Azalia83

I grew up learning English at the same time as my native language of Vietnamese. Once I reached my teenage years, I noticed that I was starting to lose a lot of Vietnamese vocabulary because I wasn't using it as much anymore. I decided to take it upon myself to get back in touch with my culture's language and I taught myself how to not only speak more fluently, but I also started to read and write Vietnamese as well. When I started my undergraduate education, I majored in Spanish and took a year each of Italian and French. I love the logic in learning a language!!

Ironically, my first exposure to Spanish was in eighth grade. I had absolutely no interest in it and failed it. I gave it another go in high school and I was interested enough to pass with all A's all four years of high school. Only to find out that I learned little to nothing when I sat through my first college-level Spanish class. The intimidation from the full-immersion Spanish class was exactly what I needed to motivate me into pursuing a career in Spanish education. I fell in love with languages, especially the Romance languages!

Yes! I believe languages differ in the way they sound. Some languages have certain sounds that don't exist in other languages. Some even have 'clicks' in them!! My mother who is native to Vietnamese for example, have a difficult time pronouncing the 'th' sound in the word 'there' because that 'th' sound does not exist in her native language. Many Asian languages are also called tonal languages because of the way a word sounds can change the meaning. So one word, spelled the same, can mean 5 different things just by changing the tone of the word.

I knew I was a language nerd after surviving the 2 semesters in college when I would need to alternate between 5 different languages every day. Vietnamese was spoken at home and English pretty much anywhere else except in my language classes. I was majoring in Spanish Education and decided to take up Italian and French during my last two semesters of undergrad. Talk about getting things mixed up! But I loved it!!!