At nine, I had to build that bridge with two dictionaries: a Vietnamese-English dictionary and an English-Spanish dictionary. There was no Vietnamese-Spanish dictionary I could use, so every Spanish word had to pass through English before it could reach me in Vietnamese.
That was before the internet. What surprises me is how little has changed for many children since.
In homes around the world, a child asks for a bedtime story. A parent opens an app, searches a library, or looks along the bookshelf, but cannot find what they need in the language they grew up speaking or the accent they heard at home. So they read in the language available instead.
And the family’s quieter language loses another night.
Why I Built This
I was nine when my family left Vietnam for Spain. My parents did not speak Spanish. My teachers did not speak Vietnamese.
My Spanish teacher, MariCarmen, taught me with heroic determination and a great deal of drawing. She drew little figures on my worksheets and chalked wobbly pictures on the board, pairing each one with an English word she hoped I might recognize.
Then she would look at me encouragingly while I stared at the drawing and wondered:
Is that a dog? A table? A man falling over?
The picture was a riddle, and the English word beside it was another. We were two people separated by every language we had, meeting in the middle at a stick figure.
Somehow, slowly, it worked.
At first, Spanish sounded like a train. Everyone seemed to speak at lightning speed, and I could not believe real words were coming out of their mouths.
A child’s mind works in wondrous ways. Some notice sounds first. Some remember a word after seeing it many times. Others begin to see patterns between words.
For me, it was a sound.
At recess, I was jumping rope with a girl named Rocío. I kept missing the rhythm, and she repeated one word to me:
“Despacio. Despacio.”
She must have said it ten times. I had no idea what it meant, but I caught its rhythm and the shape it made on her lips. That evening, I carried the sound home and searched for it in the dictionary.
Despacio.
Slowly.
She had been telling me to slow down. It felt like I had discovered a superpower. A word I caught on the playground could travel home with me and become something I understood.
Listening helped me at school, but at home I still needed a way to find the meaning. There was no Vietnamese-Spanish dictionary, no Vietnamese stories available to me, and no easy bridge between the language I knew and the language I needed to learn.
So every evening, I sat at the kitchen table with two dictionaries. I moved each Spanish word through English until I could reach its meaning in Vietnamese.
My mother sat beside me, pointing at words and guessing with me. She turned what could have been a lonely task into a shared puzzle. The tools had not been built for children like me, so my mother and I improvised, one word at a time.
That experience stayed with me. I found my way through, and the languages I learned afterward became one of the richest parts of my life. But I remember sitting with homework I could not read and no one able to hand me the meaning. I understood, even then, that the problem was not me.
Spain was only the first move. After that came Bangor, in Wales, where I discovered that British English was practically its own language. Welsh appeared on road signs, in schools, and in a place called Llanfairfechan, whose name I still cannot pronounce cleanly today.
Then came Helsinki. The little English I had learned in Madrid helped, since so many people spoke it, but Finnish was another matter: words the length of a train and fifteen grammatical cases, apparently to keep you humble.
We spent summers in Poland, where I learned just enough Polish to shop without surrendering all my bills and coins. My favorite memory of Warsaw is setting out each morning on my own to buy fresh śmietana and bread. I thought it was independence; looking back, it may have been a breakfast chore cleverly disguised as freedom.
Years later, we arrived in America, where even the English I already knew could sound like a stranger in a new mouth.
Each move changed more than my language. In Spain, lunch came at two and dinner near ten. In Finland, entire families sat together in a wooden room hot enough to bake bread and called it relaxing. I was a child of the tropics and initially I could not survive the sauna. Then, of course, I got used to it.
In Poland, I discovered chłodnik ogórkowy, a cold cucumber soup with dill and chives that I did not expect to love and then could not stop eating.
A child who moves collects more than words. She collects different hours, unfamiliar tastes, new customs, and new ideas about what an ordinary life can look like.
At the time, I was simply trying to understand the people around me.
Now, I often hear languages described as “low-resource.” The phrase bothers me. I have lived among languages with long histories, rich literature, and millions of speakers. The scarcity is in the books, data, and digital tools available to the people who speak them.
Calling a language “low-resource” can make that scarcity sound like a quality of the language itself. It often reflects where publishers, researchers, and technology companies have chosen to invest.
I did not know that term as a child. I only knew that by my fourth language, I was no longer afraid. Even without a perfect bridge, I had learned that a language was a place I could reach.
A child should not need years of displacement and loneliness to gain that confidence. It can begin with a story in a language they already know.
Back then, some of the gap was understandable. There was no easy way to place a Vietnamese story in front of a child in Spain.
More than two decades later, technology can carry a story across languages in seconds. I no longer need that bridge, but many children are still growing up without one.
That left me with a question:
If not me, then who? And if not now, then when?
Families Live Between Languages
Most reading and language apps begin with the largest language markets. I understand why. Good content is expensive to produce, and a larger audience makes that investment easier.
But families live in particular combinations of languages.
What about a child growing up with Spanish and Japanese? Korean and Portuguese? Arabic and Swedish? Each language may be spoken by millions, yet few companies build for the particular combination spoken inside that home.
Tagalog-speaking families in California face this problem. So do Punjabi-speaking families in Vancouver, Swahili-speaking families in London, and teachers searching for Welsh stories in Wales.
Families learn to make do. But making do is not the same as being served. When children rarely see their language in books, that language can begin to feel less important than the ones they see everywhere else.
What a Story Does
A drill can teach a word. In a story, a child meets that word while something is happening and has a reason to remember it.
That is why we built ReadClub around stories. Children listen while each word is highlighted, read the story aloud, and then talk about what happened. They move from hearing words to using those words to express ideas of their own.
Who I Am Building For
I think about the child sitting at a kitchen table tonight with homework no one at home can read.
I think about the child who understands their grandmother’s wonderful stories but is slowly losing the language they share. I think about the girl who understands everything her family says but answers in English because English is the language that appears everywhere while hers does not.
Too often, their languages appear in lessons and homework but disappear from stories, songs, and the ordinary pleasures of childhood.
I also think about the adults beside these children: teachers working with more languages than any one teacher could possibly know, parents hoping their children will keep the language they brought with them, and grandparents who want to speak directly with a grandchild rather than through an interpreter.
It is for every teacher like MariCarmen, finding creative ways to reach the child in front of her.
When children hear stories in the language their family speaks, with familiar words and accents, they see that their language belongs in stories and that they belong in them too.
That is what I wish someone had handed the little girl with two dictionaries.
Bringing the World’s Stories to More Languages
Most children’s books are published in a small number of languages, with English receiving more resources than almost any other. A child who reads in English inherits an enormous library. A child looking for stories in Vietnamese, Yoruba, Punjabi, Khmer, or a particular bilingual combination may find a much smaller shelf.
Each of these languages has its own literature and storytelling traditions. What is often missing are translations that allow stories written in one language to reach children who speak another.
AI translation has begun to change that arithmetic.
Every ReadClub story begins with a human author. We use technology to carry that story into more than 80 languages, with voices representing over 100 regional accents. It gives us a way to serve language combinations that have rarely received this kind of investment.
AI translation is still imperfect, and improving quality across every language is ongoing work. We listen to parents, teachers, and children, correct mistakes, refine translations, and keep improving.
Children can choose a primary language they already know and a target language they are learning. The story appears in both, allowing them to approach something unfamiliar while standing on familiar ground.
A Vietnamese-speaking child can learn English through Vietnamese. A Thai-speaking child can approach the same story through Thai. In each case, the first language provides a way into the second.
The world has already written countless stories. Our work is to help more children reach them.
ReadClub is the bridge I needed at nine and never found. Instead of carrying unfamiliar words through two dictionaries and three languages, a child can hear a story in a language they know, read it in one they are learning, and begin to find their own voice.