Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

Hey, look over there. [[You No Take Candle|There's a guy who doesn't speak very well at all! He must be stupid!]]

 

A specific subversion of [[You No Take Candle]], and can sometimes brush up against [[Blind Idiot Translation]] when played for laughs.

 

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

 

* Shenhua from ''[[Black Lagoon]]'' is Taiwanese and presumably speaks fluent Chinese, but her English (and Japanese, in the original) is utterly dreadful both in grammar and pronunciation, to the point where Revy (who is Chinese-American) nicknames her "Chinglish." It's ''not'' a good idea to take her poor language skills for stupidity, [[Dark Action Girl|unless you want to be]] [[Knife Nut|knifed to death]].

* Kuu Fei from ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'', despite her grades is ''not'' stupid; her physical/kinetic ability sits at a genius level. She also occasionally speaks in her native Chinese, at which she comes off as perfectly concise. However, she speaks Japanese in a stereotypical "Chinese person speaking Japanese badly" manner, which is translated similarly to Shampoo's speech in the above example.

* A written version in ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'', Asuka fails her math exams at school. However, when Shinji is having trouble with a problem, she solves it in her head. When Shinji expresses his amazement at how she could possibly be failing math, she explains that she hasn't learned the kanji yet and just can't ''read'' the exam questions.

** Made more apparent by the fact that she apparently has college-level degrees and is basically a child prodigy as well as an Evangelion pilot. It's likely that kanji is really the only reason she's in school at all.

* Groot, badass tree (yes, tree) of the Guardians of the Galaxy, never says anything but "I AM GROOT!" But his inflection and tone matter greatly...

** He used to be able to talk normally.

 

== Film ==

 

* ''[[Shogun]]'' goes both ways with this trope, with some Japanese speaking English poorly, and Blackthorne struggling and even getting in trouble trying to speak Japanese.

** This applies even more obviously to several characters in ''Kim'', especially to Huree Babu and Kim himself, at least until he becomes the recipient of an English education at St. Xavier's.

* The little girl Aily from "Five Get Into a Fix" by [[Enid Blyton]] speaks beautiful Welsh, but her English is [[You No Take Candle|very broken]] ("Aily hide", "Aily not tell", etc.)

* The titular ''Pnin'' in the novel by Vladimir Nabokov.

* Dave Sedaris' ''Me Talk Pretty One Day'', which causes his French teacher extreme grief. He finally understands French... but can't speak it properly himself.

* Professor Van Helsing (a Dutchman) in the original [[Dracula]] is an interesting quasi-example of this. He speak the English in syntax quite broke, but he's really quite eloquent even then, in that he has a great vocabulary.

* [[Sherlock Holmes]] story ''A Scandal in Bohemia'' features a letter written with English words and German syntax, which is one of the clues Holmes uses to narrow down the origin of the letter.

* This was used in Kasumi Todoh's plotline in [[Art of Fighting]] 3: She is searching for Ryo Sakazaki (who is a mixed-race American) in Mexico, and is using a Japanese-to-English dictionary to communicate. She naturally sounds demented in her win poses (and probably to any natives in the area, who don't speak English anyway.)

* Alien visitor Meredy from ''[[Tales of Eternia]]'' is completely unable to speak English when you first meet her, only able to speak Celestian Melnics. Early on you participate in a quest to get her some [[Translator Microbes]]. This results in her speaking pidgin English for the rest of the game. However, once you are granted the chance to go to Celestia yourself you'll find that no other character talks like she does. She reveals herself to be quite the big cookie in the scientific research field once you get there, though.

* Brother from ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'' isn't precisely eloquent in Al-Behd, but he at least uses proper grammar. When he starts trying to impress Yuna by learning her native language, he starts out exactly as one would expect: a limited vocabulary composed mostly of simple nouns and present-tense verbs. He gets better in the sequel, to the point that he could probably be considered functionally bilingual.

* Any time a Japanese developer tries to speak English at a game conference like, say, E3, it always comes across as horribly forced and awkward, probably because they learned their lines phonetically. Some, like [[Hideo Kojima]], use it to their advantage in really weird ways ([[Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots|Didjurikeit?]]) while others, like [[Shigeru Miyamoto]], only do as little as they can get away with. When they switch back to Japanese they're obviously far more eloquent through their interpreters.

* In ''[[No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle]]'', there's a brief cameo by an unnamed character who shows up out of nowhere, monologues in horrible, broken, monotone English, hands over a new weapon, and vanishes. The reason this character's English is so terrible? {{spoiler|He's [[Takashi Miike|Takashi fucking Miike.]]}}

* The Qunari are portrayed this way in the ''[[Dragon Age]]'' games, speaking in a stilted and overly-concise manner when they are forced to conduct business in [[Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe|Theodosian]]. As they strive for perfection in all things, the Qunari that the player interact with find their inprecise mastery of the language shameful, and express difficulty understanding words like "hero" and "cookie".

* ''[[Unreal II: The Awakening|Unreal II the Awakening]]'' has Ne-Ban, an alien who's the comic relief of the game, constantly mixing up words. The protagonist casually mentions it's because he speaks over fifty languages.

{{quote|"I do not see why we are forced to converse in the barbarous idiom of the coarse westerners even among ourselves. Why must we suffer the indignity of mangling our mouths with their disharmonious syllables simply because they have never taken the time to learn a proper language?"}}

** Oh, and when we say she talks like a lolcats caption, we're [[Shout-Out|completely serious]]. Examples include "I can has cheeseburger?" and "I made you a cookie, but I eated it."

* Menelaos from [[Greek Ninja]] comes off as dumb due to his terrible English and the fact he rarely speaks because of that difficulty, but in Greek he can communicate normally. Eleonora, although fluent in English, sometimes resorts to speaking some phrases in Greek to him, often when she's frustrated.

 

* ''[[Gunnerkrigg Court]]'' uses this briefly (in a reversal of how this trope usually works): As seen [http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=455 here] (via the [[Translation Convention]]), Antimony's Polish isn't as good as her native English.

** Gamma is very shy and isolated because of not understanding English, but a veritable chatterbox with Zimmy.

* Yuki from ''[[Megatokyo]]''. On the other side of the language barrier, Piro speaks Japanese like a teenage girl, having learned it mostly from ren'ai games and shoujo anime and manga.

* The Gragrum of ''[[Tales of the Questor]]'' tend to speak the common language in a rather mangled way, using heavily broken sentence structure, but once their leader speaks in his own language, his sentence structure and use of metaphors improve dramatically and excel many later human speakers. The Rac Cona Daimh around there tend to [[Funetik Aksent|drawl]] too, but the single most capable lux user in the planet comes from there, and has the worst drawl of the lot, with many more practical and [[Mana|lux-efficient]] spells coming from near the swamps. On the inverse side, a well-spoken Rac Cona Daimh pastor speaking the Gragum tongue is easily outwitted in a short conversation to the point of pulling his trump card nearly immediately and arranges sentences oddly. When talking to humans, the fairly intelligent Rac Cona Daimh also often find themselves trying to describe a sense that few humans have and sounding slightly crazy.

* Done both ways in [[Gai-Gin]]. The USA native Gin's Japanese starts out on [[You No Take Candle]] levels ("Aah ... eat tomato, and again you see tomato I ate. No wanna eat tomato?") and improves drastically over the course of the strip, though it gets worse again when she's emotional. Her Japanese boyfriend Pyon is slightly ditzy but perfectly intelligent, going into [[Badass Bookworm]] levels near the end when he {{spoiler|researches frantically for a way to stop Gin being deported}}, but his English is hopeless: "Hi Daddy! Me name Pyon-Pyon!"

* In [[The Law of Purple]], Thud is a native of a jungle where people speak a different language than the rest of the planet. At one point he even informs someone that he's not stupid, he just has a thick accent.

{{quote|Rio: (In Gardish) Ease, Xan. Patient be. We uses this for a vantage.

Xan: ... Your Gardish is ''terrible.'' We really ''must'' work on this. }}

 

== Western Animation ==