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.

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.