Words for cooking, making?

[english-learner]

Hi, I am kind of new to the community. All very interesting as I saw first hand VN food preparation outside my hotel at many small eating places all about.
Nhất tự vi sư , bán tự vi sư : This I like. i tried the Vdict google and EvTran translator on this phrase and got a very different result -something about Buddist monks and a professor which shows the shortcomings of the machine translation! No doubt it will improve with time.
I am slowly learning some Vietnamese with goal for communication with friends now and ̣for my another trip to VN.
Chào Birgit,
I worked out your thank you "Cam on rat nhieu" for the reply as Cám ơn rất nhiều. I finally figured out the microsoft on-screen VN keyboard doing this. Think i would like to buy a dedicated VN keyboard. Without using the correct special VN characters and accent marks can native readers/speakers figure out the meaning? Does written vietnamese use exclamation point?
Rod

There is no dedicate VN keyboard. Vietnamese people use a software to transfer the symbols, characters,... into accent marks/symbols. Ex: to make the accent symbol ~, the key x is typed double. (type in telex way)
Vietnamese people, in many cases, can understand the without-accent- symbol Vietnamese. However, in some cases, the meanings is distorted and this leads to misunderstand.
THe exclamation point, of course, is used in the Vietnamese written language.

Nhất tự vi sư, bán tự vi sư is a Chinese-Vietnamese proverb
Nhất tự vi sư, bán tự vi sư is a expression/saying/proverb coming from the Confucius theorem , a Chinese great thinker, in the very old days.
It means who teaches you only a word even a half of word is still your teacher. But this is the words by words meaning/sense
The saying implies that the teachers/masters deserve to respect by everyone. They even is respected more than the king/emperor and parents. It is Confucius theorem/Confucianism.