One Alphabet Looks Like Elvish, the Other Has Six Tones That Will Personally Humiliate You

🇬🇪 Georgia vs 🇻🇳 Vietnam By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Fourteen relocations in, I have made peace with the fact that I will never sound less than faintly ridiculous in most of the countries I've lived in, but Georgia and Vietnam are the two places that most efficiently demolished my ego on arrival. Georgia hands you an alphabet so visually unrelated to anything you've encountered that you cannot even guess-read a sign, let alone pronounce it. Vietnam hands you a Latin script that looks reassuringly familiar right up until you open your mouth and discover that saying the same syllable with a different pitch changes the entire meaning of your sentence, usually from something polite to something regrettable.

Both countries are, to their enormous credit, kinder about this than you'd expect. Neither will make you feel small for trying. Both will, however, let you fail spectacularly first.

Do's & Don'ts: Georgia

Do's & Don'ts: Vietnam

Georgia: A Country Where the Alphabet Alone Disqualifies Guesswork

Georgian is not related to Russian, not related to the Latin alphabet, and not related, as far as most linguists can establish, to almost anything else currently spoken on Earth. This is either wildly romantic or a genuine logistical nightmare depending on your mood that day, and most days it's both. You cannot sound out a sign the way you might muddle through Cyrillic or a Romance language you've never studied — Georgian script simply doesn't give you that crutch, so you're either reading it properly or you're not reading it at all.

The practical reality softens somewhat in the cities. Tbilisi, Kutaisi, and Batumi have enough tourism and enough younger residents who've grown up with English as a genuine second language that daily survival is manageable — ordering food, getting a taxi, navigating a hotel all work fine. The generational split is stark and well documented: a large share of Georgians aged eighteen to twenty-four can hold a conversation in English, while that number drops to nearly nothing among Georgians over fifty-five. This isn't a minor statistical footnote — it means your experience of the language barrier depends entirely on who happens to be behind the counter.

Where it gets genuinely difficult is bureaucracy — opening utilities, signing an internet contract, dealing with a landlord who isn't part of the young, internationally-minded demographic. Banking, reassuringly, tends to be the exception: major banks like Bank of Georgia have invested specifically in English-speaking staff, because they've clearly decided the expat and international business market is worth the effort. Step outside Tbilisi into smaller towns or the mountain regions, and English stops being a manageable inconvenience and becomes, quite genuinely, a surprise when you find it at all.

Vietnam: A Country Where the Script Lies to You About How Hard This Is Going to Be

Vietnam's language barrier is a particularly sadistic bait-and-switch, because Vietnamese is written in a Latin-based script, which means it looks, on a menu or a street sign, entirely legible. You can read every letter. You have no idea what you're reading, because Vietnamese carries six tones, and the same string of letters said with a rising pitch instead of a falling one is, functionally, a completely different word. I have, with total confidence, asked for something I believed to be a polite request and received a look suggesting I'd said something considerably ruder.

The country ranks in the low-proficiency band for English overall, and that ranking is not evenly distributed. Airports, train stations, and central tourist districts in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City manage bilingual signage and enough staff English to get by comfortably. Step outside those zones — a genuine, non-touristy street food stall, a local market, a bus terminal in a smaller city — and English simply isn't there, full stop, and you are back to pointing at things and hoping.

What surprised me most, and what surprises most long-stay expats according to nearly every account I've read, is how socially significant the divide becomes over time. It's not just a transactional inconvenience solved by charades and translation apps, though both work fine for daily survival; it genuinely limits how deep a friendship or community tie can go without real Vietnamese effort. Expats who live in the bubble of an international neighbourhood in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City can go remarkably far without learning much of the language, but they'll also, almost universally, describe a persistent, low-grade separation from local life that never quite closes without it.

The Verdict

Georgia is honest about its difficulty from the first glance — an unfamiliar alphabet tells you immediately where you stand, and you adjust your expectations accordingly. Vietnam lulls you into false confidence with a script you can technically read, then quietly humiliates you the moment you open your mouth. That's the crueler trick, and I have more respect for cruelty delivered upfront.

Verdict: Georgia, for sheer transparency. At least a foreign alphabet doesn't pretend to be your friend before betraying you.

What Nobody Warned You About

Quora — "How hard is it to get by in Tbilisi without speaking Georgian?" — paraphrased: several long-term residents note that daily errands are manageable in the capital, but anything involving a government office or an older landlord requires either a translator app or a very patient friend.

expat.com Tbilisi forum — paraphrased: a recurring thread notes that bank staff are consistently the most reliable English speakers in the country, more so than utility companies or municipal offices, which surprises most newcomers.

expat.com Ho Chi Minh City forum — paraphrased: posters describe pointing at other diners' plates as the single most effective ordering strategy at local eateries, more reliable than attempting the tones themselves as a beginner.

Conclusion

Georgia and Vietnam both make you earn every ounce of comprehension, just via different routes — one through an alphabet that refuses to meet you halfway, the other through a script that pretends to and then doesn't. Learn some basics before you go to either, not because you'll master them, but because the attempt itself is what gets you the goodwill, the extra patience, the better table. Fluency isn't the bar. Trying visibly is. Both countries will notice the difference immediately, even if you never quite land the right tone.