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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: you should learn the absolute basics of the language used in the country you are travelling to.

Seriously? That unpopular? Lmfao.

Not only unpopular, but pretty daft too. If you think the basics of a language should include "this train will separate into two at station X, please sit in the front Y carriages to get to Z" then enjoy doing a cross-Europe trip.

Not that I agree with the post you are replying to - I think having announcements in a few of the best-known languages is very reasonable to deal with tourists - but the fair expression/announcement would be something simpler like "Airport carts 1, 2 and 3. so-and-so-place carts 4 through 8". A tourist could make do with "aiport", "cart" and basic numbers in their vocabulary. If I recall, I was able to get to the correct train(s) in Italy with no more Italian than "treno", the name of the city, and "linea gialla" or something.

You can't just learn a few words and expect to follow a train announcement, particularly when it's not obvious from context (anything other than announcing the next station).

I have done cross-Europe trips before and I needed way less than that.

Well in this case this is what you would've needed. Either you ignored that when you replied, or you didn't care.

I planned my trips (read: spent a couple of minutes on them). I went through all countries from Budapest to London. I was only 16 years old at one time. I did fine. Adults, in the age of smartphones are having issues? It actually is wild to me.

Being 16 was a benefit - you didn’t know anything so you checked basically everything.

This kind of thing captures older adults who know everything and have never heard of a trainset split.

I made a similar mistake years ago in NY - I assumed that the impressive subway system could get me to the airport, but you transfer onto a bus that gives you a VERY detailed tour of some neighborhoods.

I did not check out everything, I had to be somewhere.

I would have mentioned running away at age 13 with no destination in mind but I never left the country.

Going from the Netherlands to Budapest I started my journey with Deutsche Bahn. My train also did the split in half and go different directions trick. Was I supposed to learn Dutch, German, and Hungarian in order to buy my train tickets?

I said "travelling TO", and most of the time you do not need to know anything apart from the name of the city... and then I presume you have a smartphone as well. Come on.

What did you do once you arrived in Budapest? Did you do your research or did you get scammed by the taxi mafia as well?

If you travel to Budapest from Berlin you buy the ticket from DB and the crew changes as follows: German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian. None of the first three crews would speak Hungarian. Luckily all will be able to communicate in English.

(regular announcements oftentimes won't be in Hungarian until you are in Hungary, that depends on the train origin, but I would only expect local+English)

> What did you do once you arrived in Budapest?

You will be perfectly fine staying in Budapest with just English; you can learn hello, please, and thank you to be polite. This goes for most bigger European cities, outside of France I guess.

Even France you can survive with English, just try some French and ask “how do you say” a number of times.

French people are quite friendly if you don’t exhibit all the worst symptoms of stereotypical tourists.

Basics for a casual traveller are 'hello, 'please', 'thank you', 'two beers', 'can I have the bill', and 'I'll take the schnitzel please'.

Perfectly understanding rapidly-spoken German explaining something esoteric about the splitting of a train is magnitudes, years of study beyond casual traveller level.

I took French for 5 years and I don't think I learned enough to understand a tannoy announcement that the train was being split into two parts. Tannoy announcements aren't the easiest to understand even for native speakers.

It’s been a staple of comedy routines that train announcers can’t be understood even by native speakers.

Knowing the basics is knowing how to salute, thanks, ask basic directions. You can't ask everyone to know every single language they visit and be able to understand stuff mentionned in a foreign language in a possibly noisy environment and from an only half decent speaker system.

> Unpopular opinion: you should learn the absolute basics of the language used in the country you are travelling to.

As a German I disagree with this. Europe is a single market, we want to have people getting around crossing borders at all times to get stuff done. It pays to make things easier.

If you're going for a three-weeks leisure trip, sure, learn how to say hi and thank-you.

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