Nobody likes the fact that English tourists think they just can skip trying to learn a language when they visit another country. That being said, your mom was clearly trying so yeah I would have cut her some slack right away.
You can definitely skip learning the local language these days if you’re just a short-term tourist. Translate anything written with OCR, and for most other things just smile, point, fingers for numbers, and again machine translation is totally fine for simple things.
If you actually assume people can speak English though, that’s not cool.
If I had to learn the language of every country I ever visited I would have never had time to visit those countries.
Nobody’s asking you to be fluent but yeah every country I’ve been too I took crash course in the language they speak and used tools to try and speak the language. Expecting other people to learn English doesn’t help with how obnoxious english-speaking tourists have a reputation to be.
This isn’t trying to learn a language. This is memorizing a few key words to convey the most basic of necessities. I have lived in english speaking tourist places, and anytime it got popular, with a more culturally insular ethnicity (ie like people from the booming Chinese middle class who aren’t working in a place that places value on knowing english), it’s not that big of a deal. This happened A LOT with the economic miracle period, new middle class, of germany, and japan. Their inability to speak english isn’t what bothered me, or anyone else where we were, it was their crass disrespect of property, propensity to wander off, alone, into the wilderness, etc. that made them bad tourists. Their home media trying to blame us for some idiot, that wandered off into death valley, with only a small bottle of water, didn’t help. I can’t expect someone raised in those conditions to know my language at all, and I wouldn’t want them excluded, nor feel they should receive rude treatment, for not know how to say bathroom, or whatever.
However, if I spoke, say, simplified chinese, I would not continue speaking english to a chinese person I know I can’t speak english, to have a clear communication venue, in their language. As long as they are not acting in a manner detrimental to where I live, they are fine. Who am I to expect everyone to know my language? Why would I exclude those people to greater exposure to my culture if that bothered me? That would be oppositional to my desire for them to better understand my language. Just sounds like misplaced frustrations that come with living in any tourist spot. Depending on exactly what you feel/do, maybe xenophobia.
I have been working on learning spanish for a couple years, in my free time. That is a language that is rapidly rising in importance in my country. That is why people actually try to learn languages.
It’s not hard to learn to say please, thank you, good day, two beers please, etc just for some basic conversation. I do so for every country I visit and almost never have encountered rude people.
This isn’t trying to learn a language. This is memorizing a few key words to convey the most basic of necessities. I have lived in english speaking tourist places, and anytime it got popular, with a more culturally insular ethnicity (ie like people from the booming Chinese middle class who aren’t working in a place that places value on knowing english), it’s not that big of a deal. This happened A LOT with the economic miracle period, new middle class, of germany, and japan. Their inability to speak english isn’t what bothered me, or anyone else where we were, it was their crass disrespect of property, propensity to wander off, alone, into the wilderness, etc. that made them bad tourists. Their home media trying to blame us for some idiot, that wandered off into death valley, with only a small bottle of water, didn’t help. I can’t expect someone raised in those conditions to know my language at all, and I wouldn’t want them excluded, nor feel they should receive rude treatment, for not know how to say bathroom, or whatever.
However, if I spoke, say, simplified chinese, I would not continue speaking english to a chinese person I know I can’t speak english, to have a clear communication venue, in their language. As long as they are not acting in a manner detrimental to where I live, they are fine. Who am I to expect everyone to know my language? Why would I exclude those people to greater exposure to my culture if that bothered me? That would be oppositional to my desire for them to better understand my language. Just sounds like misplaced frustrations that come with living in any tourist spot. Depending on exactly what you feel/do, maybe xenophobia.
I have been working on learning spanish for a couple years, in my free time. That is a language that is rapidly rising in importance in my country. That is why people actually try to learn languages.
