Sometimes we will never know what we are missing until we travel 300 miles for a pagan holiday like Halloween. 

Back in high school, most likely junior or senior year, there was this one occurrence that I never fully understood or appreciated until now. 

As was usual for those years, a bunch of us were spending our lunch break within the confines of Mr. L's.  It could have been a Speech and Debate Meeting.  Or it could have been a rush to finish homework for the next class period.  either way, a writing utensil was required, and one was borrowed from Mr. L's breast pocket.

To the borrower's surprise, the utensil that looked like a mechanical pencil that he also owned turned out to be a ballpoint pen.  In response to the unexpectation, Mr. L. merely replied with, "Oh, you must be thinking of something something."  However, instead of actually saying, "something something," Mr. L had actually listed the original pencil's make, model, and caliber.  To the other young adults in the room, a person who was able to recall that much detail about an insignificant writing instrument seemed unusual and eccentric.  We said that.  Out loud. 

Mr. L's only response was, "If you love it enough, you will just know everything about it." 

Like always, it is so easy to blame the French for making things more complicated than it has to be.  Usually they do not deserve the blame, but hey, it is so convenient to do so when a scapegoat is needed. 

However, in today's case, the French rightfully do get to share a bit of the blame of the mess they created.  You see, a long time ago, a lot of the East and South Eastern Asian territories had developed a writing system consisting of distinct shapes and scratches not too unlike your stereotypical "Chinese."  With Vietnam, their written language followed this similar pattern.  But soon after the colonization by the French, the Vietnamese written language took a weird turn and went from scratches to an alphabet not too different from the Roman-based alphabet.  Just look above at the side-by-side comparison between ancient (right) and modern-day Vietnamese (left).   And looking at the image below, you will see a set of the current Vietnamese alphabet (it includes capitalization of letters, thus making the list look bigger than it actually is).  Engrish-looking. 
 
So, because of this radical transformation, because of this massive jump from an Asian-based alphabet all the way to a Roman-based system, there's a very good reason why a lot of Vietnamese last names are phonetic nightmares for most people.  Especially my grade school teachers. 

Let's take the most common of common Vietnamese names: "Nguyen."  And by common, just think of it as the the "Smith" or "Jones" of the culture.  Plus if you graduated from a high school with a significant Vietnamese population, you would remember graduation ceremony consisting of sitting through a half an hour of going through all the Nguyen's in your graduating class. 

However, despite the abundance of Nguyen's around, a lot of people have a hard time pronouncing it.  Hell, I even had a hard time pronouncing it as a kid, and I'm Vietnamese!  The more common mispronunciations arise from trying to figuring out what sound an "Ng" makes.  As a result,  when "Nguyen" is said, it comes out as "Nah-goo-yen" or "N-guy-en" or even as "fuck..." 

But seriously, just remember the important lesson we've learned today: blame the French for making things overly sophisticated. In this case, even though there's an "N" in "Nguyen," it's not pronounced.  Same goes for the "G." And "U." And the "Y" too.  Hell, pretty much most of the letters in "Nguyen" are pretty useless.  Just remember to keep it simple and pronounce "Nguyen" as "Win." 

Win with a Nguyen, as they say.