What are the essential travel words?

March 24, 2009 2:49 PM

Which are the 100 most important words for travellers?

I am creating a resource for international travellers, which lists the 100 most essential words that they'll need to express themselves, together with their translations (and pronunciations) in each world language.
The idea is that travellers will be able to use the list to form very basic sentences, for example:

where - hotel - cheap?
hello - i - want - stay - two - night.
room - bad - very - cold - want - change.

Firstly, I need to draw up the list of 100 words. I've made a provisional list already but I'd like to see what the hive mind comes up with, in case I've missed something essential like 'toilet.'

I want to keep the same 100 words for each language, equally useful to both backpackers and luxury travellers, and irrespective of destination or culture.


Some questions:

1.) Would such a 'bare bones' or 'babytalk' approach to language work in every language, or are there certain languages whose structure or syntax would render such communication incomprehensible?

2.) Will it be enough to include the infinitive form of each verb: 'have,' 'want,' 'go,' rather than 'i have,' 'i want,' 'i go?'
I'm concerned that saying 'he - go - shop' might be unintelligible in languages where the person and verb are compounded.

3.) Are there certain words which are worth omitting because they are, more or less, completely international? 'Taxi' or 'telephone' for example.


I have no background in linguistics and I only speak English and bad French so I'd love to hear any criticisms, thoughts or suggestions you might have.
Thanks!

posted by Black Spring to writing & language (41 comments total)

"Doctor" or "Hospital"
posted by Joe Beese at 2:57 PM on March 24

"bathroom"
posted by LN at 3:00 PM on March 24

"Sorry" or "excuse/pardon me"
posted by fire&wings at 3:00 PM on March 24 [1 favorite has favorites]

"water", "thank you", "please", "food", "hungry"
posted by Night_owl at 3:00 PM on March 24 [1 favorite has favorites]

beer
posted by jennyb at 3:01 PM on March 24

I've gotten by pretty good in multiple non-English speaking countries by learning "Hello," "thank you," "please," "pardon me," "where is the restroom," and "how much" in the local language. I carry a small solar-powered calculator for the last one: whomever I'm doing a transaction with responds by punching in their desired figure, I've gotten into some good bartering sessions using the + and - buttons.
posted by jamaro at 3:06 PM on March 24

Things like telephone could easily be missed off your list if there is some sort of recognised mime or hand signal for it. Food may fall into that category too, actually. Maybe add a list of words after the 100 for "ones you may need but that can easily be got across by waving your arms about like this".
posted by Brockles at 3:12 PM on March 24

Here are the words I'd drawn up previously, in approximate groupings. Feel free to suggest which ones I should add or remove:



hello, goodbye, please, thank you, yes, no, maybe, excuse me, sorry.

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

hundred, thousand, cheap, expensive, how much? less, more, money.

i, you, he, she, we, you pl., they, man, woman, child, name, people.

have, go, eat, sleep, look, stay, like, can, wait, change.

where?, when?, what?, who?, why?, and, very, this.

toilet, hotel, room, restaurant, bus, train, airport, ticket, police, doctor.

good, bad, big, small, hot, cold, open, closed, finished.

here, there, near, far, left, right, ahead, stop!, quickly!

now, later, hour, week, today, tomorrow, morning, afternoon, night, time.
posted by Black Spring at 3:16 PM on March 24 [1 favorite has favorites]

Brockles, yeah that's definitely true, I didn't want to include 'drink' or 'telephone' for this reason. Hand-signals for numbers seemed to be pretty common in China too. What I really wanted were hand-signals for the different animals, so I could order in restaurants. Instead I ended up drawing sheep on the napkins or making chicken noises.
posted by Black Spring at 3:20 PM on March 24

All you need.
posted by pianomover at 3:21 PM on March 24

According to my mother, my great grandmother, a near-monoglot Yiddish speaker, survived for decades in Yorkshire with nothing more than "one ... ten", "yes", "no", "how much?" and "too much."
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:24 PM on March 24

To be honest, it's not such a good idea. Your hypothetical traveller is more likely to find somebody who speaks a little English than somebody who will bother to listen to their broken sentences and try to decipher what they need. Also, just anecdotally of course, there always seems to be somebody who speaks English not too far away who would jump at the opportunity to translate for you. I don't mean to be a downer, but English really is sufficient in many (though by no means all) cases.

The kind of traveller who is willing to put time into learning 100 words is probably also willing to do that little bit more to try and get a basic handle on the language (like present tense conjugations and simple sentence construction). I don't know how many people fall into that category of 'I will learn a little, but not a lot', especially compared with 'English will do' and 'I love learning languages!' categories to either side. I know phrasebooks were (are?) still incredibly popular, but they're not seriously used in my experience (people often point to the words in the books and allow the person to read it). I know your lists are shorter and potentially memorable, but proportionally less useful as well.

As for your questions:

1) In some languages 'bare bones' would make little sense, and it may need more things such as tone, and word order even to approach sensibility.

2) Some languages don't have infinitive forms of verbs.

3) You can find international word lists on the net, and perhaps especially for some European languages, there are potentially hundreds of words they might share in common.

Oh, and numbers are useless, especially one to ten, as we have fingers to do that for us.
posted by Sova at 3:26 PM on March 24

I once borrowed an Italian phrasebook from a friend of mine. It was in pristine condition except for heavy underlining on one phrase: "No thank you; I'm only looking".
posted by kitfreeman at 3:27 PM on March 24 [1 favorite has favorites]

The one phrase I find indispensable in any tongue is "Do you speak English?"
posted by Lame_username at 3:28 PM on March 24

Possibly a simpler solution.
posted by i_cola at 3:33 PM on March 24 [2 favorites has favorites]

Can I just suggest an alternative that might be really useful? Assuming your audience is English-speaking, it would be worthwhile teaching them how to communicate effectively with people whose English is very basic and scant. Like how to strip out unnecessary grammar, keep sentence constructions simple, and use words that are most likely to be known.
posted by Sova at 3:35 PM on March 24

I would add to your list:
-zero (as a digit, for phone numbers)
-need (my ESL-teaching mom lists need, want and like as essentials for communication)
posted by wallaby at 3:36 PM on March 24

Thanks for the advice Sova, I was basically just going on what I had personally found useful whilst travelling across Asia last year. (I found myself making the same list of approximately 100 or so words every time I entered a new country.)
I found that most fellow travellers were only staying in each country for 2-3 weeks, during which those with the inclination (at least half) had time to get to grips with <1> I was equally surprised by how much English is spoken in certain countries and cities, and how little is spoken in other regions (often nothing beyond Hello and No.)
posted by Black Spring at 3:45 PM on March 24

My last post came out slightly garbled, I meant that most travellers I met were keeping little lists of a few dozen simple words in their notebooks during their two or three week stays in each country, but a good many were to their credit launching enthusiastically into the grammar of Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, or whatever, usually with hostel owners who were more than happy to oblige.
posted by Black Spring at 3:53 PM on March 24

A lot of guidebooks and phrasebooks have this sort of thing. I think I used a Lonely Planet all-Europe book that had about a hundred pages per country, not a lot of space, so they had one page with key phrases, just like you're describing. You can find easily find books like this in a library or bookstore.

By the way, you're missing these:
(train) station
supermarket
museum, church, tower, square (various tourist attraction nouns)
reservation
help, theif, rape, fight
beer, wine
pharmacy/drugstore

And finally. Someone has stolen your idea of making sentences using basic vocabulary, but decided that instead of travellers learning fractured local languages, they should just learn broken English, since it can be understood in a lot of places. (the guy was French). It's called Globish. There's even a dictionary for it. Some people think it will replace English one day.
posted by PercussivePaul at 4:11 PM on March 24

2.) Will it be enough to include the infinitive form of each verb: 'have,' 'want,' 'go,' rather than 'i have,' 'i want,' 'i go?'
I'm concerned that saying 'he - go - shop' might be unintelligible in languages where the person and verb are compounded.

As a previous commenter said, if you and your reader are willing to go to all this trouble (100 words * every language = tons of text), wouldn't it be easier to give a bunch of useful stock phrases? It seems like your plan is to encourage people to use heavily mangled language, which seems ill-advised.

And just giving the infinitive form? So, for instance, you'd give the French "vouloir" (to want), but not "veux" or "voudrais"? So you'd have people say "Je vouloir ___" ("I to want ___")? Do you really think that would go over well?


3.) Are there certain words which are worth omitting because they are, more or less, completely international? 'Taxi' or 'telephone' for example.

You might know that "taxi" is common to many languages, but why assume your reader does? Also, you say you want this to work for "every world language." I doubt that "taxi" and "telephone" work in every world language. They work in many Romance languages; have you really checked all the major Asian languages, for instance? Russian? Swahili?
posted by Jaltcoh at 4:16 PM on March 24

more likely to find somebody who speaks a little English than somebody who will bother to listen to their broken sentences and try to decipher what they need

Absolutely right. You're much better off with common phrases, since people are used to hearing them and will likely understand your bastardization of "Good morning" than they would "hotel car I go you yesterday?"

A quick list, probably about in right order:

1. Hello
2. Thank you (+ No thank you)
3. I would like…
4. Where is the…
5. Help

Oh, and numbers are useless, especially one to ten, as we have fingers to do that for us.

Absolutely wrong. You cannot barter until you've learned the numbers, and that's a huge part of the fun of visiting some countries. Numbers are simple, anyway. Most languages follow the same pattern: one through nine get their own word, then for each multiple of ten, there's another word. If there are any exceptions, 9/10 they'll be a couple numbers between ten and fifteen. Everything else follows the same (or similar) pattern. But even if you don't care about that, one-through-nine will be enough for most situations.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:17 PM on March 24

And to clarify, when I say, "You cannot barter," I don't mean you can't try and barter, and maybe even think you're actually doing some bartering. But it won't be nearly as effective.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:19 PM on March 24

Oh, and numbers are useless, especially one to ten, as we have fingers to do that for us.

Absolutely wrong. You cannot barter until you've learned the numbers, and that's a huge part of the fun of visiting some countries. Numbers are simple, anyway. Most languages follow the same pattern: one through nine get their own word, then for each multiple of ten, there's another word. If there are any exceptions, 9/10 they'll be a couple numbers between ten and fifteen. Everything else follows the same (or similar) pattern. But even if you don't care about that, one-through-nine will be enough for most situations.

But is it worth at least 10% of the list? Most languages in Europe have at least some non-reducible words between 11-19, meaning that the potential space is >10%. And because no two languages have the same non-reducible numbers, the list content will differ from language to language, thereby destroying the idea of a 'standard' list. Also, you have to include the rules in each language for constructing the numbers above those you give. Which means you needs 100 words + rules. This can get progressively more complicated until you've effectively reinvented the phrasebook.

I'm all for phrasebooks if people want them, and kinda think this proposal is fishing in the same waters. However, I don't actually think it's entirely useless whatsoever, it just needs to mark out quite tightly what it wants to do. For the traveller who is worried about getting stuck somewhere with no English-speakers about, and quickly needs a word to fulfill a basic or common task, a simple wordlist could suffice in some languages.
posted by Sova at 4:32 PM on March 24

you might check out the iPhone/Touch app called ICOON

it is a picture dictionary use for communicating between languages. for example, if i need allergy meds, i can pick the health category, scroll to the picture of the man sneezing with a flower and point.
posted by phritosan at 4:42 PM on March 24

Thanks everyone. I originally liked the idea of keeping the list to 100 foreign words, because it seemed much more manageable (to the layman like me) than 100 phrases. However, it's looking like a mix of simple phrases (for the 'good morning' and 'where is the ___' type expressions) together with a list of nouns, numbers, adjectives, etc would work much better in practice, and cause much less confusion than trying to awkwardly cobble together pronouns and infinitives. The idea of instant 'building block' sentences isn't looking too practical. The original idea behind this, by the way, was that I felt a lot of casual tourists were put off by the length, size and complexity (especially the phonetic elements) of even the simple phrasebooks, and would be happier with something as pared-down as possible, to pull out and glance over on the plane / bus, or use in a tight spot when the ubiquitous English speaker isn't around.
posted by Black Spring at 4:45 PM on March 24

1.) Would such a 'bare bones' or 'babytalk' approach to language work in every language, or are there certain languages whose structure or syntax would render such communication incomprehensible?

It wouldn't work in a lot of languages very well. In a lot of languages with complex declension systems, for instance, it would just sound stupid. People would probably *eventually* understand what you want, more or less. But it'd be a hundred times easier to buy a cheap phrasebook. You'd find it easier, and so would the locals. In my native language, Bosnia, there are different "cases" for the same words (there are a few remnants of this in English, like "I" and "me") that, if not employed, just sound awful and weird. Such as a vocative, which you use when calling someone's name out loud or addressing them specifically. So the name "Dee" would be different in the sentences "I didn't kill Dee" and "I didn't kill, Dee." This isn't the greatest example, but trust me, it would sound bizarre and incomprehensible in many languages, for all sorts of reasons.

2.) Will it be enough to include the infinitive form of each verb: 'have,' 'want,' 'go,' rather than 'i have,' 'i want,' 'i go?' I'm concerned that saying 'he - go - shop' might be unintelligible in languages where the person and verb are compounded.

What about Hungarian, which doesn't properly have a word for even something as "basic" as "to have?" They use a weird construction with special rules involving possessive suffixes on the noun or pronoun of the possessor . . . in short, impossible to fake. Something like "Do you have money?" translates directly to something like "Is it some money-your?" If you don't have some knowledge of Hungarian syntax, you couldn't make much sense, and the result would, at least in many cases, be the same to a native Hungarian speaker as if you just shouted random words.

It's a nice concept, but would actually require some real knowledge of how languages work outside of (the pretty similar) French and English. And if you're interested in such a thing, I think you'd really love a good book on structural linguistics, which would clue you into some of the basic ways different languages work.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 4:57 PM on March 24

Great answer Dee! Exactly the kind I was looking for
posted by Black Spring at 5:46 PM on March 24

Thank you.
posted by Bunglegirl at 5:55 PM on March 24

Depending on where you go, I think "embassy" might be a good one.
posted by turgid dahlia at 6:22 PM on March 24

Bring a small solar powered calculator. EVERYONE knows how to use a calculator (learned this in Thailand).
posted by furtive at 7:33 PM on March 24

Most useful phrase I ever learned was "no, I am not an american".
posted by tim_in_oz at 9:13 PM on March 24

This may be helpful to you:

via Tim Ferriss How to learn but not master any language in 1 hour

(another post about language learning and a list of the 100 most used words)
posted by bradly at 10:42 PM on March 24

Nthing Sova.

I travel constantly for work, and I've learned the best thing I can do is just try to be pleasant and work hard to begin to learn the local language. The first phrase I always try to figure out in a new language is:

"How do you say...?" (i.e. "Como se dice...?")

I'm generally learning the "How are you" and "Please / Thank You" and whatnot at the same time, but if I can figure out how to ask how to say something in their language, its one of the most useful phrases to be armed with. When I first came to East Africa I didn't know a lick of Swahili, but I figured out that "Una saymadye" means "How do you say..." and when I'm at a shop or on the street or asking for directions, I can just point at something, say "Una saymadye" - and presto, they know what it is I'm asking about and I've also learned the word for what it is I'm asking about. On top of that, it shows the native speakers that you're interacting with that you're genuinely interested in learning their language, and 99 people of 100 generally respond amicably and want to help you learn.

So I'd recommend a list of "How do you say..." in as many different languages as possible, seems that would be useful.
posted by allkindsoftime at 12:25 AM on March 25

An amazing book I used in while living in Indonesia was just this. There are one hundred "basic" words in the book - and lots of grammatically correct phrases and sentences with each word. The words are sorted by subject, too, so in the shopping chapter, you get the word for "cheap", but you also can see how to construct a sentence like "Can you make this a little cheaper?" or "Why isn't this cheaper?". It's WAY better than a simple sentence-to-sentence translation phrasebook, which depends on memorization...and always carrying the book! Here's the Amazon link.

I'm also a fan of the Fast Talk Lonely Planet series - some of their phrasebooks are ridiculously bloated and these are WAY easier to navigate for trips with simple language being the only necessary language. Their Eastern Europe multi-language book is even more compressed - ten languages in a hundred pages or so!
posted by mdonley at 2:00 AM on March 25

Drop your panties Sir William, I cannot wait till lunchime.
posted by Neiltupper at 3:31 AM on March 25

There are also written words it is very useful to be able to read. I learned this the hard way.


The first time I travelled abroad on my own (only the second time after a school day trip) I hitchhiked from London to Madrid. The last stretch came when I was picked up by a Spanish lorry driver after being stuck for 24 hour outside Bordeaux. he took me all the way across the border and onto the outskirts of Madird where he dropped off his lorry. He then took me round the metro system and left me at a central station a few minutes walk from my final destination. It was only then I realised I had no idea what the Spanish word for exit was, and I spent the next 10 minutes following people at random until it turned out one of them was exiting the station.
posted by tallus at 4:02 AM on March 25

You've got hospital, but you need words like hurt, sick, allergy.

And if I can throw in a unasked for two cents, one thing I found invaluable when I went to China was having the hotel concierge write down the name of the hotel and address for me. Being able to show that to a taxi driver was a lifesaver.

And ditto what Alkindsoftime said. Phrases like "How do you say..." are great for talking to people, learning more and creating a connection.

Also ditto Tallus, Entrance, Exit, Warning/Danger... very good to know what those signs look like.

Honestly there are a lot of words, things like "Help!" which are good to know, but if you're in a position to use it, you're not likely to remember. But it good to have a list like this, just to be able to point.
posted by Caravantea at 5:45 AM on March 25

Civil Disobedient is definitely right about the numbers thing. They were among the few words I knew when traveling. Great for bartering, regularly useful.

"Vegetarian" was also an important word for me to know, as were "hello" and "thank you" and "How do you say ...?"

The more you can speak of a language, the better you can chat it up with the locals, the more fun there is to be had.
posted by aniola at 9:59 AM on March 25

Traveling in Japan I found the first two questions people would ask would inevitably be "Where are you from?" and "How long are you staying here?". If you can answer both of those questions in Japanese, they will inevitably assume you're fluent and start launching into a flurry of Japanese, at which point you can exercise the most important word for any traveler to Japan, "Wakarimasen" (I don't understand).
posted by Gortuk at 10:49 AM on March 25

An amazing book I used in while living in Indonesia was just this.

Indonesian (Bahasa) is a really good example of how easy it can be to learn the numbers.

Two … dua
Five … lima
Twelve … dua belas
Fifteen … lima belas
Twenty-Two … dua puluh dua
Twenty-Five … dua puluh lima
Fifty … lima puluh
One Hundred … seratus
One Hundred Fifty … seratus lima puluh

English follows a similar pattern: five, ten, fifteen ("fif" + "ten"), twenty five ("two" + "ten"… "twen" ty five).

But is it worth at least 10% of the list?

The other thing you have to remember about numbers is, they're not like common phrases or even basic nouns. Counting from one to ten is deeply ingrained, like learning the alphabet. I would suggest that "one-two-three-four-five" and "six-seven-eight-nine-ten" be treated as single phrases, because that's how you'll practice and memorize them. For-the-money, those are two extremely versatile phrases to have under your belt (telling time, reading prices, heck, even just basic counting).
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:42 PM on March 27