Language

In case you do not master the lingo.[1]

Please do not expect all Spaniards to be fluent in English. In more touristic areas (San Juan, Águilas) and certainly in bars and restaurants, English will be spoken in most cases. Elsewhere … well, good luck. Hands and feet are very helpful attributes for communication; just don’t get impatient, they’ll make a serious effort to understand and to be understood.

Please try Google Translate or one of the many similar apps for the more serious translation work. Many of these apps even support a spoken conversation in two languages. Definitely worth a try. Google Translate even processes written text, like signs and menus; just point your camera and all of a sudden, the dishes have English names. Well, sort of anyway, at times it’s Spanglish.

For the benefit of foreigners, Spain has made correct pronunciation of e.g. names of towns quite easy: the accent-token (á, í, é etc.) is always on the noun in the syllable that gets the emphasis. Example: Águilas and Pulpí; the first respectively the last letter gets the emphasis.

[1] Spanish is spoken by some 466 million people around the globe; following Mandarin (1,026 million) and English (of course; 765 million) it’s the world’s third-most spoken language.