I LOVED CO THU BA SO MUCH! This is a review for the entire Vietnamese Heritage Learners series 1A-3A! I took it online but she said her format is going to be similar in person. It was a lot of notetaking, practicing on your own through homework, recording yourself speaking, and small projects. She really makes the classroom feel not really a class but more like a family/club! She is really funny and fun to listen to her lectures! If you have never spoken Viet before and only can listen to Viet a little bit, you'll be fine! She starts from the beginning and makes sure to break things down for you or to clarify things in English. Just a lot of busy work with notes and projects like singing a song or group projects on the history of Vietnam but it definitely helps your practice! Discussions are long but my TA was nice enough to let us go early sometimes and definitely a good time to practice. Even though this is a 5 unit, it did not feel like one at all, very calm workload, and definitely didn't feel too much at all when taking 3 other classes with Viet! TAKE IT WITH CO THU BA!

I think the grade spread is pretty accurate. The biggest hassle of this class is the group project, which is making like a 5-7 minute video, but it's fun to watch during the last discussion.

Cô Thu Ba is an amazing and fun professor. She's always super energetic, and she's truly interested in our learning. Plus she's sometimes unintentionally funny. She teaches the entire VIET 1A-3A series, which fulfills the language requirement.

There are no traditional exams, but the individual "midterm" and "final" consist of you basically writing a short essay based on a prompt and creatively filming yourself speaking it. There is also a group final, where based on a prompt, you write a script and film a skit. You have group assignments throughout the quarter that are supposed to help you guys continuously work on the final group project.

The main are the "Student's Notes" and homework. Student's Notes are worksheets that you fill in class, that are essentially a lot of fill-in-the blank that you copy from lecture. I found those mostly just tedious, especially since they were due the morning after every lecture. Homework was weekly and usually consisted of doing exercises from the textbook. I though those were more useful. I personally bought the textbook because I wanted to do some self-learning, but many in the class didn't, and that's okay since she posts scans of the book for you to do HW.

Lectures are recorded, but attendance is part of your grade. For Viet 3A in Spring, she had a live Zoom and in-person option

By the end of the class, my parents remarked that my Vietnamese was noticeably better. Overall, while some work in the class is just a lot of busywork, you do genuinely learn, and I bonded with the other people in the class. If you have Vietnamese heritage and need to fulfill the language requirement, I highly recommend taking this whole series!

I miss Cô Thu Ba so much. I am having Viet class withdrawals :( She is the sweetest soul I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and this class feels like one big family. I wish

Going to class felt like I was being healed from the stress of my other UCLA responsibilities <3 LOVE

The best series to have ever existed at UCLA

Really nice professor; obviously basically everyone in this class is vietnamese since it's the heritage class, so the vibe you get is sort of the vibe when vietnamese people who've never met each other acting like they've known each for other for years in a really friendly way, which is how the professor treats everyone. There's textbook HW (you can find the old edition PDF) a few times a week, but takes like 30 minutes max each. The class is a lot of fun and it's pretty laid back. The TA's are really chill and nice also and the tests are pretty easy if you mostly pay attention in class and don't blow the class off.