Have you ever wanted to date someone outside your city, state or even country to see what options may be outside of your local watering hole, grocery store, or coffee shop? Or perhaps you have met someone online and want to make the first contact, but English isn’t their first language.
Well, I did.
And guess what? I was able to do so despite there being a language barrier in the beginning. In this post, I’ll show you exactly how to break the language barrier between you and your potential match. But first, let me tell you about my personal story…
In 2013, I was interested in dating a Brazilian woman.
Problem #1: She didn’t speak much English and I didn’t want to restrict myself to only people that did.
Problem #2: I didn’t speak a single word of Portuguese.
So, I decided to come up with some techniques to be able to communicate in Portuguese on a basic level.
Here are 4 of these techniques that you can use right now to be able to achieve the same because you can apply these to any language!
Using Google Translate to Understand Your Partner
Unlike what many people think, start with Google Translate. It should be used only to understand what your partner says because it won’t always give accurate translations, but with the context, you should be able to understand what it is your partner is saying.
Linguee – Excellent for Translations
Now that the understanding part is figured out, comes the part where YOU write something in his/her language. Linguee is, in my opinion, the best tool for doing so. However, finding the right translation is not instantaneous, because it generates about 25 of them, in order of relevancy.
Go for small sequences of words for better results.
Using the Google Search Engine to Check For Language Accuracy
Google has a huge amount of correctly written samples in a lot of different languages. Take advantage of them by checking if your sentences are correctly written.
This can be done by typing a small sentence in quotes as such: “eu acho você bonito”. Then, look at the number of results at the top to see whether it is likely “correct” in that language.
Generally, the higher the number of results, the more accurate the sentence.
Mimicking Your Partner
Start mimicking how your partner speaks. After all, he/she speaks the language better than you can. Take what your partner said (which you understand with the help of Google Translate) and reformulate it to express your own ideas. You and your partner will start to feel more and more connected!
So, there you have it. Apply these techniques and get ready to possibly meet the love of your life.
