Before I took my first European trip, I invested in a phrase book, and I taught myself how to order a coffee and a beer in four languages. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary, although my tortured pronunciation did provide some light relief for the locals.
As a native English speaker, I have a big advantage everywhere I travel: I talk the language much of the world already knows or is keen to learn. But is it simply lazy, or even disrespectful, to try to get by with English when you travel?
Furthermore, can you really claim to know a place when you don’t know the language?
I’ve travelled to scores of countries, and I’ve lived in a few of them. Yet, despite trying, I didn’t learn much Cantonese when I was in Hong Kong, nor did I know a lot of Mandarin when I lived in mainland China.
I spent five years in the United Arab Emirates with barely a word of Arabic to save myself, and I’ve been in Thailand for more than three years in total over two stints, and my Thai is atrocious.
Not knowing the language has led to some difficult moments, such as nearly buying a feminine hygiene product instead of toilet paper. But it’s not just the prospect of embarrassment that’s the issue, it’s a matter of doing the right thing.
Like so many other English speakers, I get by in my own language because (almost all the time) I can. In most countries I’ve visited, I’ve not been far from somebody (often a young person) who can understand me.
I know expatriates in Thailand who are fluent in Thai, and they have made a huge effort to get that way (often with the assistance of a Thai partner). Others have been in the country for years and get by on a few stock phrases.
Very few of the non-Arab people I know in the UAE speak Arabic — although the UAE is one of the few countries in the world where the locals are outnumbered by imported labour. English has become the default lingua franca.
Wherever I go, I still try to learn a few “essential” words and phrases, including polite greetings and ways to obtain coffee and beer.
Partly because I never believe that I’m going to stay in the one place for too long, and partly because there is no imperative to do so, I haven’t made a big-enough effort to learn another language.
The only place I’ve ever been where I’ve been totally surrounded by non-English speakers, and felt lost as a result, is in a small village in southern Belarus where I spent about a month.
The only person who spoke English was my then girlfriend, who taught me the one phrase she said I had to know: “Ya ne ponimayu”.
It means “I don’t understand” in Russian, and it worked well in Minsk, where there was always somebody who had some English (or, in the case of a taxi driver, German, in which I can sometimes get by).
But in Svetlogorsk, a rural town just north of the border with Ukraine, they just thought I was an idiot.
