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Languages and Travel

One of the main reasons people learn languages (at least those people who aren't constantly learning new languages out of love and obsession) is to travel.

We see proof of this in the way that phrasebooks are laid out. Sections like "airport", "hotel", and "dining" are aimed at providing the traveller with what they need to get by in another country.

But for the consummate learner whose goal is acquiring the language itself, travel can become the means to practise. Instead of the language being a tool for their trip, their travel is a stepping stone to fluency.

Lindsay Willams and her husband took this one step further, using their travels not just to expand their language knowledge, but to create something to share with others.

Back in 2012, Lindsay Williams (back then, she was Lindsay Dow) started "Lindsay Does Language" as a small company in England offering private language tuition. She expanded to Skype lessons and creating informative and fun videos about language learning on YouTube with her future husband Ashley Williams.

Her passion for languages has led her to create other projects to inspire others. One of those is "Language Stories", a podcast series with stories and interviews from their travels around the world.

In "Not A Year Off: The Story Behind Language Stories", Lindsay explains what it took to make the first two seasons of Language Stories. She and her husband roamed the globe for a year, talking with fellow language lovers and exploring various cultures. It was very much a working expedition, as they recorded their experiences to share with others, thus the title of it not being a year-long vacation.

The book is fun to read and offers the reader insight into other cultures, especially those of east Asia and southern America. Their itinerary reads like a geography lesson: the United States, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Laos, and many more.

It is available through Amazon as both printed and Kindle books.

The heart of Lindsay's business is the website "Lindsay Does Languages". The body of it is her blog covering teaching languages and resources for learning them. There are links to three of her larger projects.

Clicking on "Learn" takes you to Lindsay's page for her courses aimed at helping people with their language studies. Selecting "Teach" will bring you to a page of products for people who want to coach others.

The third link is to "Language Stories", her podcast about discovering languages around the world and meeting the people who speak them from their world trip.

They share stories and interviews of the multicultural places they visit, focusing on the multilingual, bilingual and monolingual people they met.

Whether your interest is in language, cultures, or both, the podcast is a fascinating and entertaining look at people around the globe.

You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, and TuneIn.

Touring other countries is a great way to connect with other languages, but it isn't the only way. For the student, there may be an exchange program, like Erasmus and AFS, they can utilize that would allow them to continue their studies in another part of the world.

In the Parrot Time article, "Broadening The Mind Travels The World", guest writer Olivier Elzingre shares his thoughts on study abroad programs as well as a look at their history over the centuries. He also gives examples of literature describing the experiences and benefits of these arrangements.

You can also explore a more humorous side of such programs in the French film "L'auberge Espagnole" which follows the adventures of a French student who spends a year in Barcelona as an economics exchange student. There is a review of it in Parrot Time here: https://www.parrottime.com/index.php?i=1&a=4

You don't need to travel the world to get a sample of various languages. We can put vocabulary from over a dozen languages into your hand with one book!

"Victoria's Multilingual Dictionary: Volume 1" is formatted to give you words in fourteen languages for easy searching and cross-referencing. Over 800 basic words like "airplane", "money", and "zoo" from categories including animals, bank, hotel, number, colours, and vegetables translated from English into Albanian, Croatian, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Slovene, and Swahili.

This book is a great tool for when you want to see what one word means across other languages, giving you an idea of how similar and different one language is to another. It is a great gift for etymology lovers as well as translators or word lovers.

Volume 2 is also available with Catalan, Danish, English, Finnish, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Turkish.