Then with a language like that, you just have to memorize chunks of vocabulary relevant to your travels: so for me, that meant creating long word lists involving food & drink and travel. There were only two main reasons for me to communicate with the locals: when I need to get on a bus or train to travel somewhere and when I need to get something to eat & drink. Again, there's no real secret formula about it - there's just a lot of tedious rote learning to memorize long lists of words. And once I had that basic cache of vocabulary, I learnt how to construct basic sentences and questions like, "I want to go to Tsqaltubo tomorrow morning, where is the bus station?" Then of course, I had to learn how to count, so I could find out how much things cost. Thankfully, 1 Georgian Lari is about £0.29 or S$0.51 so most items would cost between a few Lari to like 30 Laris for a meal. It's not like in Vietnam or Indonesia, where US$1 = 23,200 VND or 14,200 IDR. Boy, that would make trying to learn how to pay for stuff in those languages a lot more confusing! But of course, there's always a fall back if all else fails: Russian. Georgia was part of the Soviet Union (and the Russian empire before that) and only achieved independence in 1991 - so a lot of the older generation still speak Russian fluently. So if you were 15 in 1991 (like me), then you would have completed most of your secondary education in Russian within the Soviet Union where Russian was a compulsory subject. But even after independence, a lot of the books and teaching resources in the schools, libraries and universities were only available in Russian and not Georgian or English, so the Russian language continued to dominate education in Georgia long after independence. So whilst I was learning Georgian for this trip, I was also revising my somewhat rusty Russian which is my 15th language - hence that means I speak 14 other languages more fluently than Russian: they are as follows from the most fluent to the least until Russian:
1. English
2. French
3. Mandarin
4. Spanish
5. Welsh
6. Italian
7. Hokkien
8. German
9. Cantonese
10. Malay/Indonesian (it would be unfair to count these as two)
11. Dutch
12. Portuguese
13. Catalan
14. Romanian
So whilst my Russian is respectable, oh boy - it is out of practice, it is rusty. I used to work with Russian people from the period 2001 to 2008, but that was an awfully long time ago. When I am speaking to people in Russian, I would make a lot of mistakes but at least, I can more or less understand what they are saying to me if they speak slowly and clearly. I ended up speaking a lot more Russian than Georgian eventually when I was there because I would ask a question in Georgian like, "how do I get to the bus station please?" The local would answer in Georgian and I wouldn't understand enough of what they said, then we would switch to Russian and the conversation would start all over again! So there were times when I would be frustrated that I couldn't express myself any better in Russian, but then my partner has to remind me, "Alex remember, you're speaking in your 15th language, most people struggle in their second or third language". So how useful was Russian in Georgia? Extremely. Let me give you a simple example: it was Sunday morning in Kutaisi and we were told that there was a big supermarket open somewhere in the city center by the lady at the cafe we had coffee. Whilst wandering around a big car park, a security guard approached us and asked us if we needed help (in Georgian). I tried explaining to him what we were looking for in Georgian but I couldn't understand his reply in Georgian, so I asked him if he spoke English and he said no, but he offered Russian. So the conversation continued in Russian and he told us exactly where to go to find that supermarket. So you see, the vast majority of the locals we encountered in Georgia were indeed very friendly and keen to help us, but they just don't speak English at all.
So do people in Georgia speak any English? Well, not really is the answer. You see, English is supposed to have replaced Russian as the official second/foreign language after independence from the USSR. The Russians were seen as the foreign invaders who conquered Georgia and after the famous Rose Revolution, the country had a major change in their foreign policy, looking towards the West instead of Moscow, embracing democracy and reforms to demonstrate their aspirations to be more like Germany and less like Belarus. Street signs are mostly bilingual in Georgian and English, but if you're a foreigner trying to ask someone for directions, good luck trying to find any help in English. Just like the security guard in that car park, the locals will help you but they just don't speak any English - all this despite the fact that English is now a compulsory subject in all Georgian schools and they are taught English as students, but few learn it to a high enough standard to be able to use it confidently with foreigners. Russian pretty much still remains the de facto lingua franca Georgians use to communicate with foreigners, whilst the very few people who spoke English tended to be the Georgian elite who had managed to send their children to study abroad or had at least paid for private tutors to make sure their English becomes quite fluent. Those who work in the tourist trade usually speak some English, but you'll be amazed how many times I had to speak Russian: the Kutaisi hotel we stayed in was run by a little old lady in her 60s, so she didn't speak a word of English and everything had to be done in Russian. It was a beautiful hotel, everything was perfect from the room to the location, her homemade breakfast was so delicious but she simply didn't speak any English.
The problem though, is that the current system has created a generation of monolingual young Georgians. I remember struggling on in Georgian with a young lady in a Tbilisi supermarket because she spoke neither English nor Russian and I simply didn't speak enough Georgian to understand what she was trying to say to me. I suppose people who end up working in supermarkets are not exactly highly educated graduates from the top universities in Georgia, but let's compare her to the Russian-speaking security guard in the car park in Kutaisi - he wasn't exactly highly educated either but at least he was bilingual in Georgian and Russian. Furthermore, Georgian is spoken by about 3.7 million people only, if you are not able to speak another language like English or Russian, oh boy - the amount of news, information, entertainment and social media is severely restricted. Despite the efforts to teach English in Georgian schools in recent years, the overall standard of English is still extremely poor and I suppose that has got to do with the lack of incentive for English. The vast majority of the tourists who visit Georgia are from other former Soviet countries like Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus - those tourists would probably default to Russian to communicate with the Georgians rather than use English. So you're probably better off learning Russian if you're selling souvenirs to tourists rather than English, if the majority of the tourists are Russian-speaking. Whilst visitors from places like Germany, Saudi Arabia or Israel may default to English as the language to communicate with the Georgians, not a single English speaking country made the top ten in the "arrivals by country" list in the last three years. So unless more American, Irish, Canadian or British tourists start showing up and spending a lot of money in Georgia, the situation is unlikely to change.
I did get to use a few other languages when I was in Georgia, much to my surprise. For instance, I did run into a German tourist in Mtskheta on her own and she was looking for other tourists to share the cost of a taxi to the nearby Jvari monastery which was not accessible on public transport. It would be expensive for her to get a taxi there and back on her own, but we were only too happy to share the costs with her as it made it cheaper for us as well. And whilst she speaks English fluently, of course I chose to speak German instead of English with her. Likewise, we visited a small cake shop in Kutaisi which was run by a woman whose only foreign language was German and she spoke it remarkably well. It turns out that when she was in secondary school, there was a very good German teacher there and she learnt it to a pretty high standard whilst English was very poorly taught in that school; so I suppose it does help a lot if you happen to have had a good teacher to help you master a foreign language. My partner and I often spoke to each other in French whilst on the crowded buses because we weren't going to risk any of the locals understanding enough English to know what we're talking about, but sure enough on the bus from Bakuriani to Tbilisi, one of the locals just turned around and started chatting to us in pretty good French - he didn't speak any English, but he had learnt French as a foreign language just as in the previous case, he had a good French teacher at school. Finally, we did visit a Thai restaurant in Tbilisi (where I had my best meal in Georgia) and a Turkish restaurant in Batumi but sadly, despite the fact that I had studied both languages before, I had totally failed to get out more than just a few basic words in Turkish and had to resort to using English there.
Let me be the first to admit that I was particularly frustrated with myself in not being able to remember how to speak Turkish given that I had worked in Istanbul and my Turkish was passable back then, but it was an awfully long time ago and I didn't bother to revise my Turkish for this trip. Some of the places we visited were no more than 10 km from the Turkish border, so there were plenty of Turkish restaurants in Georgia. But that's the problem with learning foreign languages, you will eventually forget most of what you have learnt if you do not keep it up. I knew I would not be able to absorb 100% of the Georgian I was learning, my brain is not a computer - it is more like a leaky bucket that can retain roughly about 70% to 80% of the information I stuff into it. That percentage actually stayed pretty healthy whilst I was in Georgia and I kept using Georgian, accumulating new words and getting plenty of practice. But the moment I got off the plane in London Luton airport, I stopped using it and I am probably now going to forget like 90% of it and retain only the very basics - which is exactly what happened to my Turkish. I simply don't have anyone to practice my Turkish with after I returned to London, so I had lost more than 90% of my Turkish vocabulary and trying to speak it years later, it was extremely difficult to remember much at all. So you might think, is there any point in making so much effort to learn a language for a holiday, only to lose most of it eventually over time from the lack of practice? Well yes, there definitely is.
Let me give you two examples: firstly, there was an airport bus from Kutaisi city to Kutaisi airport for just 5 Laris, but you had to book the bus in advance and we didn't. So the bus didn't even turn up as nobody had booked the bus for the day and we were left scrambling around trying to find an alternative way to get to the airport. This taxi driver approached us and he spoke English fluently, when he asked my partner (who speaks neither Georgian nor Russian) where were were trying to get to, he offered to take us to the airport for 70 Laris. That was daylight robbery, so I popped into a nearby hotel and spoke to the receptionist in Russian, asking her how much it would cost, she said in Russian that she could call me a taxi to the airport and it would only cost 30 Laris. Then I went into the street, asked a taxi driver what his best price would be (in a mix of Georgian and Russian) and I got him down to 20 Laris. So yeah, if you only spoke English, you would have paid 70 Laris for that trip and that's a very good reason to make a genuine effort to learn the language. But as we didn't even have 20 Laris left on us then (remember we were trying to spend all our Georgian currency before leaving the country), so I spoke to a bus driver (again in Georgian and Russian) who told us that we could get a bus to Kutaisi main bus station for 0.5 Lari each and then from there, get a bus that goes to the nearby town of Samtreida and that bus would go right past the airport. The bus driver can drop you off just outside the airport and that trip would cost just 2 Laris each. So that would be just 5 Laris in total to get us to the airport - compared to 70 Laris with the English-speaking taxi driver!
The next example comes from the city of Batumi - we got the inter-city train from Tbilisi to Batumi and because the prices were so cheap, we decided to go first class as I really wanted to just snuggle up and sleep as much as possible for that five-hour journey. Little did I know that there would be a whole group taxi drivers waiting for me outside the first class compartment the moment I stepped onto the platform at Batumi station. One taxi driver started following me and started speaking to me in English, "I have a very good taxi, I'll take you to any address in Batumi for small money, I give you a ride to your hotel tonight. Please, you come with me, where is your hotel?" I asked him how much and he said 50 Laris. I laughed and told him in Russian that he was joking or he simply didn't know how to count in English. The moment I switched to Russian, he dropped his price to 25 Laris, then 20 Laris but I was still not interested. I then asked a fellow passenger in Georgian if he knew there would be buses running at this hour going from the train station into town and he said that he was going to take the bus, if I would like to go with him. I ended up on a bus into Batumi town center that cost only 0.5 Lari each. So as you can see, there is a pattern emerging in each story: the price starts off ludicrously high when they think that I am an English-speaking foreign tourist; but it will fall dramatically the moment I switch to Russian and crash to rock bottom once I speak Georgian. The same thing happened in Tunisia, as I transitioned from English to French and finally to Arabic. It's not so much to save money per se, but it's that feeling of glee when I can demonstrate to these taxi drivers that I am not the gullible dumb foreigner they thought I was and thus I find that process very satisfying.
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