Essay Paper Assignment
Write an essay that’s about 1,000 words long in which you (1) compare and contrast Vietnamese (first language) with English (second language) and (2) reflect on your experience learning the second language by discussing which aspects of the language were easy and which were hard to learn.
To compare and contrast, consider one or more of the following aspects:
phoneme inventory (e.g. English has /ŋ/ but Spanish doesn’t. Instead Spanish has /ɲ/ also known as “eñe”)
pronunciation of a phoneme that exists in both (e.g. /p/ in English is pronounced with aspiration at the beginning of a word, but it’s pronounced without aspiration in Spanish)
phonotactics (e.g. consonant clusters are allowed in English but not in Japanese)
word formation processes (e.g. circumfixation exists in Indonesian but not in English)
word order in phrases and sentences (e.g. English follows an SVO order while Korean follows an SOV order; adjectives often appear before the noun they modify in English but they often appear after the noun in French; English has prepositions but Turkish has postpositions)
agreement (e.g. German has three grammatical genders — masculine, feminine, neuter — and an article and a noun that follows must agree in terms of gender but there is no such gender agreement in English)
