KUALA LUMPUR: The Vietnamese language and culture have been reintroduced as an optional subject at Universiti Malaya (UM) – one of the top public universities in Malaysia.
About 100 to 140 students at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics (FLL) are currently learning Vietnamese language and culture, said FLL Dean Professor Surinderpal Kaur, Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.
The students are from Malaysia, China, India and Indonesia.
Established as a language centre in 1972, the FLL is responsible for conducting language courses relevant to the needs of the university. It offered Vietnamese language courses from its establishment until 2017 when its only Vietnamese lecturer retired.
Vietnamese language and culture courses were resumed in 2023 after the faculty employed Vietnamese Master of Linguistics Nguyen Thuy Thien Huong who is said to have inspired FLL staff and students to learn more about Vietnam.
Surinderpal said the faculty is cooperating with the Malaysia-Vietnam Friendship Association on student exchange programmes, with the desire to build a separate programme on the two countries’ cooperation.
It also plans to develop a curriculum providing comprehensive Vietnamese courses from primary to advanced levels, as well as to organise activities to promote Vietnamese culture, such as cooking classes, Vietnamese traditional music classes and Vietnamese movie screenings.
Aside from Vietnamese, the faculty also offered nine other language subjects – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Tamil.
