About Us
My name is Nikita Dinh (Đinh Thị Như Nguyện). We are Vietnamese immigrants, finding hope, home, and a new homeland in America. As we grew up in Vietnam and can read Vietnamese, we hope to put together this course for those who are interested in reading the language. While writing the course, we adopted the pen name Kỳ Tứ, which is much simplier to read than Như Nguyện, to be used within the course when necessary. We are based in Colorado, USA.
If you are seeking to know more about Vietnam, we hope you will find the beauty beyond a bitter war-torn country - a language with the sounds of music, food with flavors of fresh rain, hospitality that melts hearts, eyes that capture souls, and the people with humility, courage, perseverance, compassion, passion, and love beyond imagination.
About I Can Read Vietnamese Course
In college, we volunteered to teach Vietnamese to school children (mostly Vietnamese Americans), and we recognized an unmet need. The teaching materials presented new concepts with very little practice exercises, making it a challenge to learn new lessons without forgetting the old ones. To supplement those existing books, we made up additional reading exercises on the go. Those loose leaf materials are the infancy of this course.
Soon we realized that the struggle to read Vietnamese was not limited to young children, adults and college students faced the same challenge when trying to read Vietnamese. For adults, there are many courses to teach the basic Vietnamese language, but few focused only on reading and the writing system. Thus, in 2001, we gathered the old loose leaf materials and started to compile them into a book, to be used within the family. In 2013, per a four-year-old's request, we used our very limited musical knowledge to write the Vietnamese Alphabet song and the Vietnamese Tones song. In 2014, realizing that the need was still unmet (at least unmet over the internet), we decided to bring the course online.
I Can Read Vietnamese is an online course designed for adults to self-study, even though a tutor is strongly recommended. As this course is not to teach the basic Vietnamese, it would best benefit those who are already familiar with the spoken language and only seek to learn to read. This "illiterate" population are often intellectual young adults with inquisitive minds, very different from the simple peasants or the preschool children. Perhaps because this population is so small, it is hard to find a course designed just for them. We hope to fill this gap.
While building this course, we received feedbacks that many of the younger viewers prefer watching videos to reading lessons. Thus, we revised our scope slightly and try to make YouTube videos in addition to the written materials. We are still learning the trade (making videos, building websites) while working full time in a completely different field, thus we are quite slow in building this course online. We appreciate your patience and welcome any feedback you have for us.
Copyright
Even though we offer this online course to the public, we reserve the full copyright of this course materials. Please do not copy, alter, or distribute them beyond your personal use!
Contact
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Link to: YouTube channel