foreigner saying that they plan to go to Vietnam, rent a motorbike and drive in the mountain over there,
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I could just think good luck to you.
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It's not something I would do even though I'm Vietnamese.
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Coming back to the stereotype, it is true that motorbike is the most common transport in Vietnam our public transport system is not
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that advanced yet
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so to go from point A to point B normally the fastest way is go by motorbike almost everybody
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I know in Vietnam drive motorbikes even though they have a car
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because the car will take forever to drive over there but again
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if you're a foreigner watching
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it do not get a motorbike in Vietnam just go by taxi
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we have super easy way to catch taxi in Vietnam okay
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just go to Vietnam go by taxi go by the bus you're going to be fine
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Vietnam is a very hot country I must say there are truth into it
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if you go to Vietnam during the summer time no matter where you go in the country
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it is burningly hot it is unbearable if you like flexible
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when it comes to like holiday time just avoid summer
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when you go to vietnam not only is hot
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it's crazily humid too you always get sticky you feel hot
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you feel uncomfortable however from the middle to the north of vietnam we have four seasons per year
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and the weather could change drastically in each season the winter for example
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It's pretty cold, sometimes it goes down to less than 10 degrees and it's just very pleasant in my opinion.
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So do your research when you go to Vietnam and you might be surprised about our weather actually.
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Next one is the economy of Vietnam heavily relies on agriculture because most of us are farmers.
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Which is a very interesting take for me
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because I have witnessed the rapid change of my country like in just the last 10 years
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and it was insane for me
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when i was five like eight ten years old everybody in my village were farmer like there's no other job
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if you want to find like a job to work in a factory you have to drive to the south
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which take like a day and then work there
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and just during the last 10 years there are several factories getting built around my area
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and now nobody is a farmer anymore in the village like literally everybody abandoned their farm
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and they just go and work in the factory nearby the fact
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that their factory there actually helps my village economy a lot
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there are nicer houses getting built kids having like a fancier bias to go to school
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and they could afford things that they couldn't have before
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when they are just a farmer to having like a stable job like this is actually better for the village
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and i'm glad for
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that vietnam is a poor rural country let's say compared to a western country yep
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we are poorer even compared to other southeast asian country we are not like among the top economically as well
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and yeah they are part of vietnam that are still very underdeveloped
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and people are having very very hard life over there the
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thing is everything is changing with a crazily fast pace in vietnam
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you have building rising up every single month there's a lot of chance to open a business
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and do things in vietnam
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because of like the blooming economy in the city the quality
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of life have been improving very very significantly during the years
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like the kids nowadays live a way better life than me just 10 years ago
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i don't think germany have such drastic change
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when it comes to economy 10 years ago and now
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so i'm excited to see what happened in the next 10 years for my country Vietnamese eat pho all the time.
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No. If you don't know what is pho, it's basically noodle with a very aromatic soup and a bit of a beef or chicken up there.
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I honestly don't know why pho is so popular in the world.
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Somehow when I travel around the world, when I see a Vietnamese restaurant, it's all about pho, pho,
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pho, pho, pho, and everybody is talking about it.
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We have so many other food like bún bò hê.
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I will just put a picture there for you.
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Bún riêu cua and other things like that.
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Pho is not something we eat as a daily meal.
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We only go out to eat it in a restaurant because it took around 12 to 40 hours to cook the broth.
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Nobody have time for it.
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My opinion, do not cancel me.
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I love pho but I cannot eat it like two times in a row.
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Really, I eat pho like once per year.
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Vietnamese cuisine is spicy.
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Okay, I feel like on my channel, I make you guys believe that when I was in Vietnam,
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I was a spice eating warrior or something because my country food is very spicy.
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But it's actually not that true.
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I am so sorry because compared to like
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Western food, our food is definitely more spicy.
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That's what I meant.
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But like compared to many Asian food culture, our food is not that spicy at all.
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We don't use chili for cooking that often.
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We would put chili on our dipping sauce and everything like that.
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But in general, compared to like
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Thai food for example, every single
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Thai food I eat has a big chunk of chili in there.
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They put chili in anywhere.
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Chinese food is even worse.
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I saw it how they cook it.
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It was just insanely amount of chili powder.
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But Vietnamese food is not based in the chili and the spiciness of We eat based on other flavors,
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which I like because when you put chili in everything, you just only taste the spice.
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If you cannot eat spice, you're going to be fine in Vietnam.
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You will not be fine in Thailand because even though you tell them, it's impossible to make unspicy food in Thailand.
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The next one is Vietnamese women are often more submissive.
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which I often heard from those guys who live in developed countries
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but cannot find a partner
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so they plan to go to Southeast Asia to search for someone who is more like submissive and things like that.
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That is not how you describe Vietnamese women at all.
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I cannot speak for the whole population, I'm just gonna say it from my observation.
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Most of the women I know in Vietnam are very strong and actually very opinionated.
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They are very career driven, independent, and they don't take any bullshit from the partner.
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Sometimes it gets a bit crazy, I must say, not in a toxic way, but they could get very scary.
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There are still Vietnamese women who were raised by traditional values to be a traditional wife and submissive to their husband sadly,
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but I must say it is not a popular thing anymore.
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And if you go to Vietnam and meet a random woman over there, chances are high that she is strong and if you mess with her,
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you're going to see how crazy she is.
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So you have been one.
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Vietnamese often wear aozai in a daily life.
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It's basically our traditional clothes and yeah we do wear it in our daily life as well.
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It's not like we wear it every day
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but it's not like in Germany where they only wear the dindal like once per year during October fest.
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We have a new form of aozai nowadays
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which is the mixture between the traditional type
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and just like a modern dress so that we can wear it every day
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and it looks super cute and when you wear it it doesn't look like too much for daily life at all.
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You can find modern outside nowadays in many clothing shops which is not a thing when I was younger in Vietnam.
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I really love our traditional clothes and I like how people embrace it and just wear it like in everyday life.
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I have like fall modern outside at home and I wear it whenever I feel like it as well.
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It's very very cute.
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Most Vietnamese people are Buddhist.
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When you visit Vietnam you would notice that there are quite many pagodas
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so that Buddhists can practice their religion and many people would go there every month and pray and things like that.
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The thing is many people I know in Vietnam did that but I don't think they call themselves
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Buddhist at all.
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They just go there to have like this spiritual connection they're not very devoted on it
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and they don't call themselves buddhist over there i think in general
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i think my country is not very religious we have this practice where we worship our ancestor
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but i'm not sure if it's like a whole religion thing i'm not an expert on
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that we still go to the pagoda to like pray
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and things like
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that still christian is even rarer in vietnam
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i think during my four years of university
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i met only one christian vietnamese people are generally superstitious hmm yeah
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we are more superstitious than uh germany for sure many of the important activities
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we do during our lifetime um have superstitious activities like we have to choose the right date
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we have to choose the right partner with the right birthday date
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and things like
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that although i'm not a very superstitious person
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i still experience all of the superstitious activity in the family at least like once per year.
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Many of us often go to the fortune teller to let them tell us about our future
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and many of us believe in destiny.
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Even like successful businessmen, well -educated women, many of them have like strong belief in superstition as well.
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So I think the relationship between the younger people in Vietnam
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and superstition is that we don't really believe it actually
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but we also don't want to mess with our destiny
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so um when it comes to like uh things
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that normally vietnamese would use a petition like you know choosing the dead
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and things like
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that we would like go to the fortune teller as well
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it's like seemingly mesh into our life somehow
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it definitely could be a bad thing many people i know has paid thousands of dollars for a shaman
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so that their bad luck goes away i just don't want to take the best side of it
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but i also don't want to like dismiss it a hundred percent
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because it's impossible to like separate it in Vietnamese cultural Vietnamese are short
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and thin I mean when it comes to like the height
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if you take the medium height of Vietnamese
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and compare it to the medium height of German for example yeah we are shorter
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that is a fact I don't need to argue about that
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Obviously in Vietnam, they are taller, shorter people.
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I'm 163cm height and I was considered a tall girl in Vietnam.
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And in Germany, I always had to look up like this to talk to the girls over here.
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About Vietnamese being thin, it is true though.
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It is true.
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I barely see a curvy body type in Vietnam.
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I think because of the diet, we eat very healthy.
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We don't eat butter or milk or bread we eat a lot of vegetable
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and salad and we don't deep fry things often.
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Of course there are different body types in Vietnam and stuff like that.
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But it is true that it is commonly known that Vietnamese tend to be quite thin.
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Vietnamese people have similar facial features.
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I mean, if you're from a diverse country like America for example, where you have different races living and they are all American,
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you could say that about my country I guess because I think 99 .99 % of Vietnamese are Vietnamese,
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you know, the race.
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So that is why I guess we all have like some similar feature.
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And I have to say since I moved out of the country and start traveling abroad,
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I can identify Vietnamese even though they haven't even speak Vietnamese yet.
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The accuracy rate is really, really high.
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I don't know, is it my talent or maybe anybody can do
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that but i feel like vietnamese do have some significant feature
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that is make us like different compared to the rest of asia i don't know i could feel
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that and i could see that from like strangers and i could like identify them
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vietnamese people don't speak english i mean yeah if you see my mom
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or my father or like the older generation normally they don't speak english but
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if you see the younger generation nowadays
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they all can speak english in vietnam uh every single parent want to send their kids to an english center
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when they were like two three years old
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that's the common practice in a big city even like a small area now they also have like english center
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and it's a blooming economy everybody wants to learn English there
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and like when you apply for a job nowadays they all require like English certificate
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and English skill and many of them can do that so
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if you talk to a younger people in Vietnam chances are high
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that they can speak English and I'm
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so glad to see the graduate change to see everybody to be able to use English more
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and can like do more international thing
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it's a very positive change Vietnamese people are always late okay I cannot even be mad this
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because normally i am not the most punctual person ever since i live in germany
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i have changed a lot let me see
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if any of the vietnamese i know is punctual normally my sister is even worse than me
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when it comes to like being on time my parents are
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not the most punctual ever my friends are always late with
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every single event punctuality is not like a thing in my social uh circle sadly
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i know maybe other vietnamese is different okay i'm just saying we are pretty chill
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when it comes to time um we do things
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and then we go to the date and normally we late
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and it doesn't matter normally
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when the party would start with like two three people showing up first
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then they would start doing things cleaning talking and then more
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and more and more people will join later when they have time.
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And it's not like a big deal at all.
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So yeah, I cannot speak anything against that.
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Vietnamese people are always working hard with no time for fun.
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Vietnamese are the hardest working people I have ever met.
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Like hands down.
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They're very family oriented, career oriented.
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Once they get hired to a company, they devote their life for the company.
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It doesn't matter.
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They work overtime, they listen to their boss, they like trying to make money for their company.
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In the recent years whenever i go back to vietnam i have noticed
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that um my friends are all working in like a very stressful
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and time consuming job many of them don't even have time to like doing makeup
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or like take care of themselves anymore
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but the thing is although they work hard
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and they spend as i said crazily amount of time for
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work over there they somehow managed to have time to have fun
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and then meet people as well vietnamese love to socializing
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and i don't know how they manage that but they socialize
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so much like even when they work crazily
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when they go home they would like have meeting with friends
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and other family and then eating together go travel and things like
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that my sister for example she worked days and night
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and then she made friends day and night somehow still managed to do
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that like of course it takes a toll on your physical
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and mental health somehow because like you have to do a lot of things
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but like socializing is something vietnamese don't compromise it doesn't matter how hard they work, they would find time for family and friends, which I respect.
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So I think we debunked enough of the myth and stereotype in this video.
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I hope you guys learned something and find interesting as well.
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Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
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Bye bye!
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Debunking Stereotypes about Vietnam”. This video has 285 sentences and 3493 words to shadow. The speech runs for 19:39. The speaker talks at a natural 178 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| chili noun | /ˈt͡ʃɪli/ | The pungent, spicy fresh or dried fruit of any of several cultivated varieties of capsicum peppers, used in cooking. |
| nowadays adverb | /ˈnaʊ.ə.deɪz/ | At the present time; in the current era. |
| farmer noun | /ˈfɑɹ.mɚ/ | A person who works the land and/or who keeps livestock; anyone engaged in agriculture on a farm. |
| myth noun | /mɪθ/ | A traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, and in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are… |
| spicy adjective | /ˈspaɪsi/ | Of, pertaining to, or containing spice. |
| thin adjective | /ˈθɪn/ | Having little thickness or extent from one surface to its opposite. |
| fancy noun | /ˈfæn.si/ | The imagination. |
| taxi noun | /ˈtæksi/ | A vehicle that may be hired for single journeys by members of the public, particularly one with an automated meter to calculate the fare. |
| spouse noun | /spaʊ̯s/ | A person in a marriage or marital relationship. |
| belief noun | /bɪˈliːf/ | Mental acceptance of a claim as true. |
| pray verb | /pɹeɪ/ | To direct words, thoughts, or one's attention to a deity or any higher being, for the sake of adoration, thanks, petition for help, etc. |
| abroad adverb | /əˈbɹɔːd/ | Beyond the bounds of a country; in foreign countries. |
| fortune noun | /ˈfɔːtjuːn/ | Destiny, especially favorable. |
| beef noun | /bif/ | The meat from cattle or other bovines; especially, that from adults. |
| destiny noun | /ˈdɛs.tɪ.ni/ | That to which any person or thing is destined; a predetermined state; a condition predestined by the Divine or by human will. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| go away verb | To depart or leave a place. | |
| hands down adverb | without much effort; easily | |
| look up verb | /ˌlʊk ˈʌp/ | To have better prospects. |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. | |
| work over verb | To improve a prototype, or first draft. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have met · has fought · have managed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who have · someone who has · people who live |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was affected · are considered · is not based |
| Superlatives the -est / the most … — the top or bottom of a group | the best · the most common · the fastest |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 55 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: myth /mɪθ/, thin /ˈθɪn/, southeast /sawˈθɪjst/, clothing /ˈkloʊðɪŋ/, wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: petition /pəˈtɪʃ.ən/, worship /ˈwɝ.ʃɪp/, observation /ˌɑbzɚˈveɪʃn̩/, facial /ˈfeɪ.ʃəl/, mesh /mɛʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: mediocre /ˌmidiˈoʊkəɹ/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/, agriculture /ˈæɡ.ɹɪˌkʌl.t͡ʃɚ/, celebrity /səˈlɛb.ɹɪ.ɾi/, certificate /səˈtɪf.ɪ.kɪt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like chili, nowadays, farmer.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.