One of my short-term roommates, until she found her own apartment, was Sandi Fiorentino, who came to New York to pursue a career in modeling. At five-foot-ten with natural platinum blonde hair that most models would dye for (pun intended), the prestigious Ford agency scooped her up. Sandi was ecstatic because her first shoot was on the Italian Riviera, where she could practice the language she’d been struggling to learn from her Italian grandmother.
When she returned from her trip, she breathlessly told me all about it. Naturally, I asked the question every unmarried female asks another, “Did you meet anybody interesting?” Now Sandi could have met the ten most fascinating women in Italy, but, as every female knows, “anybody interesting” translates into “any interesting men.”
Sandi smiled coyly, “Giancarlo. I mean he is supercool, awesome.”
“How did you meet him?”
She giggled. “He picked me up on the beach.”
“Wow, Sandi, he must have been really hot!”
“Well, no, a lot of other great guys tried. But I couldn’t understand a word they said. But for some reason I understood Giancarlo perfectly, and we wound up dating every night. When he comes to visit me, I’ll introduce you.”
When I met Giancarlo, I mentioned that Sandi told me he was the first man she understood speaking Italian. He winked at me and said very, very slowly, “Parlo . . . molto . . . lentemente . . . per . . . gli . . . stranieri.” Even with my abysmally fractured Italian, I understood he was saying, “I speak very slowly to foreigners.”
Go, Giancarlo! The fast movers on the beach didn’t get the gorgeous girl. The slow speaker did. He understood how people feel when they don’t understand a language they’re trying to learn.
Little Trick #24
Speak S-l-o-w-l-y for Nonnative Speakers
In our increasingly global society, you will meet more and more people for whom English is a second language. For them to understand you, you must slow your speech down—way down. Of course it will sound strange to you. But I promise it won’t to your listener. To connect with non-native people, you need to learn a new, very simple language. It’s called Really, Really Slowly Spoken English.