Enjoy your foreign weekend away more by knowing simple local phrases like the back of your hand.
Context
The European Union (EU) specifically recognises 24 official languages. These countries are a couple of hours flight away yet the local language may make it seem like you have landed in a different world.
As a British person abroad the chances are that we haven’t learned the local language in school. The traditional way of bridging this gap in communication is to speak English slowly and loudly. While this will get you so far it won’t necessarily make you many friends.
Problem
A traditional phrase book (or its phone enabled modern counterpoint) is the usual solution but requires the user to look things up and read them out. It is often tricky to pronounce the words on the page and so we usually end up pointing at the sentence and hoping. Successful communication requires the active participation of the other party so gaining rapport is crucial.
What if you could have the most basic local phrases up your sleeve so you can at least say “hello” properly before we launch into this trial of communication?
Neither my brother or I are linguistically gifted and on a trip to Budapest we found that we had trouble remembering even how to say “hello” (szia!), “please” (kérem), and “thank you” (köszönöm) in Hungarian. To address this my brother wrote these most basic words on the back of his hand and made a show of looking at his hand then to the person he wanted to greet. It was funny and great for making new friends.
Solution
Handy Phrases are temporary tattoos that you can apply to the back of your hand or the inside of your wrist to give you ready access to the most basic foreign phrases while you are away on holiday.
In a pack you get: four temporary tattoos (two each of the left and right hand phrases) and a laminated card with some extra phrases on it.
Rather than expecting the user to decipher a traditional phonetic alphabet all the handy phrases are written in a simplified spelling system allowing the user to easily gain a rough approximation of the correct pronunciation.
Here is a mock up of the temporary tattoos for a trip to France:
And the laminated language card:
Implementation
Not yet implemented.