Learn a Language For Your Holiday
Whether you’re visiting warmer climes, or somewhere with arctic conditions, learning some of the local language might help enhance your holiday travel experience! Here we outline some of the perks of giving the local lingo a shot whilst you travel! Get ready to pick up that phrasebook and learn a language for your holiday!
Cultural Immersion
As you probably already know, part of the joy of going on holiday is the new cultures that you get to experience. Learning a new language is arguably the key to unlocking the heart of a culture. By learning a language for your holiday, you will be able to gain a greater understanding of the customs and traditions of those you meet. You may even be able to spark a friendship with some of those people and find some of the more traditional local spots to eat, drink, and spend the day.
Break Down Barriers
Tying into making friends with the locals – being able to converse a small amount in the local language may reduce travel frustrations and miscommunications. Imagine hopping on the bus abroad and being able to ask for your destination and the cost without any doubt about what’s going on – Eton Institute reports that “learning the basics of the local language will help you get around places and make travel so much easier.” Additionally, locals often respect you giving it a shot – even if you don’t get it right!
Making Memories
Through these factors combined, you may find that your holiday is a more relaxed experience than previous trips. Plus, by talking to the locals you may see a side of your destination that you didn’t see advertised before you arrived! Whether it’s a café that’s popular with the locals for having the best food, or a certain beach that is quieter than another – the perks of having had a conversation with someone local to the area means that you will gain priceless insider knowledge.
Overall, there are many positives to giving learning the language of your destination a go. Have you seen our other post on the more general benefits of learning a language? Read it here!
The importance of a phrasebook on holiday…
Recent reports have explained how a Polish man recently spent 18 days in São Paolo’s airport. Having arrived at the airport on a flight from London the 17th June, he finally left the airport on Tuesday 5th July. In a story reminiscent of the Tom Hanks film “The Terminal” (though without the appearance of Catherine Zeta Jones, as far as I’m aware), Robert Wladyslaw Parzelski arrived at the airport, on a mission to go to Brazil and then return to England with two telephones. Why he was undertaking this trip with this particular goal in mind is, as yet, unknown. (more…)
Are Chinese people forgetting how to write?
When foreigners learn Chinese, they often struggle getting to grips with writing the characters. There are around 50,000 characters in modern written Chinese, but in order to be considered literate, an adult needs to know only 3,000-4,000 (a 1,000-2,000 character vocabulary would allow you to comfortably read a Chinese newspaper).
However, more and more Chinese citizens feel they are losing the ability to write by hand, and many are signing up for exams to try and combat this.
The HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi – literally Mandarin level exam) test was originally aimed at foreigners learning Chinese, but was introduced for Chinese nationals in several cities and provinces in 2007. Because so many people use computers in their work and hardly ever pick up a pen, their written literacy skills are in decline – this is true all over the world, not just in China.
When typing Chinese characters rather than writing them by hand, a person types the sound of the character (a bit like spelling a word out) then the computer suggests possible characters for that sound from which they choose the appropriate one:
It’s a bit like multiple choice, whereas if you were writing the same word by hand, you would have to think of the character yourself.
The Shanghai Language Commission conducted a survey among university students, which found that while many know what the characters should look like, they are unable to handwrite them.