I know a lot of the podcasts we talk about travel, I know a lot of our listeners love to travel. And so one of the times people are often most excited to learn a language is that, you know, maybe they planned a trip or they have this, like you said, in China, a vision for a trip they want to take.

Not everyone who is planning a trip to a foreign country necessarily feels like they need to become fluent. Is there a stop along the way where you can have enough kind of skills in a language to have a different experience traveling and unlock, you know, really interesting things that you can get to a lot quicker and any advice for someone in that situation?

When it comes to language levels, there is a lot of specificity with this, and this is something I take into account with my targets. So I always work off the European Common Framework, which has a very specific way of categorizing language levels. It splits it into A, B, and C, and within each one, it further sub splits it into one and two.

So A is beginner, B is intermediate, C is advanced, one is lower, two is upper. So A2 means you're an advanced beginner and C1 means you're a lower level mastery speaker of the language. So this scale of six different levels is where I pin everything. So for me, fluency begins at the B2 level.

This is upper intermediate. So what that means is you can talk about most things you would talk about in casual social situations, but because you're not at the C levels, you don't have a mastery level. So in my case, I studied engineering. So the languages I have a C level at, I could work as an engineer in those languages and I could have a philosophical conversation with you about very deep subjects.

And for the most part, most conversations I'm going to have are the high level B2 social conversations. So that's what I'm aiming for. And it's important on the scale to remove perfectionism because even the C2 is still not perfect. It means that you can work functionally through the language the same way you would in your mother tongue.

Now on the same scale, I think that at the A2 level, upper beginner, this is where you can function very confidently as an independent tourist in the language. So you can ask for directions, you can get the gist of their reply, you can deal with problems like you have an injury and you can get yourself to the hospital.

All of these very basic functional things you can do with confidence, even though you can't necessarily have full on conversations. And I think that is fine for somebody who's going to the country briefly, and it is something you could genuinely get to in a lot shorter of a time than people realize.

The very steep curve at the beginning, you can make a lot of progress very quickly. What tends to happen is we reach the intermediate plateau. This is where things start to get really rough, where you're putting as much effort in, but you get stuck at the middle level. And this will happen to everybody and that's okay as long as you can push through to very beginning stages that B1 I feel is something that is definitely achievable in the matter of a certain amount of months for people, regardless of your background, if you're able to put the time in.

A B1 level means you can have a lot of conversations with people as long as they're a little patient with you. So it does not count as fluency, but it counts as conversational. And for me, this is where I love to be in my travels because I can start to make friends in the language.

I can really hang out with people. If you're single, you can go on dates with people. You can do a lot with that B1 level. So this for me is a minimum to feel like I'm truly experiencing the culture in a lot more of a direct way. Anything less than that is more a case of how confident a tourist you're going to be, which in itself can be a wonderful thing.

You can have a lot of great experiences, but ultimately you are going to be doing most of your things in English if you're only at an A2 level, which means your interactions, your friends and so on. So it depends on your style of travel. My style of travel obviously is I avoid English.

I want to make only local friends. So I have to get at least a B1 level. And that's where, when you said at the beginning, Benny speaks 12 languages, that number 12 comes from B1 and up. So I personally only say I speak a language if I can have conversations in the language, not if I would function as a tourist.

So I actually have another dozen languages that I could function as a tourist quite confidently. But the thing is, that's not as impressive as it sounds because you could do that a lot quicker than people realize. You can be a very confident tourist. You can have a bunch of phrases ready to go in a very, very short time span.

So you can be a confident tourist way faster than you imagine, especially if you're having consistent conversations ahead of time. I did for a while travel to the country and think I'm going to get off the plane and immediately start speaking the language or start learning the language. And that was an interesting period in my life.

But nowadays I try to learn the language ahead of time. So I don't leave it for when I'm in the country. I don't think, especially for people who can only travel to a country for a very limited amount of time, I don't want to be in language learning mode if I'm only going to be in a country for a month or two, I want to really get to know the place.

So that's why I do my work ahead of time and then I can explore and make friends once I