For beginning learners of Vietnamese, here's everything needed to learn the language effectively! Speak, read and write Vietnamese as it's actually used in real-life contexts in Vietnam today. This book has everything you need to learn the language effectively and to quickly achieve basic proficiency...Elementary Vietnamese was originally developed for classroom use at Harvard University and is designed to provide a solid grounding in Vietnamese grammar, usage and pronunciation. The lessons are carefully structured to guide you through the essential sentence patterns from your first encounter with them in dialogues to more detailed explanations and exercises. Each lesson contains a helpful cultural note and commonly-used proverbs and idiomatic expressions. This revised edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect recent developments in the language and culture. It includes audio recordings by native Vietnamese speakers for all of the lessons. Innovative pronunciation drills help you to improve your pronunciation and new usage examples, exercises and photos explore the diversity, heritage and history of today's Vietnam.

Dr. Binh Nhu Ngo is the Director of the Vietnamese Language Program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and has been teaching Vietnamese there since 1992. He was born and educated in Hanoi, and earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He has taught Vietnamese and linguistics at Moscow University, and since 1992 he has taught at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) and at a number of universities and colleges in the United States. He has served as the Vice-President of the Council of Teachers of Southeast Asian Languages (COTSEAL) and represents Harvard University at the Group of Universities for the Advancement of Vietnamese Abroad (GUAVA). His other books include Speak & Read Vietnamese (Simon & Schuster) and Elementary Vietnamese (Tuttle).