Vietnamese students practice English with tourists at Hanoi’s lake

Live conversations address limits in classroom English preparation

On a recent Saturday, Hieu left the suburban two-bedroom apartment his family owns in Hanoi and made a 45-minute moped ride with his parents to Hoan Kiem Lake. He soon approached Kendall Stempel and Chloe Starr, American friends who met at Wake Forest University. The women were braced for a sales pitch. The 6-year-old wanted their vocabulary instead, approaching them through the increasingly popular Vietnamese practice of seeking foreigners for English conversation. Stempel, a 34-year-old healthcare marketer from Nashville, found that Hieu accepted compliments briefly and moved quickly to the next topic.

His mother, Hoang Ngoc Anh, said she looked for visitors with blond hair who looked a bit Western. “We try to look for people who have blond hair, who look a bit Western. White people,” she said.

San tay was already common at Hoan Kiem Lake when Hieu’s mother was in college, but she never took part because she did not know any English. Now 34, she said she did not want her three sons to miss the world beyond Vietnam, so she bought workbooks, made flashcards and played English lessons at home. One day in spring, her oldest son suddenly began speaking mostly in English. Once he had surpassed her, she began taking Hieu to the lake every Saturday. The campaign forced her to learn a few phrases. Her first words to a tourist were: “Excuse me, my son is learning English. Would you mind talking with him a little bit?”

The family lives in the two-bedroom apartment, which their parents own. The parents earn about $10,000 a year, largely from the father’s bank job. The mother left an architecture career for freelance balloon artistry, and Hieu shares a Murphy bed with his brothers amid jars of balloons used for her work.

Hieu, who says you can call him “Theo,” became near-fluent in English in just a few months. His mother posts videos of his conversations online, where commenters praise his proficiency. Her own English is much more limited, and she said, “I don’t really know how good he is.”

After speaking with the Wake Forest friends, Hieu approached a couple from Australia. He told them Australia’s drop bears were like koalas but dropped from trees to attack people, then conceded that the animal was a myth. He also approached some Italian visitors and Martin, a German. Hieu told Martin that Germany had about 1,500 kinds of sausages; Martin said he had not known. His parents rewarded him with ice cream afterward.

At home, Hieu said he likes English because it allows him to chat with foreigners and watch a wider variety of videos. He has no current plans to use the language professionally. When he grows up, he wants to be a policeman. “I want to catch thieves,” he said.

Around the lake beside Hanoi’s Old Quarter, teachers organize groups of children on weekends and send them out with clipboards and prepared questions. The children ask where visitors are from, what food they prefer and what music they like. Teenagers and young adults strive for longer conversations. Students say Vietnam’s booming tourism and export industries, along with a deep curiosity about the outside world, have driven them to practice.

Le Van Tai, a 40-year-old English teacher, placed the activity in the context of Vietnam’s recent opening to the world. After the Vietnam War, the communist country remained under a trade embargo until the Clinton administration. “Vietnam has been open to the world for just about 30 years,” he said. “The situation in school is not really good at preparing students with their English.”

English practice through tourists has long been part of tourism across Asia. Before founding Alibaba, Jack Ma gave tours of his hometown lake in exchange for conversation. In Vietnam, the practice is particularly institutionalized, especially around the lake beside the Old Quarter.

Dan Truong’s experience shows the value students place on speaking directly with foreign visitors. In the 1990s, he approached tourists in the riverside city of Hue to test whether his school lessons and Voice of America broadcasts translated to the real world. “We can learn grammar. We can write. But when we spoke, we had to think it in Vietnamese and translate it into English,” he said.

One 10-minute conversation with a visiting University of Oregon professor eventually landed Truong a scholarship to the university. He earned a master’s degree and met his wife there. Now 56, he lives in North Carolina and runs a hat-manufacturing business.

Across these accounts, the lake provides students with regular, unscripted English practice while teachers and families organize the encounters around a gap in spoken-language preparation. Students also point to tourism, export industries and curiosity about life outside Vietnam as reasons to take part. The result is a weekend routine that turns a tourism district into an informal English classroom.