Learning Our Language

My husband and I are Vietnamese-American.  We both are born to Vietnamese-immigrant parents that came to the United States before college who raised us speaking mostly English and some Vietnamese.  We can understand more Vietnamese than we can speak, and what we can speak is at best broken and probably equivalent to second grade Vietnamese. And writing in Vietnamese or reading in Vietnamese is even less than that.  We both took some Vietnamese classes when we were younger and sad to say, I don’t think I applied myself enough. I thought that it wasn’t important and that everyone in my family and my friends all spoke English so there wasn’t really a need for me to be fluent in Vietnamese.

Now that I am older and now that I have children, I really regret that I did not pay more attention during those Vietnamese classes and I also regret that I didn’t use the language more in speaking to my parents, grandparents, and relatives.  I am so used to speaking English that it is almost weird to start speaking in Vietnamese again. I am not confident in my skills and I feel silly.

I really wish that I could teach my children how to speak Vietnamese and it would help if we spoke it in the home, which we do not.  I try to teach them basics. We have books and they know some numbers, colors, and objects. I know that as the generations go on we may lose more and more of the language and that makes me sad.  To be honest, our daily lives are so busy that it just becomes another thing to do that I often overlook. I am not sure how to make it a priority because we get along just fine without knowing and utilizing the Vietnamese language, but it would be really nice if we all were more familiar with the language.  I guess I feel like if my kids knew Vietnamese they would feel more of a connection to our “roots” as a Vietnamese-American family.