Need a language cheat sheet?
Languages are great. If you can speak another language when you travel a whole new world opens up, and the experience you have in that country is a million times richer. But languages are complex and take years to master, and if you’re anything like us and, for example, you find you’re in the middle of Spain, it’s likely your brain has completely blanked out all the Spanish you’ve been practising for months and magically remembered every little bit of German you learned when you were 14 instead.
This page contains our Ultimate Language Cheat Sheet Guides - These guides are continuously updated with all the essential foreign language phrases you need to know to kick-start your travels. We’re not a top language app, these are just good ol’ fashioned guides that are easy to keep bookmarked or in your pocket.
We scoured the internet for useful phrases to learn so that we can get around and do our thing in another country, but (and we're no language expert, so there might be a reason for this) practically speaking, when you touch down at the airport and you need to find the bus stop, how useful is “My name is…” or “The man eats the apple” going to be? Because, that seems to be what lots of language lessons begin with.
We’ve tried lots, even paid apps. I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn the rest of a language, as it’s wonderful to be able to make small talk and ask people their names, it’s just that there are things we wish we had learned to say sooner.
So, we’ve made a list and we’re going to recreate it for the language of each place we visit. Hopefully it will be helpful next time you head on your travels. Imagine knowing a handful of useful phrases straight off and knowing what words to listen out for in reply!