Travel with the bare essentials

Travel and the ‘Stuff Monster’ : Lessons from the road

Travel has always gone hand-in-hand with a love of languages for me. As a kid, I realised how languages were a key to opening up huge swathes of a fascinating world, a world I wanted to explore. And, sure enough, I grew up into something of a travel addict and extreme commuter.

But travel isn’t just about wonderful life experiences, but also a huge learning opportunity. The lessons at hand touch on a couple of fundamental aspects of humanity: freedom and footprint. Here, I look at some of my favourite lessons learnt from travel.

The less, the merrier

Modern, Western lives are stuff-heavy. Our lives are full of things. And we’re often not content with just one of something – we like choice. Multiple pairs of shoes, the same shirt in three different colours, a rack of coats to suit every mood. It sounds great, until you realise how closely a surfeit of stuff – clutter – and depression are interlinked.

As soon as you start to travel, though, it becomes apparent how unburdening it is to break that link. I’ve long abandoned taking a suitcase on a journey – that just encourages you to cram a load of unnecessary choices – and weight – that you won’t end up using anyway. Lugging your life about like that only creates stress.

Instead, it’s become a bit of a game to see how lightly I can pack. I challenge myself to take ever-smaller backpacks with me on trips. I work out the minimum I can get away with. The challenge is not only fun, but it leaves you incredibly streamlined – how ace is it to simply jump off the plane / train / coach with your lightweight bag and nothing to slow you down?

Neat ‘n’ tidy

Stuff eats space. If we feed the stuff monster, it hogs more and more of life’s real estate. And it’s true what they say: a messy place more often than not leads to a messy mind.

It’s the same with travel, especially if you’re moving between multiple destinations. With too much stuff, there’s a lot to think about when you pack up to move on. Did I pack this? Have I picked up everything from the room?  Keeping your stuff to a compact minimum helps enormously with stuff-stress. Keep yourself tidy and be ready to move on at the drop of a hat!

Waste not, want not

The world doesn’t want your stuff, either, or at least the detritus from it. So use up what you have before throwing it away. And if possible, stick to refillable containers.  These squidgies from GoToob are brilliant for minimising packaging waste, and saving money on those rather poor value mini-sized toiletries! Frugality can save the world and spare your pocket.

Travel, Respect and learn

Wherever we go, we’re guests. And the very least you can do to be a thankful guest is to learn a few words of the language. Whether you’re a linguist or not, some local vocab invariably wins smiles and opens doors if you’re in a foreign country.

There’s no excuse not to learn the absolute bare minimum, which would be:

  • Hello
  • Thank you
  • Goodbye

Head to Google Translate and find them out before you go!

Put your phone away

Technology is wonderful. But like stuff, it’s also a monster, and needs taming. Dogged by notifications, I find that Airplane Mode can be my very best travel buddy. Disconnecting from the ‘net can relieve some of the ‘always on’ stress, and get you focussed on what’s around you in the physical world. But at the same time, it’s the perfect strategy for making your battery last longer between fizzle-outs.

Granted, phones are often our cameras these days. But even then, do you need scores of photos from each location? After finding how infrequently I look at them afterwards, I set myself a max limit of just a couple of photos per sight / special location when I travel. It means you’re messing less often with your phone, taking in more of the experience with your own eyes and brain, and thinking a bit more carefully about the very best shot to get when you do reach for the camera. Hopefully, the shots that come out of that will be really special.

At the crux of all these lessons is materialism and freedom. Humans love stuff, physical or digital. But travel teaches you that masses and masses of it bog you down. Downsize, minimalise and economise – and travel through life that bit more aerodynamically!

Learn tricks with verbs to get your conversation flying high above the clouds

Verbs made simple: make your conversation fly

English speakers have it easy with verbs. Aside from those pesky irregular ones, you’ve only got -s and -ed to worry about.

That’s why verbs can be the first brick wall anglophones hit when they begin a foreign language. Look at Spanish – every tense has six forms, one for each person (I, you, he/she/it etc.), and all of them are different from the word you’ll find in the dictionary. Look up hablar (to speak) as a total beginner, and it won’t tell you about hablo – hablas – habla – hablamos – habláis – hablan. And that’s just the present tense!

Now, I don’t mean to scare anyone off learning verbs. There’s actually a logical beauty to conjugation systems, especially for dyed-in-the-wool language geeks like me. The patterns might be unfamiliar, but they will come with time and patience.

However, there are a couple of tricks you can use as a total beginner to get your conversation flying, and not struggling to take off in a pea-souper of verb endings.

Cut-price verbs

Tables of verbs will easily overwhelm a beginner. It’s just a massive wall of words if you don’t know the language very well. But ask yourself: how much of that detail do you actually need as a beginner?

Chances are that as a newcomer to a language, your conversations will mainly be talking about yourself (I), or the person you’re speaking to (you). You’ll probably be doing most of that in the present tense (making general statements) or the past (talking about what happened). So why not cut the padding, and just focus on the four combinations of those things? In English, that would look like:

Present Past
I speak spoke
you speak spoke

In many languages, you can ask a question by simply changing the intonation of your voice. So you won’t even have to learn any special question forms. Pick out your simplified verb parts, and add them to your favourite vocab drilling program like Anki like you would with any other word or phrase. Paper flashcards are great for learning these verb parts, too.

But wait…

Ah, you might be thinking. My foreign language has several different past tenses according to what you’re talking about! Spanish, for example, has the preterite for single, completed actions, and the imperfect, for repeated or habitual actions in the past.

Well, just take one of them. If you’re talking about stuff that happened in Spanish, then the preterite (the ‘story-telling’ past) is probably the best. In German, the perfect tense might be best, as it’s used as a ‘conversational past’. Whichever tense you choose, if you use it incorrectly, most native speakers will be forgiving and still understand. And comprehension is the name of the game, right?

So, here’s our ‘essential conjugation’ for the Spanish verb hablar (to speak):

Present Past (Preterite)
yo hablo hablé
hablas hablaste

The same goes for languages with different familiar and polite words for you. Pick just one, for now. Make it the one that makes most sense for you – I used the familiar in the Spanish above. If you’ll be speaking with peers and other students, then probably the familiar one is best. If you’ll be in lots of formal situations, learn the polite one.

To be, or not to be

Of course, you can go one step further, and not learn any endings at all. The trick is to find phrases that you can just slot that dictionary form – the infinitive – into. Then, just look up your word, pop it into your sentence, and voilà! Neatly-formed sentences without any effort.

Taking Spanish and French as an example, here are just a few stock phrases you can use with an infinitive:

Spanish French English
Hay que … Il faut … I/you/we must …
Me gusta … J’aime … I like …
Voy a … Je vais … I’m going to …

Just look up a verb in the dictionary, and wodge it on the end. Simples!

It’s all about making your job as a learner easier. Simplify – you’ll be communicating all the sooner for it!