I plan on going abroad in the coming year & want to know enough of the local language to ask basic things. Does anyone know something like 100 or 250 words that I could memorize to get across basic ideas & questions? I don’t care about being grammatical correct just enough to cave man speak during my time there.
This assumes the language in question follows the same rules as, in this case, English.
In many of the common uses of “when” in English. Mandarin (Chinese) as an example doesn’t use one word for that mixed idea of English’s “when”.
One common English usage of “when” would be substitute for literally “which time”. Or even more complicated, the Mandarin language has a word for the concept of a “completed action” where there is no single word in English that translates. While English may conjugate verbs to communicate when an event occurred or will occur, Mandarin skips this.
An English phrase like:
“I ate breakfast this morning” when conceptually translated to Mandarin, then literally translated back to English would be: “I eat breakfast. Finished. Today. In the morning.”
I’ve been told that the Finnish language uses something similar for time words (instead of conjugating verbs), but I don’t know if that’s accurate. If there’s a Finnish speaker reading this, I’d be interested in knowing if this is true.