In 1949, Honey was recruited to take up the Vietnamese language, which was considered very difficult, requiring a special aptitude from classics graduates to master. Honey was persuaded by the 1947 Scarbrough Report, which drew attention both to the importance that increasing contacts between countries would assume after the Second World War and to the serious lack of expertise across Oriental and African languages that the war had revealed. He was trained under J. R. Firth. From 1949 to 1965 he served as the first Lecturer in Annamese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.