Chinese always intimidated me. The tones that, if gotten wrong, can result in your referring to your mother as a horse; and the inscrutable ideographic characters running together uninterrupted across store fronts and the pages of novels, once somewhat representative of their meaning and now completely abstracted or long employed phonetically rather than semantically. These two combined to make me avoid approaching the language for a long time.

So when travels took me to Taiwan, I was discouraged. How could I possibly accumulate any useful amount of Chinese? Not to mention Taiwan uses the difficult traditional characters whereas most curricula employ the simplified characters of Mainland Mandarin, and that the Taiwanese people also have their own dialect of Mandarin that was used against them in mortal determinations during the peak of ROC oppression. It’s too hard!

Why even learn?

As a native English speaker, one who has been traveling for a long time, it is quite known to me that throughout much of the world I can get by as I am. English is the lingua franca of our modern Earth. Learning the local tongues to some degree, especially where unique orthographies are concerned, can be very helpful, but foreign tongues are by no means the obstruction to travel they’d have been a hundred, even fifty years ago. So it certainly would seem I’m forcing an unnecessary challenge on myself: homework for traveling! Of course such an attitude explains how so many travelers show up to countries completely unaware of the political history with which their country was often intimately involved. What an opportunity to lightly tease my upcoming article about colonialism: spoilers, it’s a more complicated topic than either the left or right back home would have me believe.

But of course I’m one of those dorks who spent their college years studying pronunciation charts, writing systems, syntax trees and dialectal shifts tied to famine, war, colonialism and other forms of human migration. I am a linguist. Hear me /ɹoə/.

So every new nation I visit, I have to dabble in the local lingo, especially when there’s a new writing system to learn. Japan had no new writing system to teach me, but I spent every subway and bus ride I took staring at the signs, memorizing the pronunciation of places' characters through their adjacently printed English names. It was worth it, as the handful of books I swiped from hostel libraries have proven, as well as the quickness with which I adapted to Chinese.

I had a great deal of trepidation about Chinese! But Japanese’s inventory of Chinese characters look a lot more like the Traditional set Taiwan employs than do the simplified characters of the PRC. And I had similar opportunity to practice in the subway reading characters, only this time it was like being in a Romance speaking country and recognizing so many cognates you start to feel like one of the languages really is just a superset of the other. Japanese has a relationship to Modern Chinese similar to that of English to Romance languages, with academic prestige of Classical Chinese and Latin being the links.

Tones came up very infrequently but in my trials with Duolingo, which would often either mark my speaking attempts correct whether I’d yet uttered a syllable or not, or refuse to recognize any human speech at all, I found them much simpler than expected. There’s a certain musical quality to them that should be very simple for anyone with any experience singing. Studying Thai and Vietnamese for the preceding two and half months could only have facilitated me as well.

“Excuse me, I am American!”

Duolingo Vietnamese, Lesson 1

Is there value in such an exercise?

Value is never essential. It is evaluated and subjective. As terrifying an idea as it is to recognize people around you will value you differently if at all, human life has no inherent value. We give it value. To come down a few degrees of severity — or irreverence: would you stop reading if I admitted as much? — there’s value in such an exercise if you assign it such. Studying Thai was exciting for me because the language has its own writing system, and an Abugida at that, a type which which I have only sparing experience. It has even given me the silly little idea of traveling to the Caucuses this summer for the simple pleasure of admiring street signs adorned with the Georgian and Armenian scripts.

Practically, there’s not a whole lot of value. I seemed occasionally to be taken more seriously haggling at markets when I could operate in local numbers. The biggest practical gain in my experience was just ease of communicating intention with regards to places. I mentioned Ninh Binh recently. How do you pronounce that? Most travelers will say something like /nin bin/ which is not terrible, but definitely not right. Fortunately it’s a common tourist destination so the Vietnamese are typically familiar with its English pronunciation, but what if you were going somewhere a little less common? This is where I think it was most useful.

Take the trouble to pronounce the street names right
People like it when you show respect

The Mountain Goats “Lizard Suit”

For the most part, locals didn’t want me to struggle through ordering in Thai or Vietnamese. They were happy for me to be making the effort, but they were working. They had business to tend. Other customers. Food prep for the dinner rush or, more commonly, dirty dishes because I had a tendency to walk in just as they were preparing to close up for the night. But less touristy places like those in Taiwan and Japan would often not switch to English unless (until) I proved incapable of sorting our business out with the local lingo.

Taipei

I’m writing this from Bohol right now. Taipei was such a blur I didn’t have time to sit down and write about it. I was with old friends, or I’d likely have skipped the island entirely. Still, visiting it was immensely valuable to me from an historical and linguistic perspective. My education on Taiwanese history in school started and stopped with “The ROC fled there after losing to the PRC and it’s been a tense situation ever since.” The deeper perspective on the legacy of Taiwan’s relationship to the West, to China, to Japan, is more heartbreaking and confusing than that. Naturally. But I’d never been to a country before that was so prepared to be invaded. So certain that their wonderful lives would be at any moment changed, even ended, by a belligerent that claims possession of, and quite likely has a strong international legal claim to, their home. Still it perplexes me to think China would ever bother disrupting the current state of affairs.

In Cebu, I was speaking with a Czech couple and we eventually got on to politics. To Trump v Biden (the number of taxi drivers in SEA who have asked me which I support is staggering). The Russia-Ukraine war. This latter point proved of great concern to them. Anyone familiar with Czech history, perhaps via Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, will remember the events of 1968 that scarred the country so deeply. Repeatedly they made comments suggesting a deep-seated concern with Russia’s possibly invading the Czech Republic, and eventually I had to stop them and ask if that was an actual fear in their country. Rather, it’s a strong fear in all the countries with whom Russia shares a border, and while Czechia is still a few borders away, the past 15 years have demonstrated no one has any intention of intervening in anything Russia does in Asia or Eastern Europe.

It’s easy to say, especially for an American, that the current era is once again one such that might makes right. That the powerful always get their way in this world. No one would interfere with China on Taiwan just as no one has interfered with Russia on Ukraine. No one has interfered with the US on any of its campaigns either. But the sad thing is that, no one ever seems to. Nobody interfered with Armenia and Azerbaijan. Nobody is interfering with Sudan. Nobody is interfering with Myanmar. And when I say nobody, I mean nobody with something like “justice” or the peaceful flourishing of humanity in mind. Only those with political or economical interests bother. Maybe it’s better to just let these things sort themselves out. After all, wasn’t failing to let these small things sort themselves out what led to WWI? Contrarily, wasn’t it waiting so long in expectation these things would sort themselves out that led to the Shoah and WWII?

Traveling isn’t all about maintaining your Duo streak and ogling impressive civic infrastructure.

Some tips on learning languages for travel

Don’t let perfect become the enemy of being understood

Perfect Tagalog/Japanese/Swahili/French/whatever is not acquired in a few months of learning, let alone the handful of hours budgeted prior to a trip. But one can be understood by focusing on nailing the sounds, memorizing a few important words and phrases, and, most importantly, by speaking! Speak speak speak speak speak! As much as you can! Say all the dumbest things that come to your mind, ask them where Brian is, repeat the bill back to the waiter, just speak as much as you can.

Bad pronunciation is your enemy

You will not be understood if your vowels are little bit too forward, your consonants too aspirated. Consider when you run into someone who speaks your language but with a very thick accent. The kind of person you can’t understand save a few words here and there despite your efforts. You don’t have to sound like this in your target language. Get on Anki, look up a shared deck with minimal pairs and practice the hell out of those. Youtube has videos for this, Fluent Forever’s curriculum focuses heavily on this: the resources are out there.

Phrases you can permute are key

• Where is x
• I want/need/like x
• We are going to x
• You are x

Don’t underestimate the value of using these over and over with new values of x, because when traveling you will use these over and over again with new values of x. I would venture most of the sentences you utter in your own language throughout the day are these phrases with new values of x.

Numbers are very important

If you plan to spend money, you should learn your numbers. If you plan to haggle, you won’t get anywhere without your numbers. Numbers are so very very useful and so very very easy to practice.

• 1 + 1 = 2
• It costs 5000 pesos
• I will have 3 pies of pizza

Don’t apologize for being a beginner

They can tell you didn’t grow up with the language. Don’t waste your memory or anybody’s time pointing out that it’s hard to learn their language or that you only know a little bit. It is one of the most effective ways to kill a conversation in any language, even your native tongue. Focus on learning, and saying, things that are meaningful.

Introductions are more than “Hi, my name is Zoonepher”

Learn how to say your profession or field. Where you live. Why you wanted to visit this particular country. These are personally meaningful things and as such are not only easier to remember, but are going to leave a more lasting impression. This is how you get invited to parties.

Culture informs language

Not to cross advertise other sections of my blog, but elsewhere I’ve argued that shared context, often in the form of culture, is all that language really boils down to. Learn about the target culture. It helps with the language.