Shopping phrases for travel: markets, sizes and prices

A market stall or a side street shop, two days into the trip, something in your hand you have already decided you want. The stallholder says a price, you hear the shape of it, a word that could be twelve or could be twenty, and then comes the pause where your reply is supposed to go. That pause is what people describe afterwards as the moment they felt like a tourist rather than a visitor.

There are two usual plans for it. The phone works and costs you the exchange, because the person in front of you is now in conversation with a device. Pointing and smiling gets you the object but not the transaction, and it falls apart the second there is a choice about size, colour, quantity, or whether you want the thing wrapped.

What people ask for is not fluency. It is enough to get by, polite rather than fluent, not being that tourist. For shopping that resolves into a short and very specific list: ask the price, ask for a different one, say you are only looking, say yes, and say no in a way that leaves the room pleasant.

Phrazl is built around that shape of problem. Setup is three screens, destination, departure date and up to three of the five scenarios, and shopping is one of the five. The other four, restaurant, transport, hotel and emergency, have their own pages.

Most shopping phrase articles give you the speaking half and skip the listening half, which is the half that stalls you. Four jobs do most of the work.

• Asking the price. One line, delivered without hesitation, in the register of the place. In a market it is casual and constant. In a shop where everything is labelled you may barely need it, which is worth knowing before you decide where to spend your practice.
• Asking for a different one. Smaller, larger, another colour, two instead of one, the one in the window. This is where pointing fails and a phrase earns its keep.
• Declaring intent. I am just looking, thank you. In some places this is the single most useful sentence in the set, because it ends a sales approach politely and buys you five minutes to browse.
• Closing or declining. I will take this one. It is lovely, not today. A no that sounds like a no and still leaves both of you smiling.

Then there is the part you receive rather than say: the number, the card or cash question, the do you need a bag, the anything else. You cannot script somebody else's lines. You can make them familiar enough to recognise, which is why every phrase is practised with the audio playing, at speed or slowed down to copy and with a written pronunciation guide beside it, rather than read off a page and hoped for. That voice is synthesised rather than a native speaker, and you should know that before you pay rather than after.

One honest limit. Phrazl is not a haggling course. Pricing etiquette varies by country, by market and by what you are buying, and a phrase set is the wrong tool for a negotiation. What a shopping set gives you is the language the negotiation happens in, which is the part you can prepare in advance. The rest is nerve, and nerve is cheaper when the words are already in your mouth.

Two of the drills behave the same way whatever language your trip is in. Flashcard shows you the English, you say the phrase out loud, then you grade yourself on what came out. Listen and repeat plays the phrase so the sentence is something you have heard before you try it on a stranger, at full speed or slowed down to copy, with the pronunciation written out beside it. Those two carry the shopping set in every destination Phrazl covers.

About that voice: it is synthesised, not a native speaker, and the mode labels it as such where you hear it. Use it to fix the rhythm and the stress of how much is this, not to pass for a local. The slow playback and the written guide are doing more of the work there than the timbre is.

Fill in the blank is the third mode, and it is fairer to tell you where it stops. It takes a word out of the sentence and asks you to put it back, which only works in a language that writes its words with spaces around them. For Japan, China and Thailand it falls back to the whole phrase instead of a single word, so there it behaves like a recognition check rather than a word level drill. Even where it does blank a word, the right option has a habit of sitting in the same place in the list, so treat a correct tap as reinforcement rather than proof. The thing you are training is what you can say out loud, and the only honest test of that is your own voice in a quiet room.

So the pairings below lean on flashcard and listen and repeat. The split that matters for shopping is not written against spoken, it is the lines you deliver against the lines you receive.