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

[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).