Excuse me, but what is a Troll, other than a character from fantasy literatuire or Role Playing Games?

Peter

A troll is someone who posts a question but only as bait to cause friction or a put-on. Don't feel that was a stupid question because when I first came here, I didn't know that or even what LOL(laughing out loud) meant.
mimi

The estimate that one-quarter of the global population can speak English did not originate with me, it is from David Crystal, editor of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. The URL reference is given in an earlier post. I suspect that Prof. Crystal is a greater authority on the subject than anyone participating in this thread. If it can be demonstrated that this estimate is wrong, then the statements that I made above would have to be adjusted accordingly. Even in this event, I doubt that anyone would seriously dispute my contention that English is the most common language spoken by international travelers.

Returning to the original theme of this post, learning how to say "please" and "thank you" in the local language is not going to help someone in a crises situation. Also, I'm not surprised that we've seen a few post along the lines of "Well, I had a nice vacation once in Barcelona and anyone that says anything bad about the place is an arrogant idiot."

If cities such as Barcelona continue vigorously to promote international tourism, they have a responsibility to provide the infrastructure that allows the targeted tourists to have a safe experience, especially since foreign visitors are more vulnerable and more likely to be victimized. Part of this infrastructure should include the ability for tourists in a crises situation to be able to communicate with someone in a position of authority in the closest thing on the planet to an international language - English. Barcelona has an impressive English-version website. Unfortunately, they don't follow through once the tourists arrive.

Were it not for the irrational Anglophobia that is prevalent in some parts of Europe, this would not be difficult to acheive. Begin by effectively organizing available resources, such as oncentrating the few English-speaking police officers in heavily touristed areas. Some of the above posters apparently believe that virtually no Barcelona police officers are capable of speaking English. If this is true, the city could work with the tourist industry to place English-speaking international tourism liasons in popular areas.

Frankly, there is an element of elitist snobbery in the suggestion that tourists that haven't acquired the local language should stay home, or worse, they deserve to be victims of crime. Functional fluency will not follow from the purchase of a few books at Barnes & Noble, and requires financial and resource commitments that are simply unavailable to some people. Europeans are surrounded by diverse languages and often fail to realize how much this facilitates their ability to learn other languages.

International tourists that cannot speak Catalan are not arrogant, nor are they exclusively American or British. One generalization that probably can be made about them, however, is that if they perceive that they are preferentially victimzed by the local riff-raff, and, for all practical purposes, unprotected by local law enforcement, they will eventually take their business elsewhere.

Well, I guess you already got dragged through the coals for the not speaking English thing and the "Oriental" thing. Hope you learned something.

Anyway, Wow what a scam. I had my passport and valuables stolen once and its was an increadible inconvienience. No money, credit cards, travelers checks, passport, identification. I had to go to the US counsel and prove who I was and ask for money.

After I read the question I thought it sounded pretty fishy to me too.

But it did bring back to mind that in Mexico City certain policemen on the streets wear a large badge stating that they are English speaking (if they are). This is a good idea in my mind for the many English speaking tourists who need help,like we did when our cab driver tried to rip us off and we ran over to a policeman wearing the badge and he helped us out We speak some Spanish but not well enough to argue with a cab driver while standing on a busy street, by the way the driver fled when he saw he wasn't getting any money.

Smueller, although I do not have the imposing c.v. of David Crystal, I do have enough advanced degrees, including the big one that took me 7 years of historical, literary, and social science research (so you may call me Prof. also), to know that throwing around extracted citations and references is often hazardous to accuracy.

You are using a reference to a somewhat anecdotal "encyclopedia" as if it were god's own truth to support your belief that we are entitled to expect to be able to use English everywhere. And I seriously doubt that Crystal, an old man of letters in England, has access to exhaustive demographic statistical data about what languages every one of the world's peoples are currently "capable of" speaking, because such data really can't exist except via extrapolation and supposition.

The world population is around 6 billion just now, the overwhelming majority of which lives in poverty in the "less developed" countries. Just tinkering with the numbers according to the number of people who are monolingual in Chinese or Spanish dialects throws the whole "1/4" assertion into serious question.

Moreover, once again, I raise the methodological issue about what, exactly, is meant by "capable of speaking English," as a basic problem with your citation. A parrot is "capable of" speaking English; and being able to say "car is not alligator" is also being able to speak English. I suspect Crystal was saying in an off-hand way that English touches the lives of so much of the world that probably a quarter of its people know what "hi" and one or two other words mean. Heck, I can say "arrigato," so am I "capable of" speaking Japanese?

Still, I certainly don't dispute your claim that English is the most common lingua franca of the contemporary world, nor do I dispute for one second that Barcelona has a serious problem in protecting and assisting tourists. It is worth knowing something about their history, however, beginning with the suppression of Catalan for as long as Franco was alive, to understand why there's a certain amount of linguistic chaos there still. They do have a long way to go but it's still a great city and yes, I do think it's a bit mindless to dismiss the entire city based on linguistic problems between tourists and petty officials.

But in no way did I propose that tourists should be fluent in the host country language or else stay at home -- another unwarranted exaggeration to defend your attitude. It's a matter of not traveling with an openness to the possibility that you may have to cope with the absence of English; and that's not only a reality and okay but maybe even a good part of the adventure.

Finally, I admit I do think the original post is a troll -- sounds awfully cinematic to me, but nonetheless somewhat convincing for the very reason that Barcelona's police do seem complicit (as I said) in allowing predators to plague tourists.

soccr, interesting reply. To begin with, you are not the only contributor to this thread with a Ph.D., so I propose that we lay aside the debate over who has superior academic credentials, it may or may not work to your advantage, and I doubt that anyone else would be interested or impressed.

Your accusations concerning David Crystal's research on the popularity of the English language seem odd. Why do you doubt that he does not have access to the type of data that would be required to pursue his research in a thorough and professional manner? I referenced Prof. Crystal's estimate of the number of English speakers because I have no reason to doubt his competency. If he were as careless as you suggest, it is unlikely that his work (not to mention his career) would have survived the rigors of peer review and competitive funding. Just because you don't like the man's results is not evidence that he is incompetent. Crystal is fully aware that not everyone that occasionally mutters "OK" is an English speaker. He is further aware that many people who claim an ability to speak English cannot, in fact, use the language functionally. Also, I doubt that he has included any parrots in his assessment.

Here is another website in which he discusses his "one-quarter of the global population" estimate in slightly more detail http://www.cup.org.br/articles/articles_12.html

It is wrong to assume that marginally developed countries do not have substantial numbers of English speakers. Do you realize that there are more English speakers in both Nigeria and India than there are in Australia?

In fairness, I concede that no one in this thread has bluntly stated that anyone refusing to learn the local language should stay home. There have been suggestions (not by you), however, that such people deserve no sympathy when they become the victims of crime and are unable to acquire police assistance.

As I believe I stated above, I don't believe that Americans, etc. expect English to be spoken everywhere. In fact, my personal feeling on the matter is that, if everyone speaks English (England, etc.), it doesn't really feel like a foreign country. I do believe that large cities that vigorously promote international tourism should recognize the utility of English as a means to communicate with a wide variety of their visitors and promote the use of the language among the tourist industry, in part, to discourage the targeting of foreign visitors by criminals.

There has been a lot of speculation that the post that initiated this thread is a troll. Another possibility is that the poster is a user of English as a foreign language. The disjointed sentences, use of words and phrases like "monies" and "customer services" (note the plural), etc. suggest this possibility. Would those that have declared they have no sympathy for disappointed (troll suspicions aside) feel the same way if they knew that he/she was Italian or Danish?

There was only one reference in the original poster's message about English speaking personnel. I believe the intent of the post was more about rudeness and lack of concern during a difficult experience. I am sure this is something we can all relate to both at home and while traveling. Although I don't use trains in the US, I do use them in Europe. I always enjoy the ride, etc. but have remarked several times that train station personnel seem to be an unhappy and unhelpful group.

Re: "all i can say is that Spain is a beautiful country ... but the people there treat tourist like crap...."

Sorry that you had bad experiences and that the above is your impression of people in Spain.

In six days in Barcelona a few years ago, we had almost nothing but very positive experiences with the Spanish people we met. I'm not saying that to discredit your experiences, just to offer mine as a counterpoint.

I haven't been to that part of Spain, but outside of Bilboa, I found the police rude.

You have the big clue to this not droll troll.

Re: "Please don't tell me they don't check passports on trains at borders because I have taken trains all over Europe and know that they do."

ThinGorjus, we traveled by train from Cinque Terre to Nice last spring and I do not recall having our passports checked.

They don't check passport any more on Spanish-French border because both are Schengen countries.

There are tourist police organisations for example in places like Tenerife, but I don't think Barcelona is a tourist place in a classic meaning of the word. It is a town for Barcelonians. And StCirq already mentioned that staff in the stations are usually just low-pay personel, and meant to serve the locals.

I suppose big towns could hire students for summer months to work in places like stations and market places. Sort of multi-lingual amateur tourist guides and helpers. That would benefit the tourists and also the students who often have difficulties in finding a summer job.

In June of 2000, my husband and I were stopped at the French boarder as per driving into Spain, San Sebastian to be specific. The guard or officer, I do not really know what he was, asked to see my driver's license. When I showed him my international driver's license he asked if I was American and when I answered yes, he demanded to see my passport, which I did have on me. I said that I thought that you didn't have to show your passport if you were traveling to EEC countries and you already showed it once when you entered. He said that non-EEC citizens must always have their passport on them by law and must show it on demand to the proper authorities. OK.No problem. When my husband and I got to our hotel, the desk clerk also told me (I told him the story about getting stopped at the boarder) that all non-EEC citizens must show their passport at hotels in Spain upon check-in because it was the law. He said this is how they find criminals by putting their passport number into the hotel computer. Supposedly the police know where all tourists are at at all times. I don't know if this is true or not, but I don't know why these people would single out me, a nurse from Delaware. Who knows. By the way, I thought Spain was really cool and the people were nice to my husband and I especially when they found out is was our honeymoon. We would definitly go back. See ya later.

I'm still stuck on why the passport and money were being carried in a daypack (instead of a moneybelt or under clothing pouch) that could be grabbed and then not even missed for 15 minutes!

Smueller, I was not questioning Crystal's credentials or even his writings but rather your use of them. You (one) can "borrow" the credibility of any references only up to a point and then it is incumbent on you (one) to make sure you use the material properly. For example, things like speculation, anecdotes, and case studies are not statistics and shouldn't be presented as hard data, just as a matter of scholarly rigor. As to whether Crystal had "access" to information, I wasn't questioning whether he could or could not find or retrieve the information. I was pointing out that the very idea of a complete database/census on world language use is preposterous -- it's hard enough just to get an accurate census of a single nation's population. As I said, anyone attempting to collect such data would have to use various methods of extrapolation and supposition to come up with what would have to be an educated estimate, at best.

And as a direct quote from the site you provided, Crystal himself says: "Well, all statistics about language use are a bit vague" and "nobody's very clear." He also raises the same questions I did about what constitutes using/speaking English. So even he is more tentative about his own _extrapolations_ than you were. But thanks for providing the original source material -- that, at least, reflects a commitment to intellectual honesty and integrity that suggests you know the difference between casual tossing around of stats out of context and actual documentation (even if it is from the notoriously unreliable web -- although in this case, there is no reason to doubt the source).

Re: troll vs. not a troll: I assumed from the outset that the original poster was probably not someone for whom English is a first language (too many odd grammatical errors and word choices), but that doesn't necessarily mean that the post wasn't a troll. In fact, who better to twit Anglophone tourists about their "linguistic imperialism" than a native speaker of some other language with a certain command of English?

I am troubled by the tendency of folks on this site to bash the victims of rudeness or theft, as if they had it coming, as if it were their own fault. What happened to "disappointed" sounds like a nightmare to me. He/she was victimized and no one seemed to take it seriously. The fact tat he/she couldn't communicate because of the language barrier just made it worse.

Next year, I plan to visit Spain. However, I've had second thoughts about it because of the persistence of reports about thieves victimizing tourists. Those warnings are pervasive. I'm going anyway, but it's wearing to have to watch one's back all the time.

I was warned about the pickpockets in Rome and so was prepared when a gang of gypsy children swarmed me near the coloseum, obviously intent on theft. It was puzzling to me why the Roman police didn't target those kinds of thieves in such a well-known haven for pick-pockets, especially for the sake of the children themselves, who were obviously being schooled by their parents in a life of petty crime.

When someone has a negative experience in Europe, it's a service to the rest of us when they warn us that the same thing could happen to us. So I wish that everyone would lighten up and show a little empathy.

That's true, Mary Fran, you have a good point there.

I am curious as to why there has been no comments from "disappointed". Is it that he/she just registered to make this complaint?

This is a thread that has no value other than to incite and I hope Fodors deletes it before it becomes more embarrassing.

Degas suggests they "deport thier (sp) sorry butts". Is this a suggestion that only non-Spaniards are responsible for crime in Barcelona? Right.

Prof.Dr.soccr, Ph.d trots out credentials that are supposed to intimidate anyone daring to disagree.

Re: "I am troubled by the tendency of folks on this site to bash the victims of rudeness or theft, as if they had it coming, as if it were their own fault."

Mary_Fran, I understand what you're saying -- because the only person truly at fault in a theft is the thief -- but, on the other hand, carelessness on the part of a victim can be a contributing factor. I fail to see why anyone who has done even the most rudimentary research on traveling in Europe would keep all of their valuables in an all-too-easily snatched daypack.