When we go on holiday to far off countries like Vietnam or China, strangers often come up to us to practice their English. Indeed in Vietnam a group of schoolgirls besieged part of our tour group and talked to them non-stop throughout their lunch.
I sometimes hear Spanish speakers on the tube or local bus and wonder if it would be O.K. to try a bit of Spanish on them - would this be appropriate as we don’t speak to strangers much in England. Also I wonder what Spanish speakers start with; I tell my English students that we always talk about the weather first in any conversation, then family but NEVER politics.
You’re in London, Dave? Might be better to go along to the British Spanish Society, or post on Gumtree for an intercambio - because longer conversations are going to be more valuable for you - but if you practise saying something like ‘I heard you speaking Spanish - are you on holiday, or working here?’ would probably get you into some brief interactions…
No, I go to London now and then but live in a small town in the Midlands. Our town has a number of spanish speakers not necessarily from Spain. To add to the problems of approaching strangers we also have a large population of Portugese speakers from Portugal and Brazil.
I go to a number of Spanish meetups where we sometimes have “Nativos” but just thought that five minutes here and there on bus and tube might be interesting. After all, this is only what foreigners do to us when we are in their countries
It sounds worth a shot - certainly can’t see that anyone would find it offensive - in my experience, even reserved English people are actually fairly talkative once they get over the shock of having someone speak to them - I had a few interesting conversations in London last week…
