Quote:
Originally Posted by HeatguyAlvin
Honestly, this procedure is pretty tough without a single knowledge of the local language and Google translate doesn't really help because they reply you in local/teen slangs that translators can never give you any help. For example , da rah a, da co, e ranh a ak - all means that they are available and khj nao den alo e nha e lm toi 8h means she only works till 8pm today. I've gotten the help of a native speaker (the hotel bellboy helped translate most of the replies from the ladies)
|
On 2nd thought, why not put this in the main thread? This was going to be my PM to you but then it occurred to me that it would be interesting to hear what others say about this.
-----------
Yes it can be hard getting this slang.
Yesterday when I asked the girl if she could go to another hotel due to the passport problem, she replied with some phrase that google translated as "That's all" followed by "a a" -- one of those is meant to be ANH I know but not sure what the other would be. Anyway it was clear she could not go to any other hotel, only that one.
Looking at yours:
da rah a -- da means past tense? rah short for ranh which means free/available, and a means anh or in other words You. (feel free to correct parts I get wrong, which I surely will)
da co -- basically 'have' which is how VN would say "I am" probably in answer to 'Em co ranh khong? '
e ranh a ak - e is Em, 'ranh' and 'a' we know but WTF is 'ak'?
khj nao den alo e nha e lm toi 8h
OK first of all, I HATE when they replace the letter i with the letter j, it just makes it that much harder to translate. Reminds me of one I met, will tell later. 'alo' is one I often get and do not understand. I guess 'e nha e' means 'I go home' and 'lm' must mean 'lam' or work, but not sure how that fits, but yeah if I read that I would guess she goes home at 8.
My story. Was wandering around actually waiting for one girl I knew to be free, and spotted this very cute girl working at a cafe. I knew I needed to kill about half an hour so I thought, why not. I'll cut the story short but she was VERY seductive, initially cold but it turned out to be like a joke she was playing on me cuz she sensed my interest immediately. Basically she saw me drive past and spot her, and I parked and sat down. She had been sitting but now that I was there she got busy cleaning tables and moving chairs and whatnot, for close to 10 minutes as I sat with my coke. Every time she passed I tried to make subtle eye contact, but she wouldn't even look my way. So I thought, OK, she has no interest. Finally she seemed to finish her work. By now there were 3 other customers sitting in the row of chairs out on the front streetside area where I also was, and so I think, well probably some of these guys are regulars, most likely she knows one of them and will go sit there instead. Bummer. Even though I got there first, now I was back of the line. SHe came out from inside the cafe (no one sits inside) and straight over and sat down next to me. I'll never forget the look she gave me. A smirk on her face and when we looked at each other, she raised one eye brow with that smile on, as if to say Ha ha, I tricked you. ;-) She was a lot of fun to talk with, showed me lots of pictures describing everything, and after more than an hour I thought "Oh shit, forgot about that other girl!" but also realized that I was in fact in the right place.
After we started talking it turned out she was Cambodian. (!!!) I rely so much on Google translate now to talk to these chicks, and this was utterly failing with this girl. She couldn't read Vietnamese. She could speak it but I think roughly. Anyway, met her a couple days there and later in the week started getting SMS from her, all capital letters, and, well, spelling was atrocious. Not abbreviations but just "words" (by that I mean groups of letters put together with spaces between them) that made no sense. I showed it to my quite street-savvy VN friend, and he looked at it and said he had no fucking idea what that meant. Eventually I found out it meant she was leaving HCM the next day. I learned this the next time I went to her cafe and she didn't work there anymore. And a weird thing, when I asked her co-workers about her, giving her name, describing her appearance (tall, curvy, dark skin) and that she was Khmer, none of them had any idea who I meant, even though she worked there as recently as the previous weekend, and for about a month, and just about 6 girls total there. Like she was a ghost. Luckily I discovered she was in Viber and her photo was in there, so I showed them that and suddenly they remembered her.