When communicating with someone who does not have much knowledge of the English language, it can be rather difficult to get your point across as they probably have no clue what you are saying. This is certainly an issue whenever you travel from country to country. Here in Canada, we kind of luck out as the only other country we are neighbouring is the United States of America and their first language is English, the same as ours. But if you are wanting to travel the world not every country has English as their main language, while lots have at least some knowledge of English not everyone in the country will know how to speak it. I personally dealt with this issue a lot when my high school went on a trip to Spain and Portugal. While all of the tour guides and people that were helping our school out were rather proficient in English, most of the people that we delt with when we went to restaurants or local shops did not have any knowledge of English. Strategies that I found helpful to use when interacting with these people were to use lots of hand motions, so if I were at a restaurant, I would point to the thing I wanted on the menu instead of trying to pronounce it. Sometimes if I knew it would help, I would try to use my own limited knowledge of their first language but since I only knew simple greetings and how to order more eggs, this rarely came in handy. Finally, the strategy I would not recommend which I only used once, was when I was cornered by a salesman in a gift shop, he was talking to me in Spanish, and I had no clue what he was saying all I knew was that he was trying to sell me something that I did not want. What I did was place the item back on the table, and walked away without saying anything, I am pretty sure that I got the point across that I did not want to buy the object, but it was not the kindest way of doing so.
neufeldrhett
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