If you’ve only heard me speak English, there’s a version of me you haven’t met yet.
She speaks Italian. She gets to the joke a little sooner. Occasionally she gets there before the other person has finished telling the story.
I’m fond of her.
I spend a lot of my life speaking English. I talk about work, record interviews and meet people I might never have met if we’d both waited for the other one to learn our language. I can have a long conversation in English and forget entirely that I’m doing it.
Then someone says something funny in Italian and I’m reminded what it feels like to laugh before I’ve even heard the end of the sentence.
It works the other way too. There are people I know in English whom I’d love to hear in the language they use with their oldest friends. I wonder what they sound like when they’re telling a story they’ve told a hundred times. I wonder who interrupts whom.
My favourite thing is when somebody who knows me in English hears me on the phone in Italian and says afterwards, “Was that an argument?”
Usually, we were arranging lunch. 😂🤷♀️
Read another piece from Lifestyle: Wait. You Can’t Leave That Part Out.
Silvia
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