Keeping Culture Close Vandan Nguyen
T
he foreign language curriculum is a far stretch from where it needs to be, as the majority of high schoolers focus on passing two years of Spanish and dropping the courses to increase their odds of ending up in a good college. Junior Vandan Nguyen, however, is one of the few students who truly has passion for the art of knowing several languages. Nguyen’s parents and grandparents came from Vietnam. “Well, my parents and grandparents came over because of the Vietnam War,” Nguyen said. “It was a lot better over here than over there.” With them they brought the language and culture Nguyen shares today. Nguyen has spoken Vietnamese as long as he could remember. As an American citizen, English could still be considered his second language. “I wasn’t really taught it,” Nguyen said. “How regular caucasian kids learn English is how I learned it.” Nguyen had to learn English in order to attend English schooling, but foreign to America, Nguyen’s family continues to speak their native language around the house. “They just used Vietnamese and I learned English from school, I can’t really remember but in preschool I don’t think I knew a single word of english” Nyguen said. As a young boy, Nguyen’s talent came easy to him, yet as common knowledge, we know as the brain gets older it becomes much more difficult to become bi or trilingual, yet Nguyen enjoys the challenge and does not plan to stop learning new languages anytime soon. There are many oppurtunities as Nyguyen sees it.
Spring 2020 | The Vangaurd 12
“I’m taking Spanish to prepare for college but also because it’s a free class.” Nguyen said. “That way I can learn three languages which would make me trilingual and that would be pretty cool. It’s pretty cool being able to speak languages fluently; I speak Vietnamese everyday.” Nguyen enjoys his culture and knowing his family’s language, however, he has taken quite the interest in Korea as well. On his journey to learn new languages, Korean is at the forefront. “I’m also a quarter Korean,” Nguyen said. “I think the culture is pretty cool, I like the language, the people, Korean food, I like how they live and the cities are so cool to me and they live so different from us.” Nguyen began studying Korean the summer of 2019, and he is currently enrolled in Spanish. Although he is branching out into other languages, he still uses Vietnamese at home and occasionally when he is out and about. “There are plenty of Asian markets and restaurants,” Nguyen said. “Most of the time you can tell if they don’t speak good English, and so I just speak Vietnamese and it makes it a lot easier for them. I also use it all the time with my Vietnamese friends. The Vietnamese community is pretty close, everyone seems to know each other.” Nguyen thinks that what he has is important and rightfully so. Whatever Nguyen pursues in the future, he plans to keep his Vietnamese language sharp and the culture close to his heart. “If I had kids a little later on, I would want them to know and learn about my culture,” Nyguyen said. “I wouldn’t want it to disappear.”
