A Vietnamese high school student in Ho Chi Minh City has grabbed headlines for his command of 12 foreign languages, acquired through self-study despite financial difficulty.

Ha Duy Loc, a 12th grade student at the HCMC-based Le Hong Phong high school for the gifted, has garnered widespread attention for his proficiency in English, French, Chinese, and Russian.

Loc can also communicate fluently in Arabic, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish.

He is now studying Thai and Indonesian languages.

Long-time dream

Loc has long cherished a desire to become multilingual since he was admitted to the school, formerly named after Vietnamese linguist, Petrus Ky.

The competitive study environment at such a prestigious school also acts as an incentive boosting Loc’s strong thirst for progress and knowledge, particularly language learning.

After classes, Loc devotes a lot of time to showing up at bookstores to scour for handy language-related materials.

As a student majoring in Chinese, Loc also makes the most of opportunities to interact with his peers specializing in English, French, or Russia as well as foreigners visiting the school so that he can hone his linguistic skills.

Loc says he spends an hour a day on foreign languages with particular study methods adopted for each.

With English, Loc focuses on exploring idiomatic expressions, genders of nouns for French, Spanish, German, or Russia, and specific features of Chinese letters.

The school’s teachers, who support Loc with useful materials, all acknowledge that in addition to his diligence and patience, Loc is ‘language-savvy’, able to quickly memorize word features right in class.

Loc is lauded as an admirable language aficionado in the face of financial difficulty as his family is currently living in a makeshift house built in Le Hong Phong School, where his father also works as a security guard.

Recently, Loc made the news for another reason, having created a unique dictionary that provides language users with entries in 12 different languages, a source of great pride for his school.

And what is Loc’s greatest wish for the future you may be asking?

To become a language teacher, of course.

(THANH NIÊN)