As part of a crazy, crazy December, I just got back from back-to-back trips to Brazil and Cuba(!!!). The trip to Brazil was for work, and it was going to entail me using Portuguese to teach some of my work colleagues down there some pretty technical stuff (an area where my vocab isn’t the strongest). And the trip to Cuba was going to be the first time I’d really used Spanish for a good while (read: seven months).
All that goes to say that I was honestly pretty nervous about both trips. And I’ve had some pretty disappointing situations in the past when I had to do a quick trip for work and my Spanish wasn’t in great shape. It honestly is pretty tough to find the space to maintain another language when I hardly ever use it on a daily basis.
This can be a pretty frustrating – and very common – experience. Most people don’t get the chance to practice a foreign language except within the confines of a short 7-10 day vacation once or twice a year. But that doesn’t mean that you have to sit back and lament the fact that you can’t live in another country or be immersed in the language 24/7.
Short, targeted trips have been some of the signposts along the way for me in learning Spanish and Portuguese and I can look back and know that each little vacation gave me marked progress and increased motivation to keep going. So don’t discount yourself yet! That next trip can push you ahead in your learning – you just need to do a bit of prep beforehand to maximize that time.
First, A Word of Warning
Before we get into the actual practicals of getting ready, there’s one common pitfall to be aware of: Flashcards.
The temptation in advance of a big trip is to dig out your flashcard app and do some vocab-building drills.
Don’t do that.
You’re just medicating your anxious desire to feel like you’re making progress and preparing. Flashcards are great because they’re so bite-sized and measurable, but they’re going to do very little to actually prepare you for the varied situations you’ll encounter in your travels. Don’t get me wrong – flashcards are an amazing long-term learning method, especially when you use them right. But they are ill-suited to that crunch-time right before a trip.
Repeat after me, “I will not hide behind my flashcards, I will not hide behind my flashcards, I will not…”
Got it? Good. Next.
Focus on Listening
Instead of doing flashcards, focus instead on honing your listening skills.
You might be thinking “But what about my speaking skills? Don’t you always recommend speaking as the fastest way to learn a language?”
I definitely subscribe to the thought process that speaking is both the fastest and most effective way to learn a language. So why do I suggest focusing instead on listening in the short run when “cramming” for an upcoming trip? It’s simple: improving your listening skills will have the highest impact in the shortest amount of time on your ability to communicate effectively.
There’s not really any way to sugarcoat this: you can script out your own sentences, get good at using particular vocabulary and prepare for targeted conversations, but nothing can fully prepare you for what the person on the other end of the conversation is going to say to you. And no matter what some people out there on the internet might tell you, it’s not a totally lighthearted, fun thing to just fearlessly speak without fully understanding another person’s response.
There is a direct relationship between how well you understand the other person and your ability to communicate meaningfully. You won’t get to the speaking part of a conversation if you can’t understand the other person’s comments and questions back to you.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that listening, while being difficult, is one of the quickest learning modes to improve in short spans of time.
How can you improve your listening skills on a time crunch? The specific tools and techniques you’ll use will probably have to be different, depending on your skill/degree of fluency, so here are some pointers for people at differing levels.
Beginner
You probably can’t go straight to native-level content right away. Instead, try out some of the beginner-level videos on FluentU or try out Gabriel Wyner’s minimal pair training. I could write a whole post on minimal pair training, but here’s the short description: you’ll hear two very similar sounds spoken in your target language, and will practice telling them apart.
This is like karate master training by carrying buckets of water and waxing cars. You might not see the immediate progress, but you’ll be surprised at how big of a difference it makes when you try to understand a native speaker – even if you don’t have a very large vocabulary.
Intermediate
Watch videos with subtitles. There are plenty of youtube videos in other languages (Youtube auto-generates trending video playlists by country; all you have to do is go to youtube and search “popular in <country name>”). There’s also lots of foreign-language content on Netflix. Find something and focus your full attention on it in short bursts (5-10 minutes, but not much more than 30 minutes at a time).
Pay special attention to the words or phrases that you were able to read in the subtitles, but didn’t catch the first or second time around – those are good hints at the specific sounds that you find difficult and are the areas where you’ll get the most value out of training your ear to hear their differences.
Advanced
Find a native-language podcast. This is the ultimate test of listening comprehension – no slowed-down speech, no subtitles to read along, and no video content to give you contextual clues. Just pure soundwaves and your ears trying to make sense of them and tie them to words you already know. As you listen, focus on the words and try to find phrases that stand out to you.
One example of this that I got recently from a podcast in Brazilian Portuguese was “Que diferença faz?” – literally “What difference does it make?” I hadn’t realized that this expression translated so directly between Portuguese and English and I’ll be using it in the future for sure!
Go Out and Try It!
It goes without saying that all of these tools and techniques are useful in general, so don’t be afraid to try something outside of your skill level.What are your thoughts? What do you do to get that last minute language cramming in before you go on a trip?
