Learning Foreign Languages - The One Year Challenge

The real question for any traveler looking to learn a foreign language is not what ones are worth knowing, but what parts of each language would help you out while on the road.  As most of us may only spend a few weeks or months in any given region, the level of understanding for a language varies substantially.  It doesn't make sense to spend a year becoming fluent in Arabic if you will only be spending three weeks in the Middle East, meanwhile only learning the basic Spanish phrases may not serve you well if you intend on staying half a year in South America.  To prepare for worldly explorations, and to have a bit of fun, the One Year Language Challenge was born!
With the exception of a few countries, many locals in the tourist hot spots are proficient in English which is something that we as fluent speakers are fortunate for.  Still, there are many cases when knowing a bit of the local language goes the long way.  Not only is it respectful to try and address someone in their local tongue, there are several situations where knowing a few words can change the scenario entirely, including:

• Introductions and Basic Conversation
• Bartering
• Negotiating a Taxi
• Asking Directions
• Ordering Food
• Reading Street Signs/Maps
• Conveying Allergy Information 

These phrases are necessary to become what we call Tourist Ready - you know the basic phrases in order to navigate a country and be respectful, but not enough to follow or maintain full conversations.  This level is equivalent to a basic or fundamental proficiency to the rest of the world, but we like to call it Tourist Ready to make sense in explanation. 

We can think of several scenarios in our previous travels where having a tourist ready knowledge of the language would have helped us out significantly.   While bartering for souvenirs in Thailand, two workers at the store were talking to each other on what the minimum price would be for what we were going to purchase.  If we knew basic numbers in Thai, we would have overheard the price and received a better deal.  In China, where I knew four words of the language, hailing a taxi was almost impossible unless you had the Chinese characters for where you wanted to go written down on a piece of paper to hand to the driver.  Finally, Angie suffers from a severe tree nut allergy, and knowing the words for nuts and allergy in local languages helps prevent a scary situation (although we have an iPod app for that, which will be featured in a future post in this series).
It is because of these scenarios that we are instituting a One Year Language Challenge.  After releasing our first book, which coincidentally took about one year to put together, we have significantly more time available for a new challenge.  Although we'll still be working on promotion and trying to secure a book deal, we'll be spending a great deal of time trying our hand at six (6) languages between the two of us to become Tourist Ready by next May.
The Languages

• French
• Spanish (pushing towards fluency)
• Arabic
• Italian
• Hindi
• Norwegian

As a means to gauge our ability with these languages, and for full disclosure of our current language proficiencies, the following are our self-appraisals for how much we know of each language at the beginning of this series:
French: Jeremy took two years of French in high school and spent a few months reading language tools in the past to refresh.  At one point he was tourist ready, but may be lacking a bit now.  Angie does not know any French.
Spanish: Angie took three years of Spanish in high school and spent a few months reading language tools in the past to refresh.  She is past tourist ready but not quite at basic fluency, although she could hold her own in a conversation if need be.  Jeremy knows a handful of words in Spanish and will be trying to get close to tourist ready before their honeymoon in late May 2012.   The goal for Spanish is pushing fluency due to our desire to travel to South American countries in the future and increasing Spanish speaking population in the world.
Arabic: Jeremy spent several months studying language tools already to become tourist ready in Arabic, including ability to read script, but has let the knowledge slide in the last few years.  Angie does not know any Arabic.
Italian: Other than a few words, mostly food related, neither Jeremy nor Angie know any Italian.  After learning Spanish and French; however, Italian may be on the easier side to pick up.  Otherwise we'll fall back on our favorite words - gelato, pizza, and Chianti. Buonissimo!
Hindi:  Okay, we know, we know.  Over 100,000,000 people in India speak English (roughly 10% of the population).  To put that in perspective, China, which I felt was quite difficult as an English speaker, is reported to have only 1% of the population speaking English while a more tourist friendly country like Thailand is also at 10%.   Why do we want to learn Hindi?  Well, this wouldn't be a good challenge without a difficult language, and we would really like to know what some our coworkers are saying sometimes when they think we cannot understand them.  Right now we know zero words of Hindi.
Norwegian: We put Norwegian on this list as another fun language to learn rather than for its practicality.  If we had to make a list of dream destinations to live in one day, Norway would likely be on the list.  We've never been, but Angie's ancestry and relatives who have visited make us not only want to go one day, but stay a while as well.  Right now we know zero words of Norwegian.
But with any language learning challenge, there are some potential roadblocks that we have to consider.
Potential Roadblocks

• Angie will be finishing up her PhD program by next May.  Her time will be significantly limited from January to April while she writes her several hundred page thesis.  (But that means massive amounts of free time for Jeremy to double up on language learning and blog to-dos!)
• Jeremy will be traveling a lot for work this year and may have less time to focus on studying, although more time in the air could mean more time to study.  (But that means more time for Angie to learn languages)
• Not all language learning tools are created equal and we are already seeing the limitations of a few that we have purchased.
• We will still be blogging and working full-time. As those earn us money to live and travel on, they have priority. 
• Our mental capacity may not be large enough to be engineers, travel writers, AND remedial polyglots all at the same time.  

With that, we begin our challenge!   Over the next year we will make frequent updates into this series going into the types of language tools we are using, our progress and setbacks, special language tools we have with us for travel, and any other major developments that arise.  At the end of this challenge (May 2013) we will summarize where we are with our chosen languages, what we learned, and any tips that we developed for those looking to learn languages on their own.  To follow more about our great One Year Language Challenge, subscribe to our blog or check out the Language Challenge link on our sidebar!
Do you have a language learning tip or a favorite tool to learn a language? Comment below and let us know.  We'll be featuring fan comments in future posts, so any advice you have may be featured in this series!
Disclosure:  We are not partners with any language learning program yet.  We hope to partner with a major company in our goal to become tourist ready in many languages, but currently this undertaking is an independent project.  All links featured in this series to products are to our affiliate accounts only and to products we are currently using.  If this were to change during the duration of the challenge, this disclosure will be updated and dated to reflect such a change.