To the fellow travelers posting here about going to Vietnam:
I just returned from a two month visit there. The smartest thing I did was to take Vietnamese classes at a university in Saigon. I went for four hours a day for two weeks. Unfortunately it was the last two weeks of my trip. Had I done it earlier in my trip I would have gone longer.
The class had five students. The others were from Holland, Japan and Singapore. We had four female teachers, three were very good and one was excellent. (There was a mutual interest between me and one of them but no time to pursue it!) These were professionally trained language teachers, and they started with the basics: phonetics, and also simple grammar. The cost was $54/week.
Although two weeks of language instruction doesn't get one far, it does get one somewhere, and along with the new skills comes increased self-confidence, and increased ability to communicate with Vietnamese people in general and women in particular.
In Vietnam, more than the many other countries I have lived and traveled, the people appreciate it greatly when you try to speak their language. They are so amazed and pleased at seeing a Westerner speak their language their reactions are the same one would experience upon meeting a talking horse.
