[hodgesrm]

This.

New languages are hard and require focused attention. I've learned several. In my current job I'm exposed to a lot of Russian. I can read Cyrillic and recognize parts of conversations. It's frustrating not to be able to fill in the gaps to understand fully, but I just don't have the time because of my job. Plus if I did try to switch over, it would leave out other people who only speak English, which is a consideration in group environments.

As a consolation I switched my phone to Russian. :)

[dheera]

I had to learn Cyrillic in one day once. I was visiting Bulgaria without a smartphone, had a paper map with the street names printed in English/Latin characters and the actual street signs were all in Cyrillic. I had to match them up to get around and make the correct turns while walking. It ended up not being that hard, whereas I think trying to learn it in a classroom with a whiteboard would actually be much harder because there are no experience-based memory aids. Like, I remember getting off the train to a big "Централна гара София" sign and was like

"София" -- cool, that kinda looks like it should be "Sofia", I mean, one of the 3 words on the sign has to say Sofia, and the Greek-like "phi" in the middle is probably an f, makes sense ...

"гара" -- that looks like a greek capital Gamma, a, something, and an a ... Oh! it's probably just "Gara" like the French "Gare" or Romanian "Gara" I've seen elsewhere

... so "Централна" kind of looks like ?ehtralha if you imagine л as a lambda and we just learned that р was an r ... and considering where I am, it's actually something that means central, like "Milano Centrale" or "Amsterdam Centraal" as you would see elsewhere ... "Centralna"! (actually more like Tsentralna, as I learned later...) Makes perfect sense!

But there, I just learned about 1/3 of the Cyrillic alphabet within 5 minutes of getting off the train. Somehow that just doesn't happen as fast in a classroom.

These days people might probably just use Google navigation, and don't even use their head anymore, sadly.

[Mediterraneo10]

> These days people might probably just use Google navigation, and don't even use their head anymore, sadly.

I have done some very long journeys through South America. It used to be the case that anyone spending a whole year or more in South America backpacking or cycling would learn Spanish. Why not, if Spanish is considered easy to learn and you have all that free immersion in the language?

But on my last long trip, I was amazed to find that most other shoestring travelers I met were simply using Google Translate on their phones to communicate with the people they met: whether waiters in restaurants, their drivers if they were hitchhiking, local people they struck up a conversation with, etc.

When I said, “Why not learn Spanish if you are here for a whole year?”, the response was basically them rolling their eyes and saying “Whatever, grandpa.”