Vietnamese Stories for Language Learners ─ Traditional Folktales in Vietnamese and English Text

Vietnamese Stories for Language Learners—a language learning experience for beginner to intermediate students of the Vietnamese language.

Nothing introduces students and cultural enthusiasts to a language and people better than stories. Intended for Vietnamese language students or heritage leaners, the stories in this volume present the everyday vocabulary and grammar in use in Vietnam today. Forty folk stories have been edited and simplified for learning purposes, and are presented in parallel Vietnamese and English versions to facilitate language learning.

These Vietnamese folk stories animate the culture in an immediate way, offering readers a glimpse of the social, cultural and religious aspects of Vietnamese society in bygone eras. The English translations allow readers who are not yet studying the language to experience the wisdom and humor in these traditional, well-loved stories. An audio CD in Vietnamese helps students improve their pronunciation and inflection, and introduces readers to the uniquely Vietnamese story of storytelling. Discussion questions, vocabulary and cultural notes are provided at the end of each story.

Tri C. Tran has published in the areas of foreign language textbooks (Spanish and Vietnamese) and linguistics (bilingual linguistic dictionary and Spanish syntax research) for the past ten years. He earned a doctorate in Romance Linguistics and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently teaching Vietnamese (language, culture and literature) and general linguistics courses at the University of California, Irvine, as well as Spanish classes at Fullerton College in Southern California.

Tram Le was two years old when her family fled Vietnam on the day Saigon fell in 1975. Growing up in Southern California, she learned Vietnamese through organizing artistic and cultural productions for over two decades within the Vietnamese American community in Orange County, home of the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. She refined her Vietnamese language skills by co-founding Club O' Noodles, a pioneering Vietnamese American theatre troupe; curating multi-art and history exhibitions; co-founding the Vietnamese International Film Festival (Viet Film Fest), which showcases films from around the world; and co-authoring a photo-history book, Vietnamese in Orange County. She received her B.S. in Business Administration from California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and an M.A. from the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She currently serves as the Associate Director for Viet Stories: Vietnamese American Oral History Project at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).