Read Viet

Simple stories for Vietnamese language learners

Read Viet is a collection of short Vietnamese stories for language learners. All stories are limited to a fixed vocabulary of about 1,000 common Vietnamese words. This project takes inspiration from the language learning principles of comprehensible input and extensive reading, which suggest that exposure to a large amount of reading material at a comfortable level can be more enjoyable and effective than struggling through more difficult texts with extensive reference to dictionaries and other reference material.

There are very few sources of simple Vietnamese reading material made for learners of Vietnamese as a second language, and learning resources made for native speakers either feature very basic, childish content (at kindergarten level and below) or quickly introduce uncommon, literary, and specialty vocabulary (grade school level and above). In order to address this shortage, Read Viet uses large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality, grammatically correct Vietnamese reading material at a large scale. It is difficult to produce text that is limited in vocabulary while sounding completely natural, but in spite of these limitations, simple and comprehensible stories can be immersive and educational.