This has been a record year for Americans taking vacations and making trips abroad. But as many travelers learn, communicating with people in other parts of the world can be fraught with difficulty.

Dusting off a language that you studied in high school can certainly be useful in many situations, but even a well-intentioned tourist might annoy or offend native speakers of the language—perhaps without even realizing it. This is because knowing a language and being able to effectively communicate with it aren’t the same thing.

Aspiring language learners need to acquire the vocabulary or the grammar of another tongue, but knowing how to employ it in socially appropriate ways is another matter entirely.

It turns out that knowing how to say something can be just as important as knowing what to say.

Each culture has its own set of social rules and routines, but the rules vary by country and sometimes even by region. These include politeness routines and the appropriate degree of formality to use when interacting with others.

Some languages, like German or Spanish, have formality baked right into their lexicons and grammar. A polite versus a more intimate form of you is something that English lacks—although more familiar versions of the plural you, such as y’all or yinz, exist as........

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