When we travel, this is something we might face, language barrier. I know some of my friends who are really smart and can speak 6 or 7 languages. However, according to a study, there are more than 7,000 living languages today. It’s impossible to learn all the leagues and we might travel to a country where we couldn’t speak the local language.
Nonetheless, a language barrier could create some interesting memories while traveling. When I was traveling in Bologna, I would like to go to a museum and I had to take a bus. I was in the bus station and asked a lady behind the counter if she could speak English. So, I kindly asked her how to take a bus there, and then she replied everything in Italian. I was standing there and didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t understand what she said because I don’t know Italian. Well, I still found a route to the museum. Nonetheless, when I told an Italian friend about this story, she couldn’t stop laughing.
Even though I can’t speak many languages, I still find some useful words in different languages. For example, “thank you/ thanks” are definitely great words for us to learn. When I was traveling in Brazil, I said “obrigado” to a custom staff and she was laughing. In Japan, people are truly polite there and I always remember to say “arigato”, so I won’t look rude.
Of course, it’s beneficial to us to learn more languages. The more languages we learn, the easier we can communicate with people from different countries. Nevertheless, there are surely some languages that we couldn’t understand. We might have to use body languages or gestures to communicate while traveling in some countries. Meanwhile, since we can find a lot of information online, it’s not that difficult to do some homework to learn some simple words such as “thank you” or “excuse me” before traveling. These two words did help me a lot when traveling.
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