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A father vacationing with his family in northern Italy has been throwing around the nine Italian words he learned in preparation for the trip like a cocky linguist trying to invent a new language, it has been revealed.
Although Anders Dahl spent more than six hours listening to Italian audio lessons during his family's drive from Luxembourg to northern Italy last week, during their first outing in Siena, it became apparent that he could conjure no more than nine words: the numbers one through four, hello, goodbye, please, thank you, and inexplicably, snow peas.
Even worse, his comprehension is so poor that he cannot even understand when people say words to him that are widely known outside of Italy. These include pizza, spaghetti, and ciao.
Nevertheless, he has been insisting on only communicating in Italian and employing the nine words he knows whenever he gets the chance and for nearly any purpose, even when they do not make sense or when it is clear that locals are baffled.
"I told him in very good English that I don't speak Romanian or German or whatever it was he was speaking," said one Siena waitress. "Only after several minutes of him wildly gesticulating and repeating some incomprehensible mumbo jumbo did I understand that he was trying to speak my own language."
"I took a gamble and gave him a bowl of tiramisu, which seemed to make him happy."
Dahl's two children, aged six and eleven, say that ever since they arrived in Italy, they have grown anxious about even the most mundane social interaction.
"Each time we approach anybody, our dad insists on greeting them with buongiorno, although no one ever understands and in fact it appears they often take it as an insult," said Dahl's son Oscar.
"When they switch to English or even Danish, which is our native tongue, our dad continues in Italian, trying to rearrange the nine words he knows to make some kind of sense, but it never does," added Dahl's daughter Sabine.
Despite the cartoonishness of Dahl's pronunciation and his tiny vocabulary, locals say they are touched.
"From his initial contact with the immigration agent at the airport, to the taxi driver who only slightly inflated the rates, to the receptionist at the hotel, Signore Dahl has valiantly and respectfully spoken Italian to us," said Roberto Bianchi, spokesperson for the Lombardy Tourism Board. "Sadly, no one has yet been able to decipher what he wants to say. We hope it's nice and respectful, whatever it is."
