Co Thu Ba is the sweetest! She is super kind and really cares about all her students. However, Vietnamese is definitely a pretty hard language to learn if you have no experience with tonal languages. I had a little prior background with Vietnamese due to my heritage, so things were a bit easier, but still difficult at first. Co Thu Ba definitely tries to make learning as easy as possible though. Participation matters a lot, in terms of your grade and learning the language. You really need to practice to get better, and there's lots of opportunities in class to volunteer (or she will randomly call on people).

There's lots of weekly assignments ranging from homework to group projects, which can be a bit tedious at times, but they do help reinforce what you learn in class. We also had to upload a recording of ourselves reading the notes after every class. Probably due to the class being online, we had multiple days to complete our midterm and final, which consisted of writing and recording a few hundred word response to a prompt using the grammar and vocabulary taught in class. There's also a song project due at the end of the quarter where you have to write the lyrics, record yourself singing, and take a quiz on the lyrics. Overall, the grading is pretty lenient and it's not difficult to get an A if you put in a little effort!

Grade breakdown:

Homework/teamwork: 15%
Participation: 20%
Midterm: 15%
Song project: 10%
Final group project: 20%
Final: 20%

If you are a Vietnamese person who doesn't know how to speak Vietnamese like me, TAKE VIET 1!! Don't take 1A, because they are essentially the same class but she speaks Viet in one and English in another. This class is SOOOO EASY. Possibly the easiest class at UCLA. Don't believe me? Look at the grade distribution. In my class, ONE person got a B+. Everyone else got higher. And I think I turned in my homework late almost every other homework. Also get TA Anh James, who is the sweetest, most amazing TA who will write you letters of recommendations, read the common book for you, and take the whole class out to kbbq. He's also a Stanford graduate doubling in public health and asian am so ;)

Overall pretty similar to Viet 1. Co Thu Ba did make some adjustments to lessen the workload by having less homework and teamwork assignments. I would say that Viet 2 is a bit easier than Viet 1 just because the learning curve is less steep. You mostly just refine your writing, speaking, and listening skills from the previous quarter and learn some more vocabular and grammatical structures. One difference is that for the song project, you have to make a music video, which can be a bit time consuming.