Sometimes you learn your greatest lessons on the other side of the globe. When I traveled to Croatia a few years ago with a Croatian phrasebook, I began to notice that I was using the same few phrases over and over again. Then later, on other trips, I started noticing this was a pattern no matter what country I was in; the same few phrases kept appearing as the most useful phrases in almost every situation. I tucked these phrases away in a notebook and made sure I had those phrases translated every time I traveled to a new country.
When I dropped my parents off at the airport their way to Mexico the other week, I told them to show me their passports (“If you have those, you have all you need.”) but also sent them off with another important travel gift: a list of 12 Spanish phrases they could use in almost any situation in Mexico: hello, good-bye, thank you, please, yes, no, pardon me, I don’t understand, Do you speak English?, Where?, I would like…, and How much? We introduce these 12 phrases at the beginning of our Passport Courses, confident that they will give you a great head start in your travels.
But what happens after you get your head start? At Living Language, we believe that it should be your decision how much of a language you really want or need to take with you. Our Passport Courses are an extension of that belief: phrasebooks are great for travel, but not everyone travels the same, and like any great adventurous traveler, adventurous language learners want to make their own way. You can use the tools of grammar to help you take your language further and fend for yourself in a foreign country, so we make sure to give you the basics of grammar in between the most essential travel phrases.
Additionally, our Passport Courses offer you the chance to practice your language with a native speaker to help you get over the fear of communicating before your trip and prepare you for a smooth landing. There’s nothing better than landing in a foreign country and being able to greet the people you see - taxi drivers, shop owners, B&B hosts, waiters - in their own language confidently and easily, and communicate to them what you need and where you want to go.
We currently offer Passport Courses in nine languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian, Thai, Greek, and Japanese. No matter where you’re traveling - South America, Asia, Europe, or the Caribbean - we hope we’ll have you covered with all the phrases you need to get by, plus a little extra nudge.
Want to win a Fodor’s guidebook and Passport Course for two for an upcoming trip? Tag a friend to enter our sweepstakes! Find out more here.