I really need a title, even a temporary one, for this book project.
Anyway, I’ve decided to have the characters speaking Italian most of the time. Our Heroine spent most of her prep time focusing on things that interested her, and since she’s a budding geologist, she knows the very, very basics, like “What time is it?” “What is this?” “How much does this cost?” and “Where is the bathroom?” and a bunch of geology terms. She can talk about fumeroles and calderas, and name an assortment if igneous rocks, but not much more than that.
So when her first friend tries to make friends with her, she is friendly, but has to go around the long way to describe concepts she doesn’t know the vocabulary for for a while. This will pass after some practice.
This is also why she starts to look for the prince at first. She overhears a conversation and cannot understand what they’re saying, but since the participants in the conversation are acting sneaky, she figures that they might be up to no good.
The only thing is that I need to find a way to differentiate between conversations in English and conversations in Italian. I’m thinking that I will use a serif font for one and a sans-serif font for the other. If this story were set in Switzerland, I’d use Helvetica, because I think I’m funny.
I know that I don’t need to brush up my Italian for this, but I guess if I refresh my memory about the basics, I’ll have an easier time building realistic beginner Italian sentences? Maybe?