Travelling to other Cultures

          Nowadays people love to spend their money on lots of things. Some choose to spend it with friends. Some choose to spend it with their families. Some chose to spend it for themselves. But what sets them apart from the past generations is that this generation, people love to spend their money on travelling a lot more than before. With tourism on the roof and rising, people are a lot more engaged to save money for travelling purposes. This is where language comes in as a factor in touring new cultures across the globe.

          Unless you are a linguistic person or you know somebody that can guide you around a new place, you need to learn the basic language of every culture you will meet along your journey. Even though English is a universal language, not everybody in the world and not every culture can speak the language fluently. It's still better to learn, even if it's basic, to learn other culture's language. When you speak in their own language, even if it's not fluent, they will still appreciate that you tried to communicate with them in their own language and it will be seen very genuine.

          Learning other people's language will certainly lead to better experiences and memories that you will always cherish. That is why this site is a great way to learn each other's linguistic differences that will help us be more knowledgeable when it comes to travelling. 

I think it is rude not to have a try at a few simple words or phrases abroad. I have lived in Spain a year now and there are English people here who have lived here over 25years + and can't say more than please and thank you. The Spanish are very welcoming and encouraging with language learners patient too! 

I generally try to learn the basics of any country i visit, the hellos and goodbyes, please and thank you, numbers, and useful phrases.

The parts i love the most in learning anything new is finding the shared heritage of a language itself, within English we have a lot of Greek, Latin, Germanic, and Scandinavian roots, which i find help with a lot of other European languages, for example Latin is the base of all the romantic languages, so having a basic knowledge of it will help when learning dozens of others

Personally I don't expect everyone to speak my language when visiting my country. I don't mind speaking English with tourists or any other language we have in common. 

I love finding the rootsroots too makes me marvel at the connectivity and how languages evolved aasaas we 

I travel about 6 months a year, mostly to asia, and mostly to places where I speak the languages. I do admit, however, that sometimes I go to countries for several weeks and don't speak any of the local language. It feels a bit awkward, haha. But if I really like the country, I'll learn the language and come back again. That's what happened with the Philippines most recently. I've finally reached B2 in Tagalog. 

For this question,

I'd like to bring my country(South Korea) into this.

Some students from other countries come to Korea to learn Korean language.

However, they're so afraid of speaking Korean to native Korean speakers in Korea.

They think that it will be embarrassing if they're wrong to say.

For Korean, we do not expect any perfect Korean speaking from foreigners. As we think that Korean language is hard to pronounce and learn.

We normally expect foreigners to speak English to communicate. However, when they speak Korean to us, we're more than welcome.

We do not judge any foreigners by their Korean language skills, but we appreciate their attempt to speak Korean.

If you ever plan to visit Korea, it would be better to know how to say "Thank you," "Hello". When you speak those words, it should be the good start to learn about Korean.

In my experience it can sometimes be a bit tough when you travel to a country whose native language you're trying to learn. While staying in Denmark this summer has helped me immensely with my understanding and fluency (it's still far from great, but it's better than it was :D), it was sometimes SO HARD to get Danes to speak Danish to me, since we were all good at English and it was much easier to talk that way. It didn't help me improve my Danish, though!

And sometimes, of course, if they did want to speak Danish to me, I'd have trouble understanding them because of my narrow vocabulary, or they'd have trouble understanding me because of my poor pronunciation. It got better though, and I like to think it still gets better. I'm hoping to go next summer as well, with another year of studying under my belt.

Kosta.Cirkovic wrote:

it was sometimes SO HARD to get Danes to speak Danish to me

Yeah, I've heard about that. You may be stuck talking to teachers for a while