Dateline Discovery

Part of traveling is accepting the language barrier. You’ll never know what can happen when you try speaking something else.

The words still stick with me as a reminder of one of my greatest disappointments abroad.

“Man, your Spanish is terrible!”

I was crushed. I was standing in the middle of a restaurant on a trip to Costa Rica a few years back when my simple request, “Me gustaría jugo de naranja, por favor,” was ridiculed by the teenage waiter.

It wasn’t so much that he outright dismissed it — I did get my orange juice, after all — but the way he did it: Publicly, loudly and mockingly, with a smarmy stress on the Rs in “terrible” that still makes my skin crawl.

Nobody wants to make a fool of themselves in a different country, especially when the language barrier can be difficult to overcome. More than leaving a visitor feeling flustered, an inability to communicate can lead to inadvertently taking a left at the intersection instead of staying straight, ordering a whole fish instead of a tuna steak or committing an offense with much more dire consequences.

For me, though, that shouldn’t have been the case — at least, not in this instance. I spent five years studying Spanish in school and, while all of my interactions in the language took place in a classroom with other non-native speakers, I figured I was prepared to navigate simple interactions in a Spanish-speaking country.

As someone who speaks English, it’s remarkably easy to get by when traveling abroad, especially if one is only sticking to massive metropolitan areas and popular tourist sites. A significant number of museums have multilingual signs. Announcements at transport hubs are frequently made in English. And, as my Costa Rican waiter demonstrated, if there’s no English menu at a restaurant, there’s always an English-speaking staff member willing to chime in, helpful or not.

That, however, is not how I want to travel. Consciously aware of how poor the reputation of American travelers is abroad (and having seen quite a few in all their ignorant glory), I feel obligated to constantly change that perception and hold myself to a higher standard. I also believe it’s just a part of being polite and respectful; after all, I wouldn’t want someone approaching me on a street corner and yelling “Sumimasen!” in my bewildered face.

One of the first trips I took after moving to London was a weekend break in Stuttgart. It’s the sixth-largest city in Germany but not one of the country’s most popular tourist spots. For two months leading up to the trip, I tried to learn as much rudimentary German as I could, not just to exchange greetings but also enough to at least be able to check into a hotel, ask for directions and read a menu.

It was again an abject failure, which I realized shortly after arriving in the city. Chalk it up to nerves, or call it a fear of embarrassment, but all of the German I had tried to commit to memory in previous weeks — “Hast du einen Tisch für zwei?” “Ich hätte gerne ein Bier, bitte!” — had evaporated. Furthermore, the quintessential, picturesque Swabian restaurant we chose for dinner the first night, Brauereiwirtshaus Sanwald, was not staffed by an English speaker, so every interaction took place via the modern traveler’s primitive staples: hand signals and Google Translate.

My ego bruised (again), I gave up for a while on trying to be Mr. Polyglot. When I tried to interact with people in Portuguese or in Italian, my inevitably bungled attempts were always answered in polished English — something I had to learn to stop taking personally. Subsequent trips to Copenhagen and Stockholm, where English is spoken better than most Americans, reduced my urgency to try to master a new tongue. It was only when in Helsinki, when I struck up a conversation with a bartender, did the reason for this become clear: She, and many of her friends, learned the language from watching American movies with Finnish subtitles.

As I’ve discovered, my approach won’t always get me far. Several months back, I was speaking to a multilingual colleague about a trip I had planned to Istanbul, and he warned me that English alone might not carry me very far there. Worried, I brushed off my books, putting myself through a rigorous, 12-chapter course on introductory Turkish.

Upon arrival, it was clear that I didn’t need it as much as I thought I would, but that didn’t stop me from offering a gratuitous “iyi günler” or pulling out a “hoş bulduk” when the situation warranted. One night, when we went to get dessert, I decided I was going to interact with the waiter entirely in his language, even though his English was clearly better than my Turkish.

Not only did he humor me, but he taught me a few new words to fill out my vocabulary — all of which I have since forgotten — and, clearly entertained by our interaction, he brought over a few different pieces of baklava on the house.

Tucking the personal embarrassment aside, it’s clear that most locals are charmed by foreigners trying to speak their language and that, as travelers, we should never be afraid to try.

After all, who knows what we’ll get out of it?

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