An American friend who ought to know better persists in addressing his Vietnamese bride, Tram, in a decidedly Western way. If her last name was Poline, she’d be Tram Poline.

Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to mind and might even be charmed by how he mangles her name. In Vietnamese, Tram sounds more like “cham” – as in “champion.”

To be a foreigner in Vietnam is to mumble, fumble and stumble linguistically. English is, after all, the world’s most useful language – and may God save the Queen for that! As a result, most of us are baffled that the combination tr might somehow sound like a ch. I still catch myself mispronouncing Hanoi’s postcard-perfect Truc Bach Lake.

The Vietnamese, in my experience, are more patient and accommodating than most cultures of the way foreigners abuse their language. But we expats learn we can save ourselves some trouble by acquiring the basics of the language sometimes called Taxi Viet. True, the typical cabbie may understand your English much better than your attempt at Vietnamese. But those who lack scruples know how to pad a fare by feigning a bit of confusion.

Now I’m not claiming an entirely firm grip on Taxi Viet. I’m more at the level of just knowing enough to be dangerous. So Rule No. 1, which I often break, still applies: Do not rely on your memory: The address of your destination should be written down to be shown to the driver – and it’s better still to have the route marked on a map.

But if you’re not just passing through, lessons come in handy. Knowing how to count from one to ten – mot, hai, ba, bon, nam, sau, bay, tam, chin, muoi – is useful in giving an address. A phonetic grasp of Vietnamese can help you distinguish between the boulevards named for Ly Thai To and Le Thai To.

And if you know the route, it’s nice to complement hand gestures by saying re phai (turn right), re trai (turn left), di thang (go straight) and dung lai (stop here).

These phrases raise another idiosyncrasy of Vietnam: the accents of north and south. In the south, an R sounds like a plain old R to Westerners, but in the north it is pronounced with a Z sound. Northerners, it seems, just love the sound of Z. To most foreign ears, the letters R, D and the combination of GI all come out sounding like Z from northern lips.

If I had studied Taxi Viet from the start, I might have avoided a drama that frightened my two sons, then ages 9 and 15 months. It started when we climbed into a small cab near Hoan Kiem Lake.

“Phu Tay Ho,” I instructed the driver. A dozen other cabbies managed to understand my effort to pronounce the name of this popular temple near our residence. Not this guy.

“Sheraton,” I said, figuring to make hand gestures from there.

Strangely, he still seemed confused. Later, he missed the turn from busy Au Co, and I became alarmed as the meter pushed to 130,000. I managed to get him to pull over. “Dat qua,” I said – or tried to say, meaning, “Too expensive.” A very useful phrase.

I unloaded the kids, placing the little one in the stroller. I handed the driver a 100,000 dong note and gestured to try to explain how he missed the turn and we were still far from our destination. When he complained angrily in Vietnamese, my response in English was louder and angrier. My older boy was visibly alarmed, and later told me he thought we might duke it out. But when I pushed the stroller away, the driver gave up. We hiked a good mile back before I managed to hail a cab and finish our adventure home.

In retrospect, I don’t think the cabbie was trying to rip me off. No, he was just a young man from the countryside. He still needed to learn his way around Hanoi – and maybe learn some Taxi English too.

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