Say It Well and They Answer Fast

There is a familiar split among people who travel. On one side, the traveller who spends a few weeks before a trip building up thirty phrases: greetings, numbers, directions, ordering, and an apology for mangling all of the above. On the other, everyone they travel with, who thinks this is elaborate preparation for a problem that a phone already solved.

Both sides have a real case, and the argument between them is more interesting than either position alone.

The part nobody disputes

Ask a room of experienced travellers what they learn first and the answers converge so tightly it stops looking like opinion. Hello. Please. Thank you. Goodbye. Excuse me. That is the whole of it, repeated almost word for word by people with wildly different travel styles — the person who spends months with a tutor before a trip and the person who admits they are hopeless with languages both name the same five.

What they say about why also converges, and it is not about communication. It is about respect: the sense that arriving somewhere and being unable to thank someone in their own language is a small discourtesy you can cheaply avoid. One traveller described knowing more than a dozen ways to say thank you, collected across years, with no illusion of speaking any of those languages.

The reported effects are consistent enough to take seriously. People warm up. Shopkeepers meet you halfway. A traveller in Slovenia who worked at his pronunciation with a shop owner was handed a free croissant for the trouble. Several people note something more practical: a word or two of the local language makes you marginally harder to overcharge, because the vendor no longer knows what you can follow. In places worn down by tourism, the effect is bigger, not smaller — the effort reads as unusual precisely where visitors have stopped making it.

None of this requires fluency. It requires five words and the willingness to use them badly.

The second tier, where the disagreement starts

Past those five, the lists diverge, and the phrases that survive on most of them share a quality: they do work that pointing cannot.

I don’t speak [the language] comes up nearly as often as thank you, and it is the one most likely to be missing from a phrasebook that has I don’t understand and do you speak English? Those are different tools. One reacts to a sentence already spoken; the other hands the conversation over to English. Neither sets expectations before anyone has committed to a sentence, which is exactly what you want in the first two seconds of an exchange.

No, thank you is the most under-rated phrase on any of these lists. Most phrasebooks give you polite thanks and, further along, something closer to leave me alone, with nothing in between. A soft refusal that leaves the relationship intact is the phrase you use ten times a day in a market you intend to walk through again tomorrow.

Then the honest utilitarian set: where is the toilet, how much is it, do you speak English, not spicy please, a table for two, the bill please. One traveller’s version of this list ends with “one large beer,” which is either a joke or the most practical entry on it.

And numbers — further than most people take them. The usual advice is one to ten, which is enough to hear a price and not enough to hear a time. One traveller of twenty-five years learns one to twenty-four specifically so that departure boards, appointment times and opening hours all become legible. It is nine extra words in most languages, and in nearly all of them they are regular constructions off the first ten.

The objection worth taking seriously

Here is the strongest version of the case against all of this, made by a language teacher who teaches a less-common language largely to people with trips booked: unless you can pronounce well enough to be understood and understand the answer, the phrases are not a good use of your time. Hello, good morning, thank you — and a translation app covers the rest.

A second traveller sharpened it into something more uncomfortable. Say a question well and you will get a reply at full conversational speed, because you have just advertised a fluency you do not have. You are then worse off than if you had asked in English, having spent goodwill to buy an answer you cannot parse.

That is not a cynical objection. It is a design flaw in the way most people prepare, and it is real: the better your accent, the faster the response, and the phrase you rehearsed for a week produces thirty seconds of sound you cannot segment.

What actually resolves it

The fix is not fewer phrases. It is two phrases, and the habit of never asking a question without one of them.

Please speak slowly. Please write it down. Most phrasebooks carry both, filed among a hundred others as though they were ordinary entries rather than the technique that makes the other ninety-eight usable. Deployed as a pair with every question, they convert the problem the language teacher describes into a manageable one. You are no longer pretending to fluency; you are declaring a speed limit, and most people will happily observe it.

The second half of the fix is asking questions whose answers you can receive. Where the answer matters — a price, a platform, a departure time — prefer the form that can be answered by pointing, by writing a number, or by yes and no. A question that can only be answered in a paragraph is a question you should ask in English.

And lead with the apology. Several travellers independently report that some version of sorry, I’m still learning is the single most productive thing they say, because it invites people to slow down and correct you gently rather than switch to English out of politeness. It sets the register for everything after it.

The tools, honestly

The popular apps are excellent for the big languages and simply absent for others. A traveller who had just landed in Georgia found that neither of the two best-known apps offers Georgian at all, and was reduced to pointing at pastries in a bakery, unable to say thank you. The same hole exists for Khmer, Nepali and a long list of others — which is worth checking before you assume a route is covered, because for those languages a written phrasebook and an hour with a tutor is not a supplement to the app plan. It is the whole plan.

For pronunciation specifically, audio courses do something no written respelling can: they break the sounds apart and drill rhythm, which is the part that determines whether you are understood. The recommendation on offer is narrow — the opening lessons are genuinely useful, and the later content wanders into scenarios no traveller needs. Online tutoring marketplaces have made one-to-one lessons cheap enough that a few focused hours before a stay is a reasonable purchase.

Translation apps remain the right tool for anything complex. The complaint people have is not accuracy but rhythm — the pause while someone types, the phone held out, the exchange that takes forty seconds instead of four. Keep it for the pharmacy conversation and the rental agreement, and keep it out of the first sentence.

The thing that isn’t vocabulary

One traveller made the observation that the cultural norms mattered more than the phrases, and the example is a good one. In Germany, restaurant staff bring your food and then leave you alone; they will not return unless you signal, and the bill has to be asked for. Travellers who have been raised to think that flagging down a server is rude can sit for a very long time waiting for something that was never coming.

That is not a language problem, and no amount of vocabulary solves it. Waving at staff is normal in Germany and across much of Asia, and reads as impatient mostly in North America — so the instinct to wait politely is the error, not the flagging. The same goes for whether you may turn right on a red light, whether bargaining is expected in shops or only in markets, and which hand you eat with.

Where it lands

The sceptics are probably right that thirty phrases is more than you will use, and right that the ones you deploy without a plan will produce answers you cannot follow. The enthusiasts are right about everything else. The core set is small, it is not optional, and the effort is legible even when the pronunciation fails — which it will, and which turns out not to matter much. Very nearly the worst case is that nobody reacts. Everything above that is a warmer transaction than you would otherwise have had.

Learn five words. Add I don’t speak this, no thank you, and the numbers to twenty-four. Never ask a question without asking for it slowly or in writing. Apologise early and often, and let people correct you.

Every phrase named above — including please speak slowly and please write it down — is in the Slow Travel Phrasebook, in sixteen languages with pronunciation.

RobertExplore and Write · 10 August 2026

Drawn from a long discussion among travellers on the r/travel forum, where the case for and against preparing phrases was argued out at length.