Skylar Lindsay, a 1+3 PGR in the SWDTP, applied to receive DLT funding to study Vietnamese as part of his research on coffee production. Below is his account of his DLT experience.
I am a human geographer researching agrarian change, livelihoods and the production of commodities. My PhD research looks at how coffee farmers and processors in Vietnam work to improve their livelihoods by increasing the quality and value of their coffee; this research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Central Highlands of Vietnam between July 2023 and August 2024.

The SWDTP’s Difficult Language Training grant offered crucial support in building the Vietnamese language skills that made my PhD research possible. My research happens through personal relationships: getting to know coffee farmers and processors and their ways of working. Building these relationships requires language skills. I carried out a year of combined language study and research between July 2023 and August 2024—making use of six months of DLT support to focus on language skills during the initial period. The language study itself came together through the people involved in my research: a coffee farmer friend also worked at a local university and introduced me to a language tutor there. The two of us started one-on-one lessons, allowing us to focus on vocabulary and questions relevant for my research. That said, we had a lot to build on and didn’t start from zero.
I first began visiting friends and colleagues in Vietnam in 2017, prior to the PhD, but struggled to get traction with the language. I started studying Vietnamese seriously in 2022 during my MSc, supported by an SWDTP 1+3 grant. My MSc research looked at the rice trade and value chains in Vietnam and during a 1-month fieldwork visit to Hanoi in mid-2022, I took lessons at Vietnam National University using some RTSG funding. Back in Bristol during the first year of the PhD, I continued via online Vietnamese tutoring with an institute called TVO, recommended by a geography professor in the region. These one-to-one lessons prior to the fieldwork itself were very helpful—far more so than any independent studying I had done in the past.
This all provided a foundation that set me up to make significant progress during the second year of the PhD—the DLT + overseas fieldwork. Going into the fieldwork, I was hesitant about language and unsure what to expect but a foundation in the basics of the language gave me enough skills to start asking questions, pointing, and linking up ideas enough to build some vocabulary and make conversation. The people I worked with were also extremely generous in meeting me where I was at: they would learn what I knew and tailor their wording so I could understand. This meant dumbing things down at first but this was only temporary.

During the final six months of the research, I conducted many interviews with two translators—also coffee producers themselves. But when circumstances wouldn’t allow them to join or an interviewee knew some English, I began trying to conduct interviews alone. The results were mixed—and still are—but often successful, depending on local accents and topic. This level of proficiency, and the relationships that it allowed, was only achievable using the added time and support provided by the DLT grant.
