Julie Holloway Bryant Memorial Scholarship

Being bilingual is an exciting skill but for me, being multilingual is most fulfilling. My name is Ivan and I am a senior attending Sun Prairie West High School. Currently, I have been applying to colleges in Wisconsin. My post-graduation plan is to attend University in Wisconsin. My current interests for majors are computer science and political science. My first language is Vietnamese. I was born in Vietnam and moved to the United States with my family when I was four years old. Learning Vietnamese was easy because the language was spoken around me since I was growing up. During my first few years in the United States, I lived with my cousins for a while. During this time, their parents would teach me easy English words. I learned “Hello”, “Bye”, and the ABCs. What I found a challenge was when I started elementary school. It was increasingly difficult for me to make friends because of the language barrier. I had a teacher who was with me each day to help teach me English while I was in school. I would finish part of my classes and then have a study session with her to go through simple English phrases such as, “Hello my name is…” and “How are you doing today?” As I progressed through these lessons, I started talking to my classmates and slowly made friends, which was challenging in the beginning but gradually got better. A benefit to being bilingual is the connections I have been able to make throughout the years using my English from elementary and middle school. I’ve met many great people who I still am friends with now in high school. Along with people in my community who are now close friends. Another benefit to being bilingual is being able to translate for my parents when they need help like at a doctor's visit or paperwork. I translated English to Vietnamese often for my parents when they took me to the doctors for a visit and to fill out school papers or bills. Being bilingual has shown me how I can help people with this skill. During middle school, I took a multicultural class learning different languages and cultures of Spanish, Chinese, and French. When I started my freshman year of high school, I decided to take Spanish as a language class. Taking Spanish helped me learn more about how different languages can be intertwined like Spanish and English. Learning Spanish was challenging because the two languages I knew kept interfering with Spanish and I would get them mixed up sometimes. This created a barrier of confusion for me between all three languages but I kept studying and got better. For me, the benefit of being multilingual now is still the connections I can make with people in my community. For example, when I volunteered for my school’s parent and teacher conferences, I was able to help parents who spoke only English and parents who only spoke Spanish. While learning Spanish, I forgot a little of my Vietnamese. This was a realization for me because being multilingual is an incredible skill to have but forgetting my native language is hard to take in. While studying Spanish, I also am studying more Vietnamese. Currently, I am in Spanish 4 in my senior year of high school. Throughout my years of learning Vietnamese, English and Spanish, I learned many valuable skills from being multilingual such as communication in different languages to help others and ambition to learn multiple languages.