Vietnamese start learning Mandarin (News Report)

Hungkuang University’s Mandarin Center donates books to help Vietnamese students learn Chinese.

To welcome new students from Vietnam and those from the preparatory Mandarin class for international students at Hungkuang University, a “Vietnamese Fun Gathering” was organized in October. The International Mandarin Center arranged for teacher Nguyễn Thị Ngọc Mai to share her experiences studying, living, and teaching in Taiwan. Each student was also gifted her new book, “Vietnamese People Begin to Learn Chinese”. The hope is that through this introductory traditional Chinese material, which is tailored to the linguistic background and learning needs of Vietnamese people, students will learn basic Chinese and pass the Chinese Proficiency Test.

Currently, there are 42 Vietnamese students at Hungkuang University. Vice President Chang Tsung-Min stated that through student union activities, the International Mandarin Center allows newcomers to interact and exchange with senior students, reducing the sense of strangeness and helping them adapt to the campus learning environment and life in Taiwan. At the same time, they are provided with more resources to learn Chinese.

Nguyễn Thị Ngọc Mai shared that when she graduated from Can Tho University in Vietnam and started working, she came into contact with Taiwan. She came to Taiwan in 2014 to learn Chinese and while studying at the Graduate Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at the National Normal University, she began teaching. She found that Chinese textbooks in Vietnam mainly use simplified Chinese materials from mainland China. The vocabulary, idioms, cultural introductions, and habits differ from those in Taiwan. There is a significant lack of traditional Chinese materials.

As a result, Nguyễn Thị Ngọc Mai, who has long been involved in bilingual teaching and translation work in Chinese and Vietnamese, co-authored a book with veteran Vietnamese language teacher Wu Ting-Wen titled “Start Speaking Vietnamese from Zero” last year to teach Chinese people Vietnamese. This year, she went a step further to independently complete the book “Vietnamese People Begin to Learn Chinese”. She hopes to use her personal experiences and teaching expertise to guide Vietnamese students, new residents, and migrant workers in learning Chinese.

“In Taiwan, many teaching methods involve using English to teach Vietnamese students Chinese, and the indirect learning effect isn’t good,” said Nguyễn. For example, Vietnamese pronunciation mainly consists of first, second, and third tones. The four tones in Chinese pronunciation are relatively difficult for Vietnamese students learning Chinese. Additionally, situations where two consecutive characters change tone, combined with the complexity of traditional Chinese characters, make recognition challenging. Her teaching materials come with both phonetics and pinyin, accompanied by arrows indicating tone changes, and commonly used traditional Chinese characters are enlarged, making learning Chinese simpler for beginners.