Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Difference between revisions

* 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.

* 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.

* [[Dominic Deegan|Donovan "Little Pink Man in Pink" Deegan]] is only capable of speaking Orcish in the sense that he seems to have a rather large vocabulary. He just doesn't know what those words mean. When speaking his native Callanian (The "English" of the world) he is the world's most renowned poet and bard. It turns out that {{spoiler|he speaks Orkish perfectly and acts otherwise because [[Rule of Funny|he thinks it's funny.]]}}

* [http://www.drowtales.com/mainarchive.php?order=date&id=1303 Vaelia] from ''[[Drowtales]]''.

* 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!"