ABOUT ME

My name is Cuong Quoc Vu and I was originally  born in Vietnam. I am currently residing in the US and have become a naturalized US citizen. I have a strong aptitude in foreign language acquisition and believe that I am destined to work in a field that closely relates to language. I plan to pursue a Master in Speech Language Pathology (I prefer the term Therapy), a field that is built upon many areas of linguistics.

When I was 10 years old, I copied the first few pages of a Russian mathematical textbook taken from my father's bookshelf. After that, I became aware of many simple Russian characters such as И (looks like an inverted N) Й П Б Я З Л.

See! After all these years, I still remember the exact title and the cover of the book!

 Around that same time, I was able to scribble down certain very simple Chinese characters that I saw in many Chinese historical series on TV, such as 人 木 品 大 太. These are signs that I am naturally curious about languages. 

But there is a period when I could only learn and speak English. This period extends over 10 years of my life because my school curriculum was heavily geared towards natural sciences instead of linguistics, humanities and social sciences. I also tended, during this time period, to view languages as a subordinate interest to History, which is my second passion. This means that I viewed learning a language as a way to acquire the tool to do deep research in History, rather than as a separate interest in it self. Thus, I did not push myself to study another language. Nevertheless, I had studied French for 4 years in primary school before my mom took me to an English class because she judiciously foresaw the rise of English in Vietnam. Then when I was 19 years old, I came to China to study Mandarin. I devoted all my time to revitalize my French, as well as absorbing Russian. My university had and still has a large body of international students from all over the world, and I chiefly interacted with Russian students and those from "les pays francophones".

I graduated from East China Norma University in Shanghai, in Chinese language as an undergraduate. I have received basic education in linguistics through these 4 years. I speak fluently English and Mandarin and, to a lesser extent, French. I also have some understanding of German, Spanish and Russian, though my fluency is at an infancy stage. Polish, Japanese and Korean are languages that stay beyond my capacity to learn but still within the domain of my curiosity.

Apart from languages and history, I also have an interest in poetry and literature. I don't read a lot of novels for some reasons. Fictions do not interest me at this point. 

My blog is my own personal notes and ideas about languages. I wish to share my insights and ideas about languages and linguistics to you, if you have a burning passion to learn foreign languages and linguistics like I do.

Learning languages is a lifelong endeavour. I hope that my blog inspires you to pick up the challenge and push forth towards success. Mastering a language opens you to a new worldview, a new understanding of its culture, and above all, new opportunity to make new friends and enjoy the precious human connection.