[latchkey]

I've driven (by motorbike) around a lot of the areas mentioned. Little has changed in many of the remote villages in a very long time. People still live in the dark ages there, no running water or even bathrooms and very little electricity. It is amazing though... really beautiful, especially in the north. The people always smile at you as you pass by.

As someone who's pretty much tone deaf, I have zero hope of ever learning the language. Hard is an understatement. Makes me sad because it would be interesting to try to connect a bit more with the people there.

[Frotag]

The grammar is really similar to english (subject-verb-object). Words only have one form (they do not change with tense / plurality / etc).

If you translated each word indivdually you'd probably get an almost correct english sentence.

So yeah, I'd like to say it's not super difficult. Especially compared to other east-asian languages like cn, jp, kr. But I'm probably biased since I grew up around it (in the States, so it isn't my primary language).

[latchkey]

> The grammar is really similar to english (subject-verb-object). Words only have one form (they do not change with tense / plurality / etc).

The issue isn't reading/writing... it is speaking... I literally can't tell the difference between the tones, it all sounds exactly the same to me. This also makes it really hard for me to reproduce the tones when speaking it.

> If you translated each word indivdually you'd probably get an almost correct english sentence.

I heard that google translate actually went from Vietnamese->Chinese->English, which explained why it often came out as gibberish. Over the years, the translations have improved and I think is much better now. Apple translate, which just added Vietnamese recently, is quite good.

> But I'm probably biased since I grew up around it (in the States, so it isn't my primary language).

That's exactly it... I didn't grow up around it.

[simplicio]

As a native English speaker, I find written Vietnamese to be quite easy compared to other western languages. The grammar is relatively simple, and words only have one form, there's no changes due to gender/tense/number.

Even ignoring the issue of tones though, spoken Vietnamese is pretty rough for ears used to English. Vowels are extremely hard to distinguish, and the fact that almost all words are one or two syllables means each phoneme matters a lot, there's less room for error in pronunciation to still remain comprehensible.

Indeed, as the article briefly touches on, the similarity between the pronunciation of different words is something evident to the Vietnamese themselves, and word-play using this is the basis of a lot of poetry and humor.

[01100011]

It also doesn't help that N vs S Vietnamese sounds fairly different. My father in-law joked he probably couldn't understand someone from the central coast.

There's quite a bit to remember regarding proper pronouns due to one's relative age from what I can gather.

I've gotten to the point where I can pick out a few words in spoken Viet but I don't know if I'll ever be conversant.