Four Reasons to Learn Vietnamese!
1The Vietnamese language is spoken by over 85 million people in Vietnam and three million people around the world, including more than 1.5 million people in the US. In Hawaii, Vietnamese are among the state’s fastest-growing ethnicities. There are more than 7,000 Vietnamese living in Honolulu alone.
Literature & Culture
2Vietnam has a rich history and culture. Vietnamese classical literature has a history of more than a thousand years. Modern Vietnamese literature reflects centuries of Chinese occupation, eighty years of French rule, and America’s presence during the conflict between North and South Vietnam. The UH Vietnamese Language Program Literature has a strong component of literature and film.
3Quốc ngữ, the romanized Vietnamese alphabet was developed in the 17th century replacing the Chinese characters that hitherto were used for Vietnamese writing. With the same script that is used for writing English, Vietnamese is much easier to learn than Chinese, Thai, or Japanese.
Country of the Future
4After 1986 Vietnam became one of the fastest-growing economies in the world with an average gross domestic product (GDP) growth of around 7% per year.