Shopping for language materials when travelling

[Bluepaint]

What language related items have you bought on your travels? Anything particularly useful or unusual or that you simply love? I can't wait to try my Kadazan-Dusun-Malay-English dictionary when I get home. On the other hand, I regret not buying one of the very comprehensive Tibetan dictionaries I came across many moons ago.

[Jiwon]

I bought the Hindi-English dictionary from Oxford in Sri Lanka for 1300 Sri Lankan Rupees, which was less than 25 USD at the time. It would have cost me so much more here in Seoul with the shipping costs. I use it all the time when I am doing difficult comprehension tasks. I do regret not buying the English-Hindi dictionary at the time. I wasn't sure whether I would be studying Hindi for so long.

I also make sure to buy a copy of "Teach Yourself [ insert any Indic language]" everytime I go to India. I would love to buy them all, but I travel with a small backpack, and have tonnes of Himalaya/Khadi products to stock up. Right now I have Hindi, Bengali and Urdu. I can't wait to add Sanskrit and Punjabi to the collection.

[Adrianslont]

In general books and DVDs.

Specifically, I love my box set of the 1990s Tintin cartoons in Indonesian. I wish it was easier to buy legal Indonesian dvds - it’s really tough even in Indonesia.

What got you into Kadazan-Dusun? Have you been travelling in Borneo? Do you speak Bahasa Melayu? Bahasa Indonesia?

[jeff_lindqvist]

The first time I was abroad I bought half a metre of Teach Yourself books. This was in the mid 90s and most were only familiar with Linguaphone. When I returned home I studied one language per day on my own.

[Bluepaint]

The first time I was abroad I bought half a metre of Teach Yourself books. This was in the mid 90s and most were only familiar with Linguaphone. When I returned home I studied one language per day on my own.

Half a metre? You're my hero

[Bluepaint]

In general books and DVDs.

Specifically, I love my box set of the 1990s Tintin cartoons in Indonesian. I wish it was easier to buy legal Indonesian dvds - it’s really tough even in Indonesia.

What got you into Kadazan-Dusun? Have you been travelling in Borneo? Do you speak Bahasa Melayu? Bahasa Indonesia?

I speak neither B.Indonesian nor B.Melayu beyond "Hello, how are you?" and if people answer other than "I'm fine" I'm buggered It will almost certainly be a flirtation more than a committed relationship. I find dabbling still adds breadth to my knowledge and skills even if there's very little depth to my understanding. It's fun to see similarities as well as a language's unique points. But who knows? I might fall head over heels for it. As for why? shrug Because I came across it? It's like most of my jobs, partners, hobbies, trips etc. I get drawn in and just go for it. Which is weird because in other ways I am such a planner.

P.s I realised reading this over that last section makes me sound like such a rubbish adult

Edit: Yeah spent 4 weeks on the island

[lingua]

I mostly buy cookbooks in the language of the country I visit which usually requires translation if I want to make something from it. In the past I bought a lot of books (fiction or sometimes grammar) and cooking magazines whenever I traveled to Italy but the last few times I've been I don't bother since I prefer reading on the Kindle. I can't think of anything that was unusual. The first time I went to Italy I hadn't started studying the language yet and bought a book at the Vatican in the Italian version. I don't even think I'd decided to learn the language at that point so I'm not sure why I decided on Italian instead of English. I never did read it and donated it in one of my periodic book purges.

[Jean-Luc]

Mostly bilingual technical dictionaries with native language and business vocabulary books (especially multilingual) like:

[Cavesa]

-books in the language. Awesome, when you are not sure what to look for on Amazon. Just visit the normal bookstores, you'll get introduced to your favourite genres and find similar things more easily later.
-monolingual courses teaching the local language
-courses based in the local language (awesome in Germany, in France, in the UK, and so on), I really love for example my Italian grammar in French, or my Spanish-German 4000 words book, Assimil, and so on
-dvds sometimes.

[Iversen]

I mostly buy dictionaries - and it seems that the easiest way to find a Something->Finnish dictionaries or Estonian both ways is to buy a plane ticket to one of those two places. I would also buy grammars if the bookstores had got them in the relevant languages (those missing in my collection), but they rarely do - they have tons of text books, but text books are rubbish. I have also bought a fairly large number of science magazines and a number of bird guides - but not novels and things like that.

The problem is that I try to avoid checked in luggage in planes so the total weight limit of my luggage is sometimes as low as 7 kilos.