Can I have chicken? Ok sir, here's your fish

Vietnamese is a difficult language. If you speak a bit of it (I don't) your day is full of hilarious incidents of Vietnamese people not having a clue what you're saying even if you think your pronunciation is dead on.

Example: the word 'nam' means south, year, male and probably many other things. My colleague ran through the differences, with an inflection here and a slight accent there. No difference whatsoever to my ears.

A British colleague who used to live here for ages used to order chicken (gà) at a restaurant and get served fish (cá). The words are hard to tell apart to our untrained ears, and it took him a while to realise!