Point it: Traveller's Language Kit [Paperback]

'Point it' manages to be both useful and diverting. Crammed with photographs of everything you might ever wish to point at in an effort to make yourself understood in a foreign country, it is also very small and light, ideal for that already overweight rucksack you are taking on your travels.

The book also makes interesting 'eye candy' and you could while away many hours on that cross-country train wondering in what situation you might need to simultaneously point at a sweet potato, a hypodermic and a large tree.

Those interested in photography and art might also find this book of interest. The book is a self contained and complete photography project that could serve as a starting point for your own work. Marvel at the still lifes and tableau that the photgrapher has laid out! Check out how fashions came and went when you see the cars, caravans, trousers and hairstyles!

All this entertainment and such a small, lightweight and cheap book!

I have to say that my copy of this book was not from Amazon at all. In fact it came in a copy of the Observer, as a free gift, similar to the brief guides to everything they throw in once a week these days. At the time me and my mum thought nothing of it (i was in my early teens), it was an interesting book and it was fun to flick through from time to time.

Later, when travelling abroad became more frequent and we took school trips to France it started to come in very handy - the finer points of grammar lessons tend to be lost on you when faced with a shrugging Parisian. Point It is a "pictionary", like those DK Eyewitness books that kids read, each page is an extraordinary still life of everyday objects. There are pictures of every vegetable under the sun, and indeed under the ground. Pictures of medical implements mundane and macabre, planes, trains and automobiles and so on. It even has a schematic of a human body with organs carefully labelled.

The title of the book gives the game away - when you're in a situation where you have no CLUE how to say "I'd like a plaster" or "I drank too much alcohol and my liver hurts" or even "when does the next seaplane leave?" normally you'd be lost. With point it, you simply take out the book, flick to the relevant page and point at the picture of what you're talking about. It is a wonderfully good idea, they say a picture's worth a thousand words, well this is a lot better than lugging round a dictionary or phrasebook.

Did i not say? It's small enough to fit into the most ladylike of pockets too. Perhaps the best point of this is that it's both cheap and multilingual, £4 for a dictionary/phrasebook that will work in any language imaginable is pretty good value. And of course it works both ways, you can hand this to a baffled foreigner so they can show you what they mean - genius!

As I said, i originally got this for free, but it's been so useful (and my copy is so dog-eared and has been dried out one time too many) that i'm compelled to buy another.

I'm travelling to Poland next week and, confused by the sheer number of consonants in the dialect, I think this will come in very handy once again.

I've bought this for a few friends as a going away present now - it is so small and light that they will easily be able to carry it with them, and even if they don't get much practical use out of it some of the pictures should give them a good laugh. Foolishly i didn't take a copy with me when i went to china and i genuinely think it would have helped on occasions when the language barrier was insurmountable, even with a phrasebook.