Language and Travelling

On a recent trip to Argentina, we were fortunate that many people spoke English.  In fact, I find it embarrassing that people in many countries speak my mother tongue while I struggle or am ignorant of theirs.  Nevertheless, there are now a good selection of travel language CD's available.  For the commuter, a fair bit can be learned during down time.  (Warning:  It must be the case that trying to learn a language in your car is as dangerous as talking on a cell phone.)  Not only is learning a bit of a foreign language interesting, but my experience has been that people are quite generous with their patience when your effort is sincere. 

For concise travel language, I have found the Teach Yourself series to be quite good, but would stick to the "conversation" sets, for example "mandarin Chinese conversation."  For this trip to Argentina, however, we tried Penton Overseas Inc "Spanish, The Complete Language Course."  Although this set was more involved, almost all the work can be done in the car and it built you up nicely.  I personally find that I like to see some of the words to grasp them, and a little reading on verb conjugation doesn't hurt, but busy folk can accomplish much without this.