Hey! I'm Conor, the Language Tsar, and in this
video I'm gonna give you five reasons
why you should learn Russian if you wanna
travel in Eastern Europe, so that's in
Russia, Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine in
particular. So coming to Eastern Europe
and assuming that the local people are gonna
speak English would be a really big
mistake. Now Education First have done a
ranking of the countries around the
world and their proficiency in English.
So what they say is that this region,
Eastern Europe, is actually graded in
the fourth lowest out five categories
so it's got a very low level of
proficiency in English. And to give you a
comparison that would be the same as going
to China or to Latin America
according to their grading system while
Central Europe would get actually a high
proficiency so the second out of the
five grades, so there you can see the really big
difference between these two regions -
Central and Eastern Europe. In general
you can use Russian as a lingua franca
in the region everywhere except probably
here so much which is western Ukraine
because here they tend to speak
Ukrainian, not so much Russian in general.
Although here in the center of Lviv
which is the main city you can you can
get by with Russian in general but a lot of
people will reply to you in Ukrainian
so you can need it at least
to understand it, even if you don't
speak Ukrainian. And even if you only
learn Ukrainian just to come here to
Lviv, it's a beautiful city so it's well
worth the investment of your ... of your
time, to be at least able to understand it.
Really, one of my favorite cities in
Eastern Europe is here in Lviv. So what
are the advantages to you of having gone and learnt, say Russian? Now I did a
video before with Benny Lewis of
fluentin3months where we spoke about the
English-speaking tax which is when if
you rely on English, you tend to be more
vulnerable to pay higher prices. If
you try to pay for a taxi here and you
get one on the street and you have to
negotiate the price. So if you speak in
English they, gonna think it's
Christmas by literally.
They're gonna demand, you know, maybe
fifty percent, maybe double the price,
maybe three or four times the price, than
they would to a local person. Now the
best way to get a price here, say here
in Ukraine, is actually to call a taxi.
They're always cheaper than haggling on
the street but there you're gonna
have to be able to speak at least
Russian to be able to order a taxi
because if you don't speak Russian,
that's really can be a problem. Actually I
had that one when I first came here,
I didn't speak Russian. I could not order
a taxi. It was so frustrating. So
you can, of course, rely on taxi apps and
they have improved things a little bit, so you
have, of course, Uber that is a kind of...
international, of course, and you can use
that app but it actually tends to be a
bit expensive, in any case Uber, which
is unusual because in most countries
it's actually cheaper option but here for
example in Ukraine it's a good, even without
the, you know, without surge charging it's still
about twenty or thirty percent more
expensive. So the second big advantage
you'll get by speaking Russian as
opposed to English is in terms of just
communication in general, right? It goes
further than just your basic
communication in terms of with a taxi
driver you know and with people in
restaurants. It's actually important for
building real relationships in the
region because if you can't speak
Russian then you're really gonna
narrow a number of people that of course you
can communicate with in general, make
friends with or just, you know, hang out
with while you're in the
region. And if you don't speak Russian,
it's really hard to understand, say, the
conversations that are going on around
you, right? Because we you don't speak the
local language and especially not Russian
in Eastern Europe then, you know, you're
gonna miss so much. Without Russian
it's ten times harder. I know that
because I actually came on the first
trip to the region without speaking
really any Russian and it was so hard
and it was so frustrating. So the third
big advantage to having learnt Russian
and traveling Eastern Europe is the
ability to find out what's going on
locally because a lot of the best tips, say,
for restaurants or events, it's gonna
be written in Russian or we're here in
Western Ukraine, we're in Lviv, so it
going to be written in Ukrainian so you
could just about be able to figure it
out, normally. If you are... if you also can
speak Russian that's a big advantage.
I can give an example.
Like there are lots of guides, local guides or Facebook
pages where people discuss what's going
on, events. Like I was in Kyiv just at
the weekend and because I was able to
read Russian I was able to know that
there was a local electronic music party
going on and I could go and join it because
there was actually nothing in English, so
you're not gonna get the best local
tips because local people write about
those in their own languages and that
makes it harder if you rely on English.
That's another big advantage is actually
being able to get the local information
and find the best places and read all
the comments that they leave and
everything, so you can decide if you wanna
go to something. So the fourth big
advantage is making your traveling a lot less
stressful. So if you can speak and
understand, it just simplifies your
life, man. I remember the first time when
I came to Eastern Europe and I didn't
speak Russian and it was so frustrating,
so much extra pressure to communicate
with people because I couldn't read anything,
I couldn't really get the basic and
starters in a restaurant out in Russian or
Ukrainian if you're here in Lviv. So
that really makes a huge difference in
terms of being able relax and enjoy your
traveling, get so much more out of it,
not that permanent state of stress and
panic that you're being exposed to a
language that you can't understand. So
the fifth reason that I'm gonna give
for learning Russian language is
avoiding scams. That's a little bit
connected with higher prices but it's
more explicit because obviously if you
don't understand what's going on, you
don't speak Russian, you're gonna
be seen as a bigger target because
scam artists look for people who are vulnerable, who don't
really understand the environment that
they find themselves in. Like for example
a very common thing that happens to a
lot of guys that come here, especially
because the women are very beautiful of
course in Eastern Europe - Russians,
Ukrainians, Moldovans, Belorusians.
People in the Baltics everywhere in the
general region women are really
beautiful, so a lot of guys, say, from the
United States, North America and Europe,
Western Europe, they come here hoping to
of course, meet beautiful girls and that
leaves them very vulnerable when they don't
speak Russian. I've never had that
bad experience
at all but, of course, I speak the
language and I hear so many times that,
you know, they meet some girl, maybe it's on
a dating app or a dating website. Then
they go to a restaurant, they really don't
understand what's going on when things
are being ordered, all of a sudden the
bill comes and - wow - instead of
something like reasonable like 20 or 30
euros for their meal it turns out it's
like 300 and they have some big burly
bouncer telling them that they got to
pay up. Of course, the whole thing is a
scam, the girl's in on it, she brought him to that
restaurant simply to rip them off and I
saw this happened to a to a Portuguese
guy who was traveling here and he got
scammed in that way and part of the
problem for him was that he couldn't read the
bill properly, he felt under a lot of
pressure just to pay because they had had
some champagne and seafood platter but
it was like maybe 10 times the real
prices it should have cost him. Definitely if you don't
speak Russian, you're vulnerable, you
might be seen as naive and someone that
the scam artists are gonna target, so that's
another very good reason to speak
Russian and definitely understand the
environment very well. I've also seem to
happen that friends have ordered
bottle of champagne and, say, in a
restaurant in a nightclub and then the
waiter came back and spoken Russian and
said basically yeah this is the
bottle or they said 'that bottles not there'
and is this one OK and they accepted, of
course, the price of that bottle was multiples of
the original bottle that they wanted, so instead paying something like thirty
dollars or thirty euros they ended up
paying, you know, 200, 300. So I've seen it happen
I actually saw a bill of 450 as the result of
someone not understanding what was going on.
So that's vital that you get that one right and
learning Russian's definitely going to be a
great defence to that. If you enjoyed the
video please give it that big thumbs up
and yeah write me about your experiences
of course, in Eastern Europe. How you found
it ...whether you've heard of scams, whether you
found out to be the price level that you
negotiated was better and definitely in
any case Russian is a really great
language I really enjoyed learning it
and using it,
and also Ukranian here in the
beautiful city of Lviv in western
Ukraine. And I also encourage you to give
that a go if it's useful for you if you're
planning to visit here. So it's goodbye from this
video. До побачення, which is goodbye in
Ukrainian and До свидания, which is