My Vietnamese Learning Journey 1

Here is my milestone report after learning Vietnamese for six months

A street corner in Hanoi, August 2022

I started learning Vietnamese in the past six months or so. The motivation was for business. I was assigned to start a business in Hanoi for my company so I had to meet and make connections with Vietnamese. For business purposes, I did not have to learn Vietnamese (and I found that many long-time foreign residents chose not to learn the language at all) but I felt quite restricted and limited without a basic understanding of Vietnamese. So I made some efforts to learn the language and here is my six-month progress report.

My Learner Profile

• Polyglot: As I wrote in my other article (The Confession of a Polyglot), I speak English, Chinese (Mandarin), and Korean fluently.
• Motivation: I started seriously learning Vietnamese in July 2022 when I made my first trip to Hanoi. During the four days of the business trip, I found that Vietnamese people do not speak English or Chinese at all. Without speaking basic Vietnamese, my life in Vietnam was quite difficult. That was my motivation. Just learned some basic Vietnamese so that I could get by daily life more easily: e.g., buying stuff, asking for directions, saying thank you and hi, etc.
• Duration: After the first short trip to Vietnam, I made 4 more visits, each…