haha, yes we are on opposite paths, very interesting.
I find it confuses me a lot when there are words that are similar in Vientamese and Mandarin however they have different tones. For example vấn đề is 问题 wèn tí (just used your awesome pinyin converter to put tones on this, thanks Max!) is very similar pronunciation but the tones go exactly the opposite way.
Gives me a headache. Similar for you probably @Ian_Robin-Vietnamese-VN_Intro ?