A woman at a bus stop and I had about eleven words in common, and four of them were numbers. She was waiting for the same bus I thought I was waiting for. I had a piece of paper with a place name written on it in my own handwriting, which I had copied off a sign, badly.
She looked at the paper for a long time. Then she took the pen out of my hand, crossed out two of my letters, wrote the correct ones, held the paper up next to the timetable board, and pointed at a line on the board that I had not understood was a line. The whole exchange took maybe ninety seconds and neither of us said a sentence.
The app made it worse first
My instinct at the bus stop had been to reach for the translation app, and I did, and it produced something that made her frown. I do not know what it said. I know that whatever it said, it was confident, and that it made a simple situation briefly complicated, because now she was reading a sentence rather than looking at a piece of paper with a place name on it.
What I have come to think is that the app is very good at nouns and quite bad at requests. If I need to know the word for a thing, or to read a sign, it earns its place. If I need to ask for help, it inserts a screen between two people and turns a small human transaction into a document review. I now type nouns into it and almost never sentences.
The other thing about the app is that it makes me stop watching the other person. I look at the screen, waiting for the output, and I miss the fact that they already understood me forty seconds ago and are trying to answer.
Paper beats screen more often than I expected
Writing a place name down and showing it does several things at once. It is stable, so the other person can look at it as long as they want without me hovering. It can be corrected, and people correct it happily, which is how I learned I had been mispronouncing a stop for three days. It can be pointed at, held up against a board, shown to a third person, put in a driver’s hand.
A phone screen dims, times out, needs unlocking, and belongs to me in a way paper does not. Handing somebody a phone is an awkward act. Handing somebody a scrap of paper and a pen is not, and the pen matters, because a pen invites the other person to add something.
I carry a small notebook now, mostly for this. It has about forty place names in it, half of them corrected in other people’s handwriting.
Numbers and the small trap in them
Numbers travel well if you write them, and badly if you say them. I have been given a time by voice and misheard it by an hour more than once. Now I hold up fingers or write the digits, and I show my watch or my phone clock and let the other person tap it.
The trap is that written digits can carry a different convention than the one I grew up with. I once read a handwritten one as a seven and a seven as a one on the same slip, which is a fairly efficient way to be wrong twice. The fix is boring and works: I write the number back and look at their face. A person nods differently when you have it right.
The gestures that do not mean what I think
I have made a rule for myself, which is that I do not trust any gesture I have not seen used twice, by different people, in a context where I could confirm the meaning afterwards.
This came from a head movement I read as no, and treated as no, and acted on as no. It was not no. I had asked whether a road continued past a bend, received the movement, turned around, and lost an afternoon. I only understood later, watching two people at a counter, that the same movement was being used in a way no could not possibly fit.
I have thought about whether to write down what the movement was, and I have decided not to, because the version of this that ends with me telling you what a gesture means in a whole region is exactly the error. It meant what it meant between two particular people, in a particular exchange, and my job was to notice that my reading was a guess and not a translation. That is the only portable lesson in it.
So: gestures get treated as low confidence signals. Directions of pointing, I trust. Yes and no, I confirm another way.
What actually carried the meaning
Looking back at the bus stop, almost nothing that worked was language. She read my body, which was the body of somebody who did not know if they were in the right place. I read hers, which was patient and slightly amused. The paper carried the noun. Her finger carried the answer. The timetable board carried the confirmation.
The eleven words we shared were not load bearing. What was load bearing was that we were both standing at the same bus stop with the same amount of time to spend and no particular reason to hurry.
I think a lot of the advice about travelling without a shared language is written as if it is a problem of vocabulary, and in my experience it is a problem of pace. If I am in a rush, no amount of vocabulary saves me. If I have twenty minutes and I am willing to look a bit foolish and stand there while somebody works it out, the vocabulary barely matters.
What I owe the bus stop woman
The bus came. It was the right bus. She got off four stops before me and, as she went past, tapped the paper in my hand and held up three fingers, which meant three more stops, and it did mean three more stops, because I counted them and she was right.
I did not thank her properly. I said the one word I had for thank you, and she waved it off, and then she was gone down the steps and the door closed. I have a small collection of these, people who solved something for me in under two minutes and left before I could do anything about it, and I do not have a good way of squaring that ledger. I have started saying yes when tourists in my own city ask me things, which is not a repayment, it is just the only available direction to push the same thing.