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Home Travel

The Secret To Getting By In A Language You Don’t Speak

What To Do When You Don't Speak The Language

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
May 27, 2018
in Italy, Travel
0
A professional woman communicating a great idea to her male coworker
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My husband’s strategy for communicating in a place where he doesn’t speak the local language is to use similar words from a language he does know delivered with a local accent.

The craziest part of this approach is that it usually works.

In Venice recently, for example, while not efficient, Lief’s strategy was, again, effective.

Lief hadn’t had time to visit the barber before leaving for the trip, so, our first day in Venice, he decided he’d like to have his hair cut.

The proprietress of the shop where I stopped to buy a pair of hand-stamped sconce shades (to use in the house we’ve built at Los Islotes) apologized over and over, in Italian, for speaking no English.

No, it’s we who should apologize, we assured her, for speaking no Italian.

She smiled and then turned to show us how she stamped each design on to each shade, section by section.

The shades I chose share a pattern from a room in Venice’s Doge’s Palace. The kind Italian lady showed me photos of the original design in a book from her shelf, then covered my shades in tissue paper and packed them safely in a box.

Encouraged by the lady’s helpful manner, Lief decided to inquire about his haircut.

As the woman wrapped my purchase, Lief spoke up… in Spanish…

“¿Dónde puedo cortar?” Lief asked using his best Italian accent and motioning in the direction of the top of his head.

“Ah!” she replied enthusiastically. “Si! Si!”

She knew a place where Lief could go to be coiffed.

The lady grabbed Lief by the shoulder and spun him around to face the stone wall of her small shop. On the flat stone, she drew, with her forefinger, the route from her shop to the barber, a few blocks away.

When she’d finished outlining the route, she cried out, “Ya!” and smacked the stone hard with her open palm, as if to say, “There you have it… piece of cake!”

Then she escorted us to the door and pointed us in the direction we should head.

We found the barber with no problem, and Lief got the most expensive haircut of his life.

Lief and I both have spent the better parts of our lives in places where the locals speak something other than English. We should be more linguistically competent than we are. Lief speaks Spanish. I muddle through in Spanish and get by OK in French, but that’s the extent of our language CVs.

Thus Lief’s strategy… which has his Spanish taking on sometimes an Italian flair… other times it comes out French or German…

The result has me giggling, but it gets us where we need to go (and now and then Lief a new hairdo).

Kathleen Peddicord

Tags: 'Travel Italy'best ways to learn a new languagelearning a new languagelearning Italianlive and invest in Italy conferencetravel venice
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Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord has covered the live, retire, and do business overseas beat for more than 30 years and is considered the world's foremost authority on these subjects. She has traveled to more than 75 countries, invested in real estate in 21, established businesses in 7, renovated historic properties in 6, and educated her children in 4.

Kathleen has moved children, staff, enterprises, household goods, and pets across three continents, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland... then to Paris, France... next to Panama City, where she has based her Live and Invest Overseas business. Most recently, Kathleen and her husband Lief Simon are dividing their time between Panama and Paris.

Kathleen was a partner with Agora Publishing’s International Living group for 23 years. In that capacity, she opened her first office overseas, in Waterford, Ireland, where she managed a staff of up to 30 employees for more than 10 years. Kathleen also opened, staffed, and operated International Living publishing and real estate marketing offices in Panama City, Panama; Granada, Nicaragua; Roatan, Honduras; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Paris, France.

Kathleen moved on from her role with Agora in 2007 and launched her Live and Invest Overseas group in 2008. In the years since, she has built Live and Invest Overseas into a successful, recognized, and respected multi-million-dollar business that employs a staff of 35 in Panama City and dozens of writers and other resources around the world.

Kathleen has been quoted by The New York Times, Money magazine, MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, the AARP, and beyond. She has appeared often on radio and television (including Bloomberg and CNBC) and speaks regularly on topics to do with living, retiring, investing, and doing business around the world.

In addition to her own daily e-letter, the Overseas Opportunity Letter, with a circulation of more than 300,000 readers, Kathleen writes regularly for U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

Her newest book, "How to Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad," published by Penguin Random House, is the culmination of decades of personal experience living and investing around the world.

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