It was interesting when I was in Vietnam recently, a lot of Vietnamese people I dealt with outside the cities didn't speak any English at all, except for numbers, or at least pretended as much.

It seems a bit backwards really. It's easy to write down numbers (which they often did, or they showed me the cash I had to pay). Conveniently the motorbike mechanics are usually so good you just point at what's wrong and they'll figure it out pretty quickly.