There is a version of language advice that tells you to spend three months on an app before a two-week trip. It is not wrong exactly, but it optimises for the wrong thing. What actually changes your experience is not comprehension. It is the visible fact of having tried.
Thirty words, pronounced badly, produces a different trip from zero words pronounced not at all.
Why it works out of proportion
In most of the world, a foreign visitor is assumed to speak only English and to expect to be accommodated. That assumption is usually correct and it quietly shapes every interaction — you get the tourist menu, the tourist price and the tourist version of the conversation.
Attempting the language breaks the assumption. It signals that you have noticed you are a guest. People respond to that far out of proportion to the linguistic content, which is often nil.
The effect is strongest in places that receive many visitors and few who bother: Japan, Vietnam, Morocco, Poland, Greece, most of Latin America outside the Spanish-fluent tourist stream.
The thirty words
In rough order of usefulness:
Hello. Goodbye. Please. Thank you. Yes. No. Sorry / excuse me.
How much? Too expensive. The bill, please.
Water. Beer. Tea. Coffee. Delicious.
I don’t eat — and whatever follows for you. This one is worth getting exactly right and worth writing down.
Where is —? Toilet. Station. Hospital.
Left. Right. Straight on. Stop here.
One, two, three… ten. Numbers earn their place because prices and quantities come up constantly.
I don’t understand. Do you speak English? I’m sorry, I only speak a little.
That last one is the most useful sentence in any language, because it converts an awkward exchange into a friendly one.
Pronunciation over vocabulary
A hundred words pronounced unrecognisably are worth less than twenty said clearly. Spend your preparation time listening rather than reading — the pronunciation guides in phrasebooks are frequently misleading, and hearing a native speaker say a word twice is worth more than seeing it written ten times.
Tonal languages — Thai, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese — are the ones where this matters most, because the same syllable at a different pitch is a different word entirely, and the difference between a polite word and an insult is sometimes exactly that.
Learn the script, or at least the numbers
Where the alphabet is different, learning to sound it out is worth a couple of hours even if you understand nothing.
Cyrillic takes about an afternoon and suddenly half the words in Russia, Serbia or Bulgaria turn out to be recognisable loanwords.
Greek likewise.
Thai, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese kana take longer but even partial recognition helps enormously with signs and bus destinations.
Numerals are the highest-value part in Arabic-script and Devanagari-using countries, because prices, bus numbers and addresses are often written in local numerals only.
Translation apps, used properly
They are genuinely transformative now, with two specific features worth knowing about.
Camera translation reads a menu or a sign in real time and is the single most useful travel technology of the last decade.
Offline language packs must be downloaded before you go, because the moment you need translation most is the moment you have no data.
Conversation mode works for a real exchange, and it works much better if both people can see the screen — hand the phone over rather than talking at it.
What they are bad at: idiom, humour, anything with cultural weight, and any language with heavy honorific structure, where a literal translation can be rude.
Do not use them for the greeting
The one place to use your own mouth rather than the app. Saying hello and thank you yourself, badly, is worth more than a perfect machine translation of a whole paragraph.
Where English will and will not get you through
Comfortably: the Nordics, the Netherlands, Singapore, most of East and Southern Africa’s cities, the Philippines, India’s cities, most of the Middle East’s tourist infrastructure.
Adequately in cities, not outside them: most of Europe, Latin America’s capitals, Southeast Asia’s tourist corridor.
Genuinely difficult without effort: rural Japan, rural China, Francophone West Africa, much of Central Asia, rural Latin America, Iran.
That last group is also where the thirty words pay the highest dividend.
The longer-term version
If you are travelling for months in one language region, a week of formal classes early on is worth more than a year of self-study later. Guatemala, Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand and Nepal all have inexpensive language schools built for exactly this, often with a homestay attached.
You will not become fluent. You will get to the point where you can have a five-minute conversation with a taxi driver, which is where travelling in a country stops being a transaction.