Finished with 1st grade Vietnamese!

We finally finished the 1st grade Vietnamese curriculum. Between starting it late, and not doing much school while my mom was sick, it's been slow going. I also slowed it down because it seemed like dd was not really retaining it so much. I changed the pace from one lesson a day to one lesson taking about 3 days. The first day we would read the passage. The second and third days we would reread the passage and do the workbook. There was usually enough in the workbook to split up. She was able to read much more fluently after multiple exposures to the same passage. She is still very sloppy about looking at the diacritics, and I constantly have to remind her which one it is. I was thinking of starting the 2nd grade right away, but since we didn't do the read aloud book yet, I think we're going to work through that over the summer and start 2nd grade Vietnamese in the fall after a short break.

Dictionaries - Not enough words!

I have had this particular dictionary for at least 15 years, and I have finally reached the conclusion that it's not very helpful. It's a Viet-English, English-Viet book, but I've found that having both directions in one book makes the set of words included rather limited. Also it's copyrighted in 1975, so I'm sure there are new terms that are missing. I bought a Viet-English only book from Vinabook.com, and it is supposed to have 175,000 word/phrases. In truth, the way Vietnamese is used a lot of concepts are actually expressed using 2 words, so the V-E/E-V dictionary has definitions for the individual words but not so many phrases. I had to start using the V-E book recently because there were words in our 1st grade Vietnamese curriculum that I could not find in the other dictionary. 1st grade words! Not in the dictionary! Now I know I need to get an updated English-Vietnamese dictionary too.

Vietnamese Language Learning

I bought a set of kids learning books from a company in California, designed for younger english readers to learn Vietnamese. I really could not get into this series. The first book seems designed for the K grade, with a letter-sized book(all the rest in the series is a smaller format, basically half-legal sized) and practice with letter writing (in print) and coloring. I'm not sure how the books correspond to grades, but since my plan was to do cursive first, the whole print thing was a deal breaker.

Couldn't find book 1 while I was taking pictures!

Found this book on Amazon, formerly from the Sacramento Library. It's obviously a bilingual book, while the ones above are mainly in Vietnamese.

Ordering off the Internet - Vietnamese site

There are of course bookstores that sell vietnamese books on the internet. When I found this site Vinabook.com, I had to make an order. The only problem is that it is hard to decide on books online, especially when you're barely reading as I am. Google translate helps, but sometimes the translations leave much to be desired. It would be so much easier if I could just look at the books. Also, the shipping costs are pretty high, since books weigh a lot. The good thing is that the books are so much cheaper. So even with the high shipping, which essentially doubled the cost of the books, they were still cheaper than the bilingual books I was buying from Amazon. The other problem was that to make the shipping reasonable, I didn't use air mail but ship mail, so it took a while(maybe a month or so) before I received the books. You need to plan ahead at that rate!

Vietnamese Videos and piracy

I found a set of Vietnamese videos teaching the alphabet in cute songs. There are 2 videos covering A to R, and there should be one more for the remainder of the alphabet. I emailed the makers of the video set to ask about the last video. Their response was that there was so much copying of their videos that they were busy suing the stores and didn't have time or money to invest in new productions. Apparently the stores were copying and selling the videos in bulk. There were some things I didn't like about the videos in that they were not exclusively in Vietnamese, but they would throw English translations of the songs in some segments. Not only that, their English translations were not the best translations. I would rather teach one language well, than have two mixed up languages. But the amount of learning video is very limited, I haven't even seen any made in Vietnam. I guess it's not as common for kids to learn from videos as it is here in the US.

Ordering off the Internet - American sites

I'm finding bilingual books at a site called www.Asiaforkids.com. They have a bunch of stuff for most Asian cultures, not just books, but dolls, videos and all sorts of cultural things to help kids learn about their culture.

Some of the books can be found cheaper at Amazon, but they are a nice resource for finding a lot of stuff in one location.

Sing and Learn - Vietnamese

I bought this before baby was even born. I've been playing the music from this book. There are a lot of cute tunes, some very traditional ones that I'd never heard but my parents remembered singing.

A sample song can be found at the asiaforkids site.

Baby Books - Elmer the Elephant series

I found this series of board books from a publisher in England called Milet Books. They are cute and teach basics such as colors and numbers. The publisher specializes in multilingual books, and has a lot more languages aside from Vietnamese.

Getting Ready

I've been doing research on homeschooling ever since I knew I was pregnant. The main problem is that I want my child to be able to be fluent in Vietnamese but I live in the US and am 2nd generation. This means that my Vietnamese is barely fluent, and I'm going to be working on my own language skills while I teach her. Age appropriate resources are limited for teaching/learning Vietnamese for people living the the US. Even bookstores which carry Vietnamese books don't generally have a large childrens book selection. On top of that, the bilingual books I have found often are expensive and have translation inaccuracies.