How easy is it to get started learning Vietnamese? If you’re curious about the language spoken by around 75 million, the first episode of Season 2 of Language Stories is for you.

Why Vietnamese?

When I reached out on Twitter looking for people and stories for season two of Language Stories, someone connected me with Gaston Dorren, who was learning the language in preparation for his new book, Babel (which is out now!).

This led to us speaking to Gaston both before and after his trip to the country, and meeting other Vietnamese learners and teachers along the way.

The Video

The Podcast

Featuring

Gaston Dorren – Learn more about Gaston’s projects at his website Language Writer. Also, be sure to check out his new book, Babel, which is why he was learning Vietnamese. And if you haven’t already, read Lingo now – it’s amazing!

Tri, Language Accepted – Tri shares his language learning progress and new life in Vietnam on his YouTube channel and Instagram.

Saphire and Shinegi, Vietnamese Teaching Group – The Vietnamese Teaching Group offer online lessons and face to face lessons in Hanoi too. Take a look if you’re curious about learning the language. You might even get Saphire or Shinegi as your teacher!

Further Reading + Resources

Omniglot – Vietnamese language and writing information.

CJV Lang – a good overview of the Vietnamese writing system and alphabet.

More Vietnamese – lots of helpful blog posts for learning Vietnamese. This is a good introduction to tones.

123Vietnamese – this video will help you to get to grips with the Vietnamese tone system.

Our Sponsor

A huge thank you to Lingora for sponsoring season 2 of Language Stories!

Lingora is a new online language community where you can share written and spoken practice in the language you’re learning and get real feedback from the community. What’s great about Lingora is that they help to eliminate the “umms” and “ahhs” by giving you prompts for your writing and speaking. And the really great bit? It’s 100% free. Yup. Totally free feedback on your language practice.

You can support Language Stories by signing up for free to Lingora at elingora.com.

Support The Show

The best thing you can do right now to support the project is threefold, and if you’ve ever listened to any podcast before, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with what I’m about to say!

1. Subscribe – by subscribing to the Language Stories podcast in your favourite place and YouTube for the sister videos, you’re going to keep up with all future episodes. Woop!

2. Review – when it comes to the tech stuff, reviews are pretty important. Reviews help to tell iTunes that people like the podcast, and that helps to raise the profile so that new people can find it easily. Yay!

3. Tell a friend – word of mouth still wins! If you know someone who would love Language Stories, tell them about it. And if they’re new to podcasts, walk them through the process to subscribe them. Woohoo!

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Share Your Story

If you have a Language Story you’d love to share, or if you know someone that does, get in touch.

I always love to hear from you! Your feedback helps to shape future episodes so thank you.