travel

Don't Offend the Locals

Knowing how to travel is a lifelong experience, much like learning a language. When you can't just chat it up with the locals, one of the main cues you can go by is body language.

A Lonely Planet article entitled "Travel Etiquette 101: Body Language" gives a humorous and useful insight into examples of body language from Russia, India, Japan, China, Nepal, Morocco and more.

What's perhaps even more curious and entertaining is the sheer volume of comments - people chiming in with specific examples from all around the globe.

This just in from the Babbel blog:

From Babbel.com Blog

There’s always a little bit of anxiety that comes along with traveling abroad, whether for business or for pleasure. Possible scenario, night before — for example — the flight to Berlin, a sudden pang: “Oh right, they speak German in Germany, and I don’t even know how to say ‘how are you’. How am I going to manage to order my morning coffee?!?”

We at Babbel have now developed a stress-reducing linguistic survival kit (and perhaps path to that caffeine fix in a foreign country) for the last-minute language learner: the Mini-Vocab Package. Compiled especially for the spontaneous traveler, it offers essential words and phrases - in German, French, Spanish, Italian and English - to get through that first encounter with the locals unscathed.

For those who’ve got a little more time before the big trip, besides the Mini-Vocab, there are twenty other in-depth packages for all relevant situations while traveling, from leaving the airport to arriving at the car rental desk. There is of course also the opportunity to hook up with someone from Babbel’s now more than 350,000-strong community to chat, trade travel tips or set up a language exchange.

To go directly to the newly compiled Mini-Vocab package, click here. If you are not already registered at Babbel, after a quick and easy registration you will be taken straight through to travel vocabulary. For our press release, click here.

From Mara at Babbel

Hello, Hola, Bonjour, Buongiorno, Hallo!

Babbel.com, the intuitively designed online language learning platform, has just released a Mini-Vocab Package specially designed for the last minute traveler. It offers all the essential vocabulary for that first encounter with the locals in Spanish, French, German, Italian and English.

Take a look at the Babbel Blog (http://blog.babbel.com) for more information.

Thanks and happy learning!

Mara

Visit Babbel.com
Read about this on the Babbel blog.
Read Free Language's review of Babbel.

I was sent a link recently about Cool Gorilla, a website that offers free downloads of mobile phone phrasebooks for French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Greek. These handy phrasebooks are quite useful for travelers.

Currently, these phrasebooks are available for Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile phone models.

From Website

Each of the lastminute.com mobile phone phrasebooks has hundreds of sound files that can be accessed through these easy to use applications. Simply decide which language you want on your phone, follow the steps and you could have the translator of your choice within minutes.

Find out more and download these mobile phone phrasebooks.

I was sent a link to a review of four podcasts with free Spanish lessons.

From the site:

Lately I have been seeing more and more websites offering free Spanish Lesson podcasts. I think this is a fantastic idea, and could be really beneficial to anyone planning a trip to a Spanish speaking part of the world.

I think most people would agree that it is definitely beneficial to learn a little Spanish before attempting travel through a Spanish speaking area of the world. But, let’s be honest, trying to learn a language out of a book is extremely boring, and doesn’t even provide you with necessary practice in pronunciation and listening comprehension.

Spanish Lesson podcasts can fill that gap, and give you an opportunity to improve your listening comprehension and practice correct pronunciation. Plus, podcasts are free, so why not spend a couple of hours a week using them before your big trip!?

To help you on your way I looked over a number of sites offering Spanish Lesson podcasts and came up with a list of 4 that I consider to be the best. All together they can provide you with over 100 hours of free Spanish instruction!

Visit this resource.

I am interested in traveling to Madagascar one day with a good friend... so I looked in to the language of the country and found these two links:

Malagasy on Wikipedia
Madagascar on Country Studies