Learning basics of multiple languages at the same time

[simon43]

Hi - I'm new to this forum. I'm a British man, age 47 and I live and work in Phuket, Thailand. Together with my Thai wife, we own a hotel next to Phuket International Airport.

My current language proficiency is:
Mother tongue English
Good spoken/written Thai
Understand spoken Lao (wife's family and staff all speak Lao)
French used to be my 2nd language (after working in France for 4 years). Now I can understand French but I tend to speak Thai when I try to speak French!
German, Italian, Spanish - Basic understanding

My problem is that I look after hotel guests every day and many don't speak any English (or very little!). Guests tend to be German, Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese, Russian and Chinese.

What I really need to do is to be able to understand and speak some of all of these langauges!!

Of course, I really only need to learn and understand a small amount of each language that is relevant to my hotel environment.

Eg - guestrooms, food, bills, etc etc

Does anyone have any suggestions as to a resource that might help me achieve my goals?

(I remember seeing an 8-language phrase book somewhere, but I also really need the audio CDs etc). If I pay to buy a language course for each language then this will be very expensive!

Thanks

Simon

[Torsten]

Hi Simon,

Many thanks for joining our forum. As for your question, I think you should try Pimsleur, it's an excellent language learning system based on audio recordings. Have you heard of it?

Talk to you soon,
Torsten
_________________
Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary