Language barriers
 

I've been touring for a long time. Decades, in fact. But with the exception of one trip to Tanzania, all my touring has been in Europe and North America. As a result language difficulties haven't figured much - English as a first language, supplemented by schoolboy French and a smattering of restaurant Spanish and Italian has been enough to get me what I need.

But it would be interesting to do some developing world touring before I get too old to be adventurous. And the thread on equipment in the developing world got me thinking. How does one manage when upcountry in Myanmar, or Kyrgyzstan, or wherever and in need of repairs, or supplies, or just advice on routes when the road is washed out? There are plenty of people here with experience of touring in extremely remote and largely monolingual environments, and I'd be interested to hear stories of how they've coped. If they're funny, so much the better.

i've toured in china, thailand, cambodia, vietnam, laos, myanmar, malaysia.
i speak passable chinese (better than some chinese, hahah), and nitnoy thai.
in big cities, can always find someone that speaks english. smaller towns
schoolkids can help, or know a local english teacher....who may (or NOT!)
speak english. monks in wats/temples often can speak some english.
miming, drawing pictures can work with "things" but not directions.

first thing you want to do is get yourself a phrasebook. lonely planet makes a small one
with the essentials for 5 languages:thai, viet, khmer, lao, burmese.

learn the numbers and how to count, helpful with kilometer posts.
http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=495932

learn some useful phrases: how far is....? which road goes to.....? where's the w.c.?
where is a guesthouse/market/bank.....?

write the most important ones on a small paper to carry in your handlebar bag. i keep
the ones i use most on small cards in the mapcase, visible so i don't have to root around
to find them when needed.

of course, you could use cell phone apps. there's one that uses your cell phone camera,
take photo of chinese menu, text recognition software will translate for you. if you
trust the translations.

major highways will usually have english, or at least a recognizable approximation of
where you're headed.
http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=495933

of course out in the countryside, you never know what kind of signage (if any) you'll
come across.
http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=495934

try to find a bilingual map. if not, compare to an english map, know the pronunciation
and characters for your destination and some towns along the way. very useful if you
need to take a bus. to/from cities will be in local characters, any announcements will
be in local language. if in english, be careful.

things to watch out for:

locals have their own names for towns and villages, their local dialect may (will!) be
incomprehensible. town names on maps may not match town names on signs may
not match town names used in the towns.

locals often don't know the area outside a few km or less around their village. heck,
some locals don't know the name of their village. "excuse me, what place is this?"
"town" "okay, what's the name of the town?" "here."

locals mostly cannot read maps. they love maps, and will gladly tear yours out of
your hands to look at it. they can't help you, but they think it's awesome magic.

locals do not know how to measure distance. in china, if you ask how far, the answer
is usually "very far" "not far" or "too far to go on a bicycle" if you ask how many
kilometers, the answer is always "2", whether it's two or twenty or seventy-five.

some languages do not have words for yes/no, or they aren't used. if used, wrong.
as a foreign traveler, never ask "is this the way to....?" or "is this the road to....?"
cause the answer is always yes.

do not think you're clever by asking "where does this road go?" because the answer
will be "where do you want to go?" if you name a destination, that's where the
road goes.

do not get more clever by asking "how do i get to....?" as you'll be told to go to
the bus station, or told you can't get there from here.

This has the potential for a good thread. (Subscribing)

My almost off topic contribution is this: One challenge I find in Latin America is that beyond the language barrier, there is a cultural issue with directions.

IME Americans tend to be the best at giving directions. They tell you "go 5 miles north, then turn right at the church, if you get to the bridge, you went too far.". Most are however skeptical you can ride 5 miles on a bicycle and have very little sense of terrain.

Latins tend to start "do you know where the blue church is?" They also tend to mention a lot of landmarks you will pass on they way, none of which require any action. Then when i pass the big mango tree, i remember something was said about a tree, was I supposed to turn here?

Many addresses in Costa Rica include nearby landmarks. "Next to the green church" or "diagonal from Pulperia Chepe". Some actually use the word "antiguo" which means it is no longer there. "Next to the former School".

i'd like to tour there, but i never could quite get a handle on latin. it was all greek to me.

Sed hoc primum caput eget nisi si quem paulo longius progressus vias et si velis venire aliqua scribat et non de omni vel youll 'postulo ut satus, ut ut dixi, hoc capite, uh, unde vos vultis abire?

I don't think this is necessarily a cultural difference. Certainly in Spain or Argentina, for example, you'll may get directions more like the ones you are accustomed to (but I haven't been far off the beaten track in either country and things do work differently in rural areas). Costa Rica is different but then people tend to navigate by the use of landmarks since street names and numbers tend to be chaotic to non-existent (at least they were when I was there last).

That's not terribly different by the way from navigating in Boston (at least before GPS units became common). Street signage is pretty chaotic, the streets typically do not have uniform names (they often change the name of a street after a block or two), and they are laid out along paths that people created long before the automobile showed up. When I first moved to Boston (pre GPS days, :), I was totally at sea driving a car. Public transportation is better than driving esp. in Boston but sometimes you have to drive. You can't really navigate, as I said, by means of signage. Finally the light bulb went off and I started driving by using landmarks and that got me oriented.

As late as the turn of the century, that's how we gave directions in the US as well (by using landmarks). There's Ken Burns documentary called "Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip" narrated by Tom Hanks. It's about a vermont doctor who was the first person to drive across the US in 1903 along with his dog naturally, :). Horatio's Drive . About the Film | PBS

It's a lot of fun and a great social history of the US. At the beginning of the film, they talk about how directions were given in the US. It is a lot like you described Costa Rica.

pobre de vos, :).

So far I have only toured in English speaking countries and Japan, my Japanese ability is good enough to have a chat about most things, I have and a few interesting experiences in Japan though, like trying to explain what happened in a crash to the police.

If nothing else, knowing "Hello" and "Thank you" with a big smile and a respectful nod/bow of the head can get you a long long way :)

Finland is a bit tough language wise. Yeah a lot of Finns speak English but it not an Indo-European language (related to Hungarian and one of the Baltic states). There are some basic words that most European languages share which is really helpful but not in Finland. Plus the mosquitoes there put the ones in Minnesota to shame. Best bread I've ever had though and the saunas are pretty cool.

If the saunas are cool, you're dong it wrong. :)

C'est une malapropism, malheureusement, ;)

Well, up to a point. It certainly disposes people to try to be helpful. But I'm not sure it's going to cut the mustard when the question is remotely technical.

i may be making too much of this, of course, having been scarred for life years ago in Spain when attempting to order chicken by saying polla instead of pollo. The hilarity among the waiting staff was something to behold.

@saddlesores, speaking Chinese and Thai is tantamount to cheating, really. The phrasebook/cards idea is a good one, but I think I might be struggling with recognising the characters. And I absolutely get the dialect thing. Rudimentary Castilian Spanish didn't help enormously even in some bits of Catalonia. I could make myself understood, but couldn't understand the replies. For that matter, there are parts of the UK in which I have to concentrate to pick up the local accents...

:lol:

Re: dialects. This is a tough nut to crack, as there may be no way to learn them in advance, even if one knows the root language. I'm able to communicate in French when I am in Paris, Quebec City, or Geneva, but I'm lost when visiting certain areas of rural France and Quebec!

I think it's worthwhile to invest time learning a language before a visit. Before heading off for Ticino and northern Italy, I signed up for a 15-week introductory Italian course at a local school, and did my homework every week! On the tour, I was able to ask for directions, understand signs and menus, etc. Although I couldn't have "real" conversations, I knew enough to scrape by.

Even a little learning can go a long way. 35 years ago I hitchhiked through Turkey. On the day I arrived, I happened to meet another traveller who had spent significant time in the country. He taught me important basics about the language, e.g., when you think you need to communicate "yes" (evet) or "no" (hayir), the words you want to use may be "exist" (var) or "does not exist" (yok). This information proved to be valuable.

A truck driver who picked me up tried to induce me into having sex with him (while he was driving!). At first I feigned not to understand. He persisted. So I said "hayir" ("no"), but he was undeterred. Then I remembered my lesson, and said "yok!" ("doesn't exist!") The driver relented, zipped up, and left me alone!

i feel your pain, having had a similar experience in germany.

went into a shop to get an inner tube ~~~ "schlauch"

but my poor pronunciation made it into ~~~~ "schlumpf"



to my horror, he had one in stock!
oh my lady gaga!
he brought out one of these in the
shape of a dingie bell!!!

http://bluebuddies.com/gallery/Regul...ella_Smurf.jpg

Actually, there seem to be remarkably few on this forum who have pedaled outside of the usual places or who have expressed an interest in doing so. (I started a thread about touring in developing countries not long ago.)

Native English speakers are spoiled, as it has become the de facto world language. I like studying languages and can speak several to varying degrees. Probably the most linguistically isolated I've felt was when I was touring in Laos. I was able to make myself understood with the help of a phrasebook. As was also suggested, it helps to have a bilingual map, too.

I toured in Czechoslovakia back when it was one country and communist. At that time, kids there studied Russian in school, not English. Most adults who were over the age of 40 then could often speak German, however. Anyone who worked in a hotel, restaurant, or bar, was required to be able to speak German because the vast majority of tourists at that time came from either East or West Germany. I got by OK by speaking German.

In Sri Lanka, road signs and many business signs were in English, and I could virtually always find someone who spoke decent English. When I arrived in one town on my bike, I was approached by a German who told me he was on a bike, too. He initiated our conversation in English. While we were talking, I was approached by an English-speaking tout who wanted to get me to stay in his guesthouse. (This didn't happen as often as I understand happens in India.) Anyway, the tout got to be annoying and wouldn't leave us alone, so I started speaking German with the German guy, and the tout eventually left since he couldn't understand us.

There have been several times when I've translated for folks. I remember overhearing a Japanese traveler and a French traveler trying to converse in English. They both had really strong accents and couldn't understand each other's English, so I helped them out. I helped an American converse with 4 French tourists in California. Afterwards, the American guy asked me where I learned my English. :rolleyes:

Another time in a hostel in the French Alps, I was looking at my maps and another traveler asked me in excellent French if I happened to have a guidebook for Switzerland. I told him that I did, but that the book was in English. He said that that was fine, and asked if he could he look at it for a few minutes. I got my guidebook and we continued to speak in French. After several minutes, he suddenly switched into English, the Australian version. So I also switched into English, the American version. A young woman who was seated nearby interrupted us because she was taken aback by our sudden language switch. The same thing happened at an airline office in Paris, where I was trying to learn about my lost luggage. The guy at the counter sounded like a native French speaker to me, and we had been conversing entirely in French. After we had spoken for a few minutes and he had located my flight info, he suddenly switched into native speaker English, the Irish version.

I used to have a French accent when I spoke Spanish. I think I've mostly gotten rid of it. Anyway, I was touring in Mexico with a friend, and a young Mexican woman was telling us about some places to visit near her town. I didn't understand all of what she was saying, and she asked me if I spoke French. I said yes, and she proceeded to tell me everything in fluent French (which I speak better than Spanish). It turned out that her grandfather was originally from France and she grew up speaking both Spanish & French.

I've only biked in Venezuela as far as 3rd world countries go (tho some of Europe's countries in the near past could have been considered 2nd world), so not a lot of advice. However, I have travelled thru several poor countries and it's all the same (but even better with a bike): if someone wants to communicate with you, they'll figure out a way to do it if they don't speak your language. I'm always amazed at how mime sign language works when the participants can't speak with each other. When you're on the bike, people want to communicate even more with you because it's not something they see too often, if at all. Since English is the popular language at the moment (better start learning Chinese though!), usually someone will know some level of it.

Interesting you choose a Nahuatl name. I like.

I like to download google translate language files (such that GT will work offline). Far from perfect but useful nonetheless

That must be a really ancient sign, the distances are all in miles, not kilometers. [I grew up in Burma and still read a little Burmese.]

I find street names useless out in the countryside in France and Italy. It's much more useful to know the towns along the way to your destination and follow signs from one town to the next town.

I've been in the Veneto (Venetian mainland, NE Italy), where I came along a street to a fork and all 3 branches at the junction were signed with the same street name! Then there are the wonderful French junctions where there's a sign pointing one way to "Toutes Directions", while a sign pointing the opposite way says "Autres Directions"!

Must be for Android? The option doesn't seem to exist for iOS (much less Windows/OS X/Linux)

Good point.

It's very true that some are better than others at giving directions. I'm not so sure it's a cultural difference though. Some people, like you say, confuse the situation by telling you about landmarks you'll pass, with it often unclear to the listener which of these are important.

A personal favorite example of useless information is the directions my mother in law gives. They include instructions like "make a hard left where the Methodist church used to be"!

This must be a common occurrence. While cycling through London (England) I asked for directions, and was instructed to turn where the such-and-such pub used to be!

When I responded that I was a visitor to London, and would not be able to recognize the landmark, my helper looked at me quizzically, and repeated the instructions.

Given that we both spoke English, maybe the story illustrates that separating cultural from linguistic differences can be challenging!

I've had a couple of depressing experiences relying on the locals to get proper directions and nowadays rely almost exclusively on GPS.

More than a decade ago, I was in Bejing (for business). Despite having the business card of the (small) hotel were I stayed, the driver told me (sign language) that he didn't know how to get me there (the hotel was located in old Bejing's hutong, a hopeless maze). Fortunately, we were able to navigate with the GPS (back then, i.e. before maps, I used to mark the location of my hotel, wander without worrying and head back using nothing more than the arrow.)

I always liked the sound of it. The word is in English dictionaries, too, but you're absolutely right about its origin.

Here's a story that Québecois cyclists may appreciate. I was on my Bike Friday (a folder w/20" wheels) on le P'tit Train du Nord (a wonderful rail-trail north of Montreal), and a cyclist asked me in French what kind of bike I had. I responded in French, and she no doubt realized I wasn't Québecois myself but also that I wasn't a native French speaker. However, my accent is mostly European French and not identifiable, I'm told. After I explained about my Bike Friday, the very next thing the woman said was, "mais vous êtes d'où, monsieur?" (which basically translates to "where the hell are you from?")

Another time in Canada, an American friend & I had just boarded a ferry with our bikes to go from the îles de la Madeleine (Magdalen islands) to Prince Edward Island. A couple got out of their vehicle and started chatting with us in French. They were intrigued by our Bike Fridays. I think that I was talking to the husband, and my friend was talking to the wife. (My friend also speaks fluent French.) After a few minutes, the man asked me why we had come all the way to the Magdalen islands from Europe. I told him we weren't European. He just assumed that because we could both speak French, that we had to be European. A couple of hours later during the voyage, he sat down and chatted with us in almost flawless English (which is why Montreal is the one francophone city in the world where I'm sometimes a little scared to speak French).

I sometimes have a difficult time understanding Québecois French, but the Acadian French spoken on most of the Magdalen islands is a lot more difficult to understand. We stayed on a B&B there, and saw mainly the wife. One day, her husband came in while we were eating breakfast. My friend asked him what he did for a living. He said something which sounded like "suis pechdoma". After the husband left, my friend asked me if I understood what the man said. I told him that I thought he said "je suis pecheur de homard". (I'm a lobster fisherman)

I was touring in Costa Rica and stopped to ask a man for directions, in Spanish. He replied to me in English that he didn't understand. He was a retired ex-pat from North America and couldn't speak any Spanish.

I was coming down a pass in Chile and saw a touring cyclist coming toward me. I stopped and learned that he spoke German. He had grown up in East Germany so he hadn't studied either English or Spanish as a kid. He was thrilled that I could speak German with him. It was his first day in Chile and I don't think he'd been able to actually converse with anyone. We talked for a long time. I still needed to get to the next town, so I told him I really needed to get moving again. I often wondered how he made out on that tour.

This is confusing, fairly useless and almost laughable. Certainly a photo opportunity.

Reminds me of the time I was on my motorbike riding along the Mississippi or the Missouri river and asking a local how to get to certain place. He told me, with no humor intended "Well, you can't get there from here." After further inquiry I realized he meant I had to double back to a bridge that was several miles in the direction i had come from, because I had to cross the river.

Re East Germans. I met an east German couple biking the same route as I in northern California, only a few years after the wall came down. The guy could speak English not too badly but the girl only spoke French and i don't speak German so I would just switch around all the time. once again it made me feel lucky to have had the opportunity to learn other languages.

One thing I've learned traveling is that some people just don't have the ability to think beyond their view and listening view of the world. And its not always a question of education, I've known and met people who lives fairly closed lives in terms of education and not being ever far from their area, but were very observant and could think of different ways to try explain things to a struggling person. Yet so many times I've had encounters with people that just leave you shaking your head, heck I've had it with fellow English speakers while traveling.

As to the specific topic, it would be hard having no common language at all when traveling, I've only experienced it a bit in Germany a few times, and can't imagine being in a place with a whole different alphabet.

Even with some common language, I've had people give me totally wrong direction advice, either they were bored and real buggers, getting a laugh out of it, or wouldn't admit to not knowing and make stuff up, or probably sometimes they were unfortunately just thick as a brick.
Always comes back to the ask twice rule, if not same answer from two different separate people, ask a third and fourth if necessary.
After going out of your way on a loaded bike a few times due to wrong directions, you learn to be very distrustful, of at least selective of who you believe. (Plus always having a general layout in your head of your general direction, good map sense)