Project PDD
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My story is undoubtedly typical of many Vietnamese abroad. My children are 13 and 15 this year. Since the ages of 4 and 6 respectively, Jackie and Candice have been attending a Vietnamese Summer School almost every year. This year because of various reasons, we didn't have the VYEA Summer School. They need to continue their education of the mother language.
Even though they did "very well" in their Summer school classes, at this point, they hardly speak any Vietnamese even though they can read almost anything -- without really understanding much. They simply lack the necessary vocabulary and the appreciation of the language that comes with the practice of reading a Vietnamese story.
I believe that children are very capable. That belief is strengthened tremendously by the Harry Potter phenomenon. Every school kid I know, even some in grade 3 and are generally not too interested in reading, professes to a keen interest in reading those thick books. As the 850-page long installment comes out this month, most Potter-heads have already processed in excess of 2,300 pages of literature!
It would be nice to have something like the Harry Potter books to spark our children's interest in Vietnamese Literature. Thinking back to my youth, the phenomenon of Chuyện Kiếm Hiệp comes readily to mind. There was nothing that drew me more than these novels by Kim Dung. Throughout my life, I must have read every single page of Kim Dung's Tieu Ngao Giang Ho at least ten times!
I will side-step the controversy of the choice of this book. In the 1970's Vietnam, as is today, there are those who consider the material not appropriate (period!), and on the other side there must be tens of millions of readers in most Asian countries, today as in the past 30 years, who have read and loved the Kim Dung novels. The greatest freedom that America gives to the world, and to this citizen of hers, is the freedom of speech and of choosing food for our mind. Let our children's parents exercise this choice on their children's behalf. My goal is to give them a small one among many for their children's education.
The book Tiếu Ngạo Giang Hồ has been selected for this project. I happen to have a copy of this 1,500 page translation by Hàn Giang Nhạn, plus an electronic copy off the web by some enthusiastic person. In addition totha fact that my personal and subjective preference for this book is well justified by its worldwide popularity, it will simply serve as a means, not a goal, for this project. It may turn out that some better choice could be made; I am fully ready to concede that and hope that others could join in similar efforts with their best choice.
(1) The first step is to go through the book and re-translate many of the words and phrases that Hàn Giang Nhạn simply left in the original Hán Việt form. There are quite a few of these. For example: phụ thân, định tâm, tử thương, sư phụ, sư muội, kinh hoàng, bất đắc dĩ, hứng thú. Some of these may be substituted by the equivalent Vietnamese, e.g. phụ thân by "cha", tử thương by "chết". A very small percentage are elected to be kept since they represented some unique aspects of the culture presented in the book, e.g. Nhạc sư muội, being retained as a form of addressing by title, and further by the school-based relation, both of these would be inappropriate to eliminate. A large majority of these Hán Việt words and phrases have become very much part of the Viet language, so hứng thú, bất đắc dĩ, kinh hoàng should be retained. Even so, simpler Viet words can also be substituted because it is easier to read.
(2) The second step is to annotate the document by providing footnotes that provides the meaning of "complicated" words or phrases. It turns out that for my children (as subject in a test) needed a lot of help with the vocabularies, especially to get started. It also turned out that most complex or even moderately-complex ideas in Việt / Hán Việt are made up of two or more individual words. For example: sức mạnh, công việc, quan trọng, hồi hộp, etc. So a logical thing to do is to annotate most double words.
(3) The third step is to provide some sort of a feedback system that helps the young reader along on the long and difficult journey of this epic story in a rather foreign language. The parents are the foremost hope to get the young reader started, but once on the way, they will need help. Towards providing some milestones and intermediate checkpoints that could also serve as enticing goals, we are preparing for each chapter of the book a 10-question test, in multiple-choice format. (There are 217 chapters in all).
Finally, (4) The tests will be presented in an interactive medium on the web. The test takers will have to register so that his/her identity and performance will be recorded and tracked for the purpose of grading. The infrastructure behind the tracking, grading and tournament, prizes, etc will come naturally as people or organization with goodwill find the experiment worthwhile and fruitful.
Kim Dung is the author of the Mandarin version of the book Tiếu Ngạo Giang Hồ. He lived in Hong Kong and wrote this book in the period of several years in the 1970's, publishing 1,000 words each day to his newspaper. Each installment was immediately copied and translated to many Asian languages the next day, Vietnamese being one of them.
Hàn Giang Nhạn is a Vietnamese Professor in Saigon who did the instant translation. This version is the only translation in Vietnamese that I know of.
Nhi.Anh Chu does the work described in parts (1) and (2) of the plan outlined above. He was assisted by Mrs. Vi Khuê, who provided the invaluable 2003 Hán Việt dictionary by Nguyễn Văn Khôn, the Việt Anh dictionary (1966) also by Nguyễn Văn Khôn, and the Văn Phạm Chữ Hán by Phạm Tất Đắc (1996).
The following individuals were responsible for the Exercises that accompany each chapters, as described as Step 3 of the plan: Mai Phương Bùi, Thủy T. Lê, Minh Ngọc Nguyễn, Hùng Bùi, Thiên Hương Bùi, and Nhi.Anh Chu. All are associated with VYEA (Vietnamese Youth Educational Assocation) of Washington DC (vyea.com) except for Thiên Hưong who hails from Australia.
John Thinh Nguyễn is responsible for preparing the tests into a web-centric mechanism for testing and tracking.
Luong Pham is hereby acknowledged to inspire the project by providing research into Vietnamese Literature on the Web.
The master document is Microsoft Word file that is approximately 18 MBytes. The main text is about 11 Mbytes, the rest constitutes annotations added to the main text. (Compressed)
For easy handling purposes, the 217-chapter book is subdivided into 72 books, each containing 3 chapters. They are named Chapters1-3.doc, Chapters4-6.doc, etc. Each of these smaller books are about 20 standard letter-sized pages; (the annotations make the number of pages almost doubled.)
Using MS Word, the book is best viewed in the form of Small Books. View each document in the "Normal" View mode.
For the less advanced reader, it may be a good idea to show the footnote pane while reading the text. (View -> Footnotes). Clicking on the footnote maker above the annotated word/phrase will position the annotation in the footnote pane to the appropriate place.
The advanced reader may find it better to view without the footnote pane. The occasional need to see the annotation (footnote) can be met by moving the mouse cursor over the appropriate footnote maker; within half a second, the annotation appears above the maker.
The pages can also be printed out. The footnotes typically take up half of each page.
Revisions of the Document in the various forms are likely to continue for sometime.
For each chapter (about 7 standard pages long), there will be a multiple-choise exercise. Typically each question test the reader's understanding of the main points of the chapter. Preparation for the questions will use the following guidelines:
a) Stress comprehension of the story, not vocabulary nor grammar per se;
b) Should be in English in the final form, to eliminate the problem of understanding the questions from the performance evaluation;
c) Should be as self-contained to the current chapter as possible;
d) Will be in multiple-choice format;
e) Will have at least 4 choices as answers, preferably 6 choices. The larger the number of choices, the easier it is to avoid cheating;
f) The choices must be that it is clear what the best choice is (if one knows the material)
The raw form of the exercises will be found here containing the key (answers). They are not meant to be accessible to the test takers. [Deleted to prevent unauthorized access. Contact nhianhchu@cox.net for copies].
and named Exercise1.doc, Exercise2.doc, etc. for the English and Exercise1-Viet.doc, Exervise2-Viet.doc, etc for the Vietnamese version.
Test takers are advised to download a copy of the test (without the key) and use it as a guide to read the material itself. The English version of the test is recommended so that bias due to the difficulty of understanding the test questions may be mitigated. The Vietnamese version is also available.
The tests are named ChapterN.doc or ChuongN.doc, where N is the chapter number in the book; the former is the English and the latter the Vietnamese, respectively. They be found here:
The web-interactive form of the tests will be found here
and can be found under the categories
Reading Comprehension based on Tieu Ngao Giang Ho
Reading Comprehension based on Tiếu Ngạo Giang Hồ.
The former is written in English, the latter in Vietnamese.