When a young American graphic novelist traveled to Damascus while touring the Middle East,

she didn't realize that she was documenting what life was like a few months before Civil War broke out in Syria.

We really didn't see it coming. When I left I had plans to go back

I said you know I'm going to come back here I'm going to learn Arabic I'm I love it here

Sarah Glidden tells us what it was like before things really started to fall apart.

Find out how other languages can express ideas we don't always have an easy way of describing in English.

A Dutch linguist suggests a few fun examples we might want to add to our vocabulary.

Then you also have this word gun, which means enjoying somebody else's good fortune, and you never hear that.

And friends from Prague remind us that talking things over while sharing a beer or two at a pub

is a Czech tradition we all should try a little more often.

The thing is we are always saying like all the problems will be solved with a muck of beer in our hands. The next rounds on us in the hour

ahead. It's travel with Rick Steve's. Ours is probably the world's biggest

language.

Some academics have calculated that English has more than a million words

thanks to how easily it can absorb words and ideas from other languages.

Coming up today on Travel with Rick Steeves, a linguist from the famously

multilingual Netherlands suggests a few more concepts from other tongues that we might consider

adding into our vocabulary.

And friends from Prock tell us why they couldn't imagine moving away,

if it meant missing out in the great beer culture

that's part of everyday life in the Czech Republic.

Let's start out today with a look at how quickly things can change in the hot. the with a couple of journalist friends and a former marine to see how people were coping in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

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