What kind of traveller are you? Do you prefer to lie in a hammock slung between two palm trees, reading the latest blockbuster novel? Or would I find you soaking up the local culture along with the sun? I’m more of the latter, and it helps to know a smattering of the local language if you go off the beaten track!
These days, I’m more of an armchair traveller. I haven’t left the country in years (it’s murder on your carbon footprint), and besides, I’ve turned my attention more towards exploring the cosmos (and you can’t get there from here!).
If you dream of being a space traveller, then language skills are essential. Although NASA works in English, any astronaut that launches into space in a Soyuz rocket has to learn Russian. Indeed, the dominant language on the International Space Station (ISS) has become a mixture – Runglish – as a result. An astronaut with neither Russian nor English as their first language needs to be even more of a linguist. Samantha Cristoforetti, for example, speaks five languages – Italian, English, German, French and Russian. And she’s one of the ESA astronauts currently learning Mandarin for future space missions with Chinese taikonauts.
I have a GCSE in French and an A-level in Spanish that I completed at school. Although I enjoy other languages (indeed, if I could whistle up a superpower, it would be to understand them all!), they haven’t played much of a role in my adult life. But space gardening is a truly international endeavour, and I recently stumbled across plans for a French astronaut to grow marigolds on the ISS. But the only information I could find was in French. So armed with my trusty GCSE and Google Translate, I gradually worked out the details. (And now I’m growing my own marigolds
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