: Re: How to write dialogue for someone who is intelligent but barely speaks the language? I have a character who is a refugee from another country. She comes to the protagonist, and they have a

@Goswami879

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The other answers here are all to do with making the character come across as intelligent in conversation. There is a flip-side to this, which probably bears mention: Non-verbal cues. Consider the following scene:

Protagonist A is waiting for Character B in a café, reading a newspaper to pass the time. When B arrives, A folds the newspaper, places it on the table, and starts the conversation. After a couple of minutes, socially-inept C suddenly bounds up and starts chatting away at A, completely ignoring B.

By the time A finally extricates themself from the (rather one-sided) verbal deluge, they notice that B has passed the time by getting out a pencil and working through the one of the harder logic-puzzles (sudoku, nonogram, etc) in the newspaper with remarkable efficiency.

This, of course, only works for certain expressions of intelligence - for a musical prodigy or a skilled tailor you would need a differenct scenario - but it's like this: If you want to indicate that someone is a mechanical genius, do you have them talk about sprocket design, escapement mechanism and gear ratios, or do you have them casually strip down, repair and rebuild a broken clock with little more than a glasses-repair kit and a swiss-army knife?

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