Vietnamese Stories for Language Learners - by Tri C Tran & Tram Le (Paperback)

About the Book

Intended for Vietnamese language students or heritage learners, the stories in this volume present 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.

Book Synopsis

A great story can lead a reader on a cultural and linguistic journey--especially if it's in two languages!

Vietnamese Stories for Language Learners introduces 40 traditional Vietnamese folktales with bilingual Vietnamese and English versions presented on facing pages. Each story is followed by cultural notes, vocabulary lists, and a set of discussion questions and exercises for further comprehension.

Online audio recordings by native speakers help readers improve their pronunciation and inflection, while a Vietnamese-English glossary provides an easy way to reference unfamiliar terms. Illustrations by award-winning Vietnamese illustrators Nguyen Thi Hop and Nguyen Dong help to bring these traditional tales to life.

This book is a great supplementary reader for self-study learners or in Vietnamese language courses, but will be enjoyed by anyone who wishes to learn about Vietnamese folktales and culture.

Learn Vietnamese the fun way--through the country's rich literary history!

Audio recordings can be accessed at the Tuttle Publishing website

About the Author

Tri C. Tran, PhD. is a lecturer of Vietnamese in the Humanities Language Learning Program at the University of California, Irvine. He has a Ph.D, an M.A. (Romance Linguistics and Literatures), and a B.A. (Spanish Linguistics) from University of California, LA (UCLA). He also teaches Spanish and French language and linguistics, Romance linguistics, English as a Second Language, and English Academic Writing. His publications include Vietnamese language texts and a bilingual dictionary for students of linguistics.

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).

Nguyen Thi Hop and Nguyen Dong began their careers as young professional artists in the South Vietnam of the 1960s, exhibiting in Paris, Taiwan, and in cities in Germany and the US, as well as in Saigon. They have illustrated many award-winning books, including Vietnamese Children's Favorite Stories and My First Book of Vietnamese Words. In the US, they have frequently illustrated the work of renowned Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh.