[dougk16]

Sure, questions welcome!

For the most part I was limited to classes intermediate and above when I started out so there's some basis for communication. Of course the best part of travel is learning the native language. After a few months you can probably start teaching beginners, especially once you get a feel for the kinds of questions students ask. People usually have the same confusion points.

Some "immersive" methods such as the Callan method explicitly do not want you to use the native language at all, even if you know it.