[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.