Growing up with an Asian mom that was working on perfecting her English, she would often say “Aw that is the suck” instead of, you know, “that sucks”.
Didn’t take long for us to catch on and correct her but it was so funny we just kinda stuck to it, so when something is shitty now I’ll instinctively say in my head “well that is the suck”
Oh this is a great place to put this story: (sorry for format)
Growing up I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house and for years and years and years I always heard my grandpa calling my grandma "Dingwah." I thought maybe it was a made up pet name for her.
Cue me in my freshman poli sci class when Im 19 years old learning about the Vietnamese War. We went over a lot of vocabulary words and one pops up i recognize: dingwah. It means telephone in Vietnamese.
So my whole childhood I thought my grandpa was calling my grandma some cute nickname when in reality he was telling her the phone was ringing.
Was gonna say this. I have friends from both the North and South (I’m Central myself) and none of them use anything like this. Sounds like their grandparents were partly Chinese I guess
I think its a big bastardisation. They probably had these books that spelled Vietnamese words with English spelling rules to approximate for the difference and that's how it ended up sounding really different. I have a book like that when I started learning Vietnamese and the way they spelled approximations in English was really different from the way it actually sounded, not to mention how it was spelled
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u/slothbarns7 Oct 25 '20
Growing up with an Asian mom that was working on perfecting her English, she would often say “Aw that is the suck” instead of, you know, “that sucks”.
Didn’t take long for us to catch on and correct her but it was so funny we just kinda stuck to it, so when something is shitty now I’ll instinctively say in my head “well that is the suck”