How To Practice Foreign Language While Traveling

A common misconception that I often hear expressed is the idea that travel is a good way to learn a foreign language. It simply isn’t. You can spend years traveling through the same language region and come out of it not being able to speak more than it takes to order a beer and ask where the John is. Many — if not, most — travelers fall into this category. How many people have you met who have been living in Mexico, China, Japan for years who can’t mutter much of anything in the dominant local language?

Primarily, the reason for this is that you don’t need to learn the local / regional language if you speak English in most parts of the world. And if it’s not something that’s needed then it’s really difficult to stay motivated to invest the thousands of hours and pain, frustration, and embarrassment that it takes to learn a foreign language.

We all see these ads from companies promising that you can learn a language fast and easy, “speak Spanish in 30 days,” but the fact of the matter is that learning to speak a foreign language well is one of the most difficult things that a human can do. There are very few intellectual challenges that even come close to it. Even babies and children have to put a lot of time and effort into it. I mean, it takes a person at least two years of constant immersion in their native language before they can say much of anything and a full five years before you can really say that they speak it.

I do not believe that immersion in a foreign language helps all that much until you are at a high-mid to advanced stage in your study of it. It can help you get a feel for the beat and the rhythm of it, but gibberish will always be gibberish.

To learn to speak a foreign language you need to put in thousands of hours of study and targeted practice and, oddly, travel can sometimes get in the way of this.

The following video from Steve Kaufman got me thinking about my own language learning journeys and how I mistakenly thought simply going to a country was enough to learn the language. I learned this the difficult way when studying Mandarin in Hangzhou. At one point I realized that I could either go out and enjoy the city or I could actually learn to speak the language by sitting in my room studying. It seems contradictory at first, but sitting in that room like a hermit for months and months pouring over books was how I was eventually became able communicate in the language well enough to travel to remote areas, work as a journalist, and write books about the country.

What’s interesting is when he mentions how he feels his Turkish had actually gotten a little worse from traveling in Turkey, which flies in the face of the role that we assume travel has in language learning … but is something that I can really identify with.

I’ve always felt this way with Spanish, a language that I speak at a B1 / B2 level. Whenever I put off tutoring sessions and formal study and go out for a stint of travel in Latin America I always come back feeling a little rusty. I thought this was an odd quirk but, apparently, other people experience it too.

Another thing that Kaufman says above that I like is basically that travel isn’t the best way to practice a foreign language but it is a good way to get a deeper impression and understanding of a language. Like he said in the beginning of the video, both travel and language learning are ultimately about the same thing: exploration. They go hand in hand, and once you’ve put in the time to learn a language a new world of travel that you never knew existed will open up before you.

While travel isn’t the best means for learning language, it can be a means — and once you get to a more advanced stage in your learning it can actually be very effective. Here are some tips for utilizing travel to enhance the language learning experience.

Prepare in advance

Like Kaufman says, six months is a good runway to intensively practice a foreign language before traveling.

It’s dumb trying to make people speak to you in a target language when you can’t say or understand much of anything. While it can be fun to try out a new language while ordering in a restaurant or asking directions or something, this really isn’t going to get you anywhere. To really be able to practice a language when traveling, you need to at least be conversational — A2 to B1, ten to twenty thousand known words, and a firm grasp of the basic grammatical structures. This takes time.

Isolate people who speak the target language

Regardless of whether this is their intention or not, professional tutors may be native speakers but they are not live speakers. They learn to speak clearly in a way that a learner can more easily understand. They know the words and phrases that you know and adapt accordingly. A live speaker knows none of this, may speak with a regional accent, and ultimately isn’t being paid to make you understand him. Going from a tutor to a live speaker is like the difference between practicing in a rifle range and going into a war zone. You have no idea what’s coming next … and more often than not you get obliterated.

So travel for the purpose of learning a foreign language is often a game of isolating potential practice targets. Unless you’re at too low of a level, the person is busy, or you’re not understanding what’s being said, you will often be responded to in the language that you start speaking with someone.

Basically, what you want is a space where it’s just you and a local who’s full attention you have. Empty cafes and bars are good places to chat with workers, long bus or train journeys are good for conversing with the people sitting near you. My favorite option is to take Ubers and taxis rather than busses, subways, and trains within cities because this is basically the height of isolation — you have a person stuck in a small vessel with you who can’t do much else other than respond to all of your stupid questions. I have to admit that I’ve taken Ubers to places I had no interest in being just to have a low-cost tutoring session with a live speaker.

Record your conversations

Another thing that I do when practicing language when traveling is I record my conversations with people. When entering into a potential conversation where I have someone isolated I hit record on an audio app on my phone. I’ll then listen to it later to identify my mistakes or try to decode sections of dialogue that I may not have understood properly the first time around. Listening to yourself speak a foreign language is also a good way to improve your pronunciation and speaking rhythm.

This is a method that was outlined in Kaufman’s book, The Linguist, and one that he applied in the 80s and 90s with a big tape deck or dictaphone. We can do this much more easily and discreetly with our smartphones today. I wouldn’t worry about privacy issues because it’s not like you’re going to be sharing what’s being said or anyone but yourself is going to listen to it. Asking permission to record some stranger talking about nonsense with a foreigner is a good way to weird them out.

Conclusion

We think that traveling the world is akin to cultural immersion. It simply isn’t. When you travel, you often do so in a bubble. The people that you meet are ultimately the same, the conversations that you have are ultimately the same, and the pigeon way that you develop for speaking the local language becomes effective enough to get by and justifies avoiding the effort needed to improve. But you don’t get to break out of the bubble until you speak the local language well, and the only way to do this is through concentrated study and practice rather than osmosis.