Is anyone but me watching "Heroes"?

[sparkofcreation]

(the one I've been meaning to ask since the start)
1. How's the Japanese? Do Masi Oka and James Kyson Lee sound like native speakers?

(and now the huge language-nerd question...)
2. Did anyone else see that red-haired girl start talking to Hiro in Japanese (in the trailer for next week) and think "Cool! A hero whose power is speaking other

Comments

[sparkofcreation]

True. But just saying "He must speak Japanese, he moved to the US from Japan" isn't a full answer. Six is a really, really young age to move countries and retain native fluency, and unless I'm mis-remembering my language acquisition theory, merely having parents (and siblings?) who speak a language isn't normally enough to preserve fluency. My best friend moved to the US as a small child, her mother is a doctor and her father is a programmer and they speak Urdu to each other to this day and it was a common language in the town they lived in here in the US; and she still sounds like a small child when speaking it (according to her husband, who moved here as an adult).

I'd be really interested to know how he got the level of fluency to translate television scripts to it (there's a twelve-year gap between moving here and starting at Brown; was he taking Japanese classes as a child? did they teach it in his school?)-and I'd still be interested to know how the Japanese in the show would sound to a native speaker.

I'm not saying Masi Oka isn't bright, because he obviously is and I am seriously in awe of all he's done, whether or not he also can translate Japanese in his spare time-but having two native languages and studying a third in school is very common in many parts of the world. My host sister in Spain was dumb as a brick, but she spoke Spanish, Catalan, and French fluently, and also a bit of English.

[tisoi]

http://www.wizarduniverse.com/television/tvother/002273624.cfm

SCOTT PORTER: Were you originally from Tokyo, or were you born in Japan?

MASI OKA: Yeah. I was actually born in Japan and I moved to L.A. when I was six. But I’ve gone back like every year and I still read my manga and watch Japanese TV so that I’m still in touch with the culture. I had to go to like Saturday school over here. Saturday school was where they cram a whole week of Japanese education, including like math and science and history and language and society, into one day. So that’s how I kind of kept up with my Japanese culture.

[akibare]

Saturday school! Bingo.

Particularly in LA/Chicago/NYC.

[aindreas]

His Japanese sounds really good to a native speaker. My teacher was really impressed, said he had perfect Japanese, which is unusual for American TV shows.

[akibare]

I never heard of this TV show so can't really answer the question, but as a point of trivia, very many people who come from Japan to the US send their kids to Saturday school where they do the same lessons as Japanese schools, on the weekend. Kids who go to those schools would sound educated like regular high school kids, particularly if (as is the usual case) they speak the language at home too. They use the same books, and it's all designed for regular speaking kids.

Programmer jargon you need to simply read a bunch of texts, as a literate adult. It just comes from context, same as any other topic. If you want to be bilingual in some given field, you need to (as I'm sure you probably know too) read texts about that field in both languages on a regular basis.

I myself am a Japanese and English speaking computer programmer. Because I read documentation for work in both languages (yay for amazon/google) I can translate them into each other. I've done the occasional translation for side money on occasion, although that isn't my day job.

I think the real dividing line is whether the kids continue to go to school (or seriously homeschool) the "other" language or not. If they don't, yes, they'll often sound like little kids (or in the case of Japanese, sound like little kids and only read second-grade kids' books).