Japanese students meet with Vietnamese students

Hello, my name is Shunsuke, who came to Vietnam for internship using my fourth spring vacation of university. Having different background from Vietnamese university students, I interviewed Vietnamese university students about their lifestyles and values this time.

Japanese students meet with Vietnamese students

The interviewees of this time, following the order of the picture from the left side, are Ms. Ngoc, Anh, Dung, and Dung(two females have the same name). Other than Ms.Ngoc, who goes to Nguyen Tat Thanh University, three of them go to Ho Chi Minh University of Law. First of all, I let them write the schedule of one week: below this text.

Surprisingly, their English are much better than I had expected- which created the first impression of them. This is partly because I had the image that “Vietnamese are not good English speaker” as far as I walk on streets. Among them, whose English seems to be much better than average of Japanese, Ms,Dung’s was especially excellent in her native-level pronunciation. She says she does internship of translation at home. Also, the first greeting given to me in Japanese “Hajimemashite” by Ms.Ngoc and Mr.Anh amazed me- two says they study Japanese as their hobby. Attitudes and motivations of Vietnamese students about language learning were quite inspiring.

Looking at the schedules they filled in for me, I found the difference from Japanese students. Firstly, in contrast with Japanese seniors completing almost all the credits for job-hunt, they goes to school at least three times a week. Also, the hours spent on English leaning- they say they watch English movies with local subtitles. At last, they cherish their family, all of four living with their families with siblings apart from their parents in countries(they cook dishes by themselves). They are reaching their family members via Skype frequently. It was also interesting to me that they go shopping very early in the mornings, which is partly attributed to the closing time of market.

Japanese students meet with Vietnamese students

By the way, the fact that four of them has smartphones demonstrated that it goes without saying that the penetration of smartphone is quite high- I myself had not seen any feature phone since I came to Vietnam. However, with their lower income(3.55USD is the average part-time payment by the hour), their phones are secondhand or passed down from their elder sisters. Also, unlike Japanese, most of whom are heavy users of “LINE” for their SNS, they depend more on SMS or Facebook messagers. Going back to their schedule, they still watch TVs though the internet has been more and more popular (same hours they spend on using smartphones: from one and half hour to three hours). Other than consumption for smartphone, they says clothes and shoes are also the main consumption in their lifestyles, but they do not still shop online as the Vietnamese E-commerce market is small and still skeptic about their online quality of online products and most of the students without income do not own their monetary cards for their shopping(only student doing internship,etc can have cards).

This interview itself tuned out to make me admire the Vietnamese university students, whereas it also gave me the sudden sense of danger as a Japanese student. In other words, knowing the higher level lifestyles and values of Vietnamese students, how about the future of Japan, one of the leading developed countries in the world now?

Report by Asia Plus Inc Intern students

Report by Asia Plus Inc Intern students

Report by Asia Plus Inc Intern students

Report by Asia Plus Inc Intern students