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pretty much. i hate them. biased reviews. limited info. exaggerated opinions on insignificant sights.
i'm gonna write my own travel book! and put it with the other million wannabe 'digital nomads'….*cough
I bet the number crunchers at Google Maps and TripAdvisor are sweating bullets with the announcement of this sale.
You guys must be living in a parallel universe.
The vast majority of these guides are still very useful, though most users probably use the digital versions these days.
though most users probably use the digital versions these days.
Nah… I still prefer the books…
i live in the same frugal universe as you. there's tons of free guides that are infinitely better than using LP alone.
for hotels, tripadvisor and booking sites (carefully read and sometimes taken with a grain of salt)
for sights, wikitravel and google pointing to blogs etc. even google images helps.
for maps, google maps, maps.me for offline maps and sometimes POI's that arent on google maps.
at least all of the above isn't written by a single underpaid employee that stays one night in each place and upsells something because they experienced it once, and briefly before rushing to the next place.
same with TV travel shows. watch for the pictures and cinematics, everything they say is garbage.
I agree with you, in the digital age, why ask a middle class travel writer from Adelaide what Panama is like?
With globalisation growing, walking down a well beaten path is such a disappointment, why not discover things for yourself and have your own experiences.
To be fair you could learn a lot from an encyclopedia or find your way with a Street directory, it's just that they are obsolete
pretty much what i do now ;)
the main sights are always good to do, but it's more about the people when they're not either sick of foreigners, or wanting to rip you off that the best experiences come. and as you say, this isn't on the beaten path. it's the small towns/villages where there's nothing major to see and do.
i think these days people (incl. independent travel writers) are trying to do too much. why would anyone really care about someone ELSES experience? i sure as hell don't.
all i care about is avoiding scams, safety, accommodation, generally where to go without spoiling it, and of course, not getting ripped off.
The phrasebooks especially I find very useful, and inexpensive.
Even for non-travel. For the language i'm learning, its surprisingly accurate - a lot more than the many iphone/android apps I tried.
google translate pretty much trumps all these days, for most languages.
i mean, most countries dont really even care if you speak a few words. and i find it rather pointless. most laugh at you anyway.
if you're actually learning a new language, as i have done, group lessons, followed by private lessons followed by living in the country is the only way to go.
I guess it depends what works for each person and the language. I actually find lessons or starting with grammar books get me nowhere in the long term. I prefer Gabriel Wyners method of self teaching, starting with pronunication then memorizing individual words with Anki, then getting into grammar books etc. For the individual words though, the LP books are perfect to start off with. If you cant find word frequency lists for your language, the LP books ive seen have roughly 2000 words so are a great alternative. I have multiple detailed dictionaries - with 10s of thousands of words, but theyre not much good for the first few thousand words - id be learning too many useless words. And Google Translate is not much help for that either (if it translates correctly). For $10-$15 the phrasebook (so far) has been more use just for dictionary list, compared to $70-$80 books ive bought and are yet to start on.
I agree, living there is best method, but its not realistic for many.
Thanks, will check out Gabriel Wyners.
Michel Thomas is also a great rapid language learning method which gets you into constructing useful sentances very fast.
Yes but if you construct sentences too quickly you're more prone to spelling errors.
OK, now i'm just being a prat.
I remember these from the 1990s, I thought they had gone the same way as the street directory and the Funk & Wagnalls