How do travellers visiting several countries manage language wise? I am a native English speaker. I have been learning Spanish for three years and I am sort of at a functional level, but I am planning a gap year/career break next year, and my countries of choice are India, Italy, Spain or Latin America (to practise Spanish), USA, and either Canada or China for working. If time, I would also like to visit Portugal and Hong Kong. Between them, thats a lot of languages! I am not talented at learning languages at all. It has taken my three years of study just to reach where I am now with Spanish and I am not going to be at a high level in any other by next year. I like to meet locals and learn about the history and culture of places I visit, not just stick to resorts packed full of native English speaker tourists where everything is home from home, so I could need some language skills.
Do you try to learn the very basic words in other languages and take a phrasebook, try to manage on English and hope that their are English speakers around wherever you are, or any other strategies?
Just concentrate on common words and phrases in each country - maybe a little italian, portuguese, and mandarin. You already seem to have spanish coverred enough to get by and then some. English is common in most tourist areas across the world.
Many foreigners live in Hong Kong for years with only rudimentary, badly pronounced Cantonese (if that), so you will definitely be able to have a great time even if you only speak English. Mandarin will get you a long way in mainland China, and if you're going to work there it's definitely worth investing some time to at least have some 'survival' phrases.
Just because you don't speak the local language doesn't mean you won't be able to interact with the locals and doesn't mean that you won't be able to travel off the beaten track. And remember that many people speak English as a foreign language - in China, for example, people will be thrilled at the chance of being able to practise with you.
Just to add that it's a fact that English is very much an international lingua franca and will get you a long way. Speaking English doesn't have to imply that you're an ignorant Anglophone who thinks that everyone should speak English! A good attitude, including a willingness to thrown in the odd local phrase where possible, can go a long way.
You don't really have a lot of languages to learn on that list. You've already got English and Spanish, so that covers (well enough) India, Spain, Latin America, USA, Canada, and probably Hong Kong. That leaves Italy and perhaps Portugal and China. Get a phrase book for Italian and if necessary Portuguese, and practise pronunciation somehow. Your Spanish will give you a leg up on both Really you can get by in both places with only English but you'll have a better time if you pick up the rudiments and it won't be hard.
You have to decide how much effort to invest in which brand of Chinese depending on where you'll be and for how long. But most visitors there invest no time at all, so anything at all will put you in the above-average class.
Have fun.
In Portugal, you will get along with "Portignol", which is a mixture of spanish and portuguese. Just speak spanish with a portuguese pronounciation and replace "gracias" with "obrigada"
otherwise you will be fine with english, although I can understand that you hesitate to speak your native language abroad. I try to avoid that with my native language (Geman) all the time...
I have always tried to at least learn "hello" and "thank you" in the local language. (I once counted that I could say either "hello" or "good morning" in something like 20 languages.) I studied Spanish & German in school and I've taken a couple of refresher classes in those languages when I know I would be traveling somewhere that they would be useful. I've also checked out tapes from the library to pick up a few travelers phrases in things like Swahili or Indonesian. When I traveled in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, I found that Spanish was very useful as I occasionally ran into people I did not believe existed--Swiss monoglots. Using a combination of my admittedly primitive Spanish and the Italian I picked up rather rapidly, I was able to communicate.
The only language I actually studied for travel was Turkish. On my first trip to Turkey, the Turks responded so wonderfully to my attempts to speak a little Turkish, that I began to take an interest in the language. I also fell in love with the country, so before my second trip, I got a "teach yourself Turkish" set of tapes & spent 4 months working on it (there are no Turkish language classes within 100 miles of me). I did my own refreshers before subsequent trips. I never became anything near fluent, but I do have a vocabulary of a few hundred words and I can construct complete sentences in the present, past, and continuous present tenses.
There is no way I could have a meaningful conversation about history and culture in any language other than English, but I can at least communicate at some level.
I think you will find that your Spanish will improve by leaps and bounds just being in a Spanish speaking country for a while. It just happens.
It is common courtesy to learn a few basic phrases of the country you are visiting. But we anglosphones are lucky that our language is now the international language. I could certainly not manage to speak the language of every country I visit or else I would have to have mastered: English and French (well, I can do those), Spanish (Castillian and Catalan), Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, Serbo-Croat, Latvian, Romanian, Maltese, Greek, Turkish, Arabic in various forms, Afrikaans, Zulu (actually my first language, so my mother said, but I have lost it), Hindi, Konkani, Thai, Cambodian, Lao, Vietnamese, Togalog, Sinhalese, Bahasa, Polish, Russian...
I would suggest, in addition to "hello," "please," "thank you," and "goodbye," one phrase that has always helped me: "Do you speak English?"
I'm pretty fluent in Spanish, but am shaky in French, so I almost always ask "Parlez vous français?" if I need more than very basic information. And many younger people in France speak some English, although they will usually say they don't if you address them in English.
A phrase book can be very helpful, but I would recommend having it in your hand when you use it, rather than memorizing anything. In Italy once, I told a chambermaid that I wanted some shirts laundered, and she responded with a question; I then said "Non capisco italiano," which led only to her assuring me that I did. It took only a few seconds more to display my real ignorance of the language, but if I had had the book in my hand rather than in my memory she would have had a less frustrating encounter with me that day.
Learning Chinese is not an easy thing... interesting because tonal... but difficult. Have been studying for three years now, and only now my vocab really is starting to kick off...
what I did when I traveled in other countries is this: I made a memory card game... it's fun and easy to play. I just bought some papers and made the game myself... asked for words typical for the country... mosque in an Arab country and chopsticks in Chinese...
Had loads of fun with it.
trusted partner
