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Soon my girlfriend and I will be traveling around Asia/Oceania for a year and normally before travelling I will learn some of the local language. I have a little bit of a formula of the stuff that I normally learn such as "can I have", greetings, days of the week, numbers 1-100 and a few other things.

With the sheer amount of countries we'll be traveling to (over 13) it's sadly a little unrealistic, my initial thoughts were maybe technology has progressed enough to fill this gap. With google translate I could translate between English/Dutch/French into the local language and then have them read it. While this is nice in certain locations, others such as China and the more remote regions of countries we'll be traveling to this isn't very feasible.

What alternatives do we have or how could we approach this problem so we can better communicate with locals and people during our travels?

li x
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Personally, I've found the language learning app Duolingo to be useful for learning the basics of a language. Duolingo (and its many competitors) rely on spaced repetition, meaning it remembers what you got wrong and right and drills down on your weaknesses.

Now I need to emphasize the "basics" here -- you're not going to get anywhere near fluency -- but if you want to learn exactly the kinds of basic greetings, numbers, simple food vocabulary etc that you mention, it hits the spot, and as little as 30 min a day can give a perceptible leg up. It's also quite good for drilling non-Latin scripts if you want to try to learn to read the language as well.

lambshaanxy
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