How to Get a Haircut When You Don’t Speak the Language
Getting a haircut is one of those ordinary errands you stop thinking about at home, right up until you’re trying to do it in a language you don’t speak, and then it takes up a surprising amount of room in your week.
I got mine cut in Phnom Penh a few weeks after we moved there, with a photo on my phone and one word in common with the man holding the scissors, and it went better than any of my planning had.
Four messages and no answers
I had already messaged three or four salons on Telegram before I found him, each time sending a photo of a short pixie cut and one question, can you do this, and nobody wrote back.
That’s its own particular feeling when you’re new somewhere. You’re not in any danger and nothing has gone wrong, you just can’t get the ordinary thing done, and the longer the messages sit there unanswered the more the whole errand starts to feel like proof of how far outside your own life you are.
Sitting down with a photo and nothing else
By the time I was in his chair, I had the picture and not much else. There was no way to ask whether he’d cut hair this short before, and no way to have the little back-and-forth that usually settles my nerves before someone puts scissors to my head, so the photo did all the talking for me.
He worked fast. Once he started there wasn’t much for me to do except sit there and watch his hands, watch the shape starting to appear, and try to read whether the photo and the haircut were still headed in the same direction.
The one word we had
Partway through, he stopped.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said.
It was going well, and I wanted a little more taken off, thinned out more than he had done so far, and “okay” was most of what we had between us. So I lifted my hands and showed him the rest, some gesture I made up on the spot.
He understood and went right back to it, no long pause, no confusion, nobody reaching for a translation app. He had seen what I meant and he just did it.
Why that exchange mattered more than the haircut
The whole thing took a few seconds, and it gave me something the unanswered messages hadn’t. Somebody checked in with me. I answered the only way I could. It worked.
When he finished, the photo had turned into my actual hair, sides tapered close, top short and textured, the fringe falling forward the way I’d hoped. I left happier than a haircut really calls for, mostly because a stranger had worked quickly and still stopped to ask, in the one word we shared, whether I was still with him.
What tends to carry across without language
I’ve been in a lot of these exchanges by now, and the pattern I notice is that the language matters less than whether both people are willing to stay in it for another few seconds.
In Santiago we dropped off laundry with a man who spoke Spanish, and between us we understood maybe two words of what he said, so he pointed at the closing time on the sign so we’d know when to come back. We must have looked like deer in headlights while our brains tried to compute the Spanish, and we got the laundry back on time anyway.
In Asunción, my massage therapist and I never shared a language at all, and we got by on translator apps well enough that we eventually had dinner together with both of our husbands along. I still send her a message out of the blue sometimes.
And my own body picked up a habit in Thailand that followed me to South America, where I kept bowing with my hands pressed together to people in Uruguay who had no particular reason to recognize it, including a woman at an outdoor market who had just sold me a fleece jacket, where I bowed and said gracias in the same motion.
None of that is fluency. It’s two people making themselves understood with what they’ve got, which is most of what daily life abroad actually runs on.
If you’re putting off an errand because of the language
A few things that have made it easier for me.
A photo does more than a sentence for anything visual, and it travels better than my pronunciation ever has.
Gestures you invent on the spot usually work, and most people meet you halfway without making a thing of it.
The errand is rarely as big as the dread around it. Mine sat in my head for days while the actual haircut took half an hour.
And a stranger checking in with you partway through, in whatever words exist between you, is worth noticing. Those moments are how a place starts to feel liveable.
Common questions
How do you ask for a haircut if you don’t speak the language?
Bring a photo of the cut you want and show it before you sit down. Mine did the whole job in Phnom Penh, and it also gives the barber a chance to tell you, with a look or a gesture, whether they’re up for it. Pointing and gesturing for adjustments works better than it sounds like it will.
What if they don’t understand what you want?
That’s the part worth sitting with for an extra second rather than giving up on. When my barber stopped to ask “okay?” I had the chance to lift my hands and show him I wanted more thinned out, and he understood immediately. Checking in goes both ways, and you can be the one who does it.
Do translation apps help?
Sometimes, and sometimes you don’t need one. My barber and I never reached for one. With my massage therapist in Asunción, translator apps were the whole bridge, and they got us from appointments to having dinner together, so it depends on the conversation you’re trying to have.
Want to talk it over with someone who’s doing it too?
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Book a free first conversation →Related reading: Your First Week Abroad and The 4 Stages of Culture Shock