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

[mactavish]

Is Masa Oka Hiro? If so, I sure hope he sounds like a native speaker, being as he moved from Japan to the US after he'd learned Japanese.

For the show, he translates his script into Japanese.

[mactavish]

(Masi Oka, sorry. Typo. And yes, I've since looked it up, and he's a native speaker:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masi_Oka)

[sparkofcreation]

I actually did know he's a native speaker of Japanese, but I'd thought he moved to the US at a fairly young age.

I taught translation classes for years, and I'd say less than a quarter of the "native" speakers of Spanish I taught really spoke it in an educated way, much elss were able to translate it well. I'd say the dividing line (between having learned enough to be fluent and sound educated) for moving to the US was generally mid- to late teens (as in, those who moved to the US before that age didn't really have an educated grasp of Spanish, and those who moved here afterwards did), and I'd thought Masi Oka moved to the US at about 8 or 10 years old. Which wouldn't give one nearly the level of fluency needed to talk like a programmer in Japanese, let alone translate English programmerese to it.

[mactavish]

Which wouldn't give one nearly the level of fluency needed to talk like a programmer in Japanese. . .

That depends on whether he continued to use it or study it once he got here. If his family's relatively well educated and used it at home, it would certainly give him fluency. If he went back to visit relatives often, it would give him fluency. Kids' fluency, as they age, depends on how much they continue with their first language(s), and the contexts they're used in.

He also speaks Spanish, and graduated from Brown University. Maybe he studied Japanese and Spanish there. He's certainly quite bright, he couldn't not be bright and speak three languages, act reasonably well, and work as a programmer in day to day life. (He doesn't just act in movies, he works on special effects.)

[sivi_volk]

Haven't seen it, but that'd be a cool super-power indeed.

[akibare]

Yes. As a kid, when asked "if you could have one superpower what would it be?" I was always torn between instant safe teleportation, and being able to perfectly know every language in the world.

Sigh.

[nekosensei]

So...does that mean that we're all superheroes? :)

Seriously, I've finished up to episode four of that series, and I think it's awesome...

[a_xolotl]

So...does that mean that we're all superheroes? :)

It does indeed. Lingua-Force unite! Just to name of a few of us, there's Morphology Man and Babel Boy, Lexicon Lass, Diglossia Gal and Semantix Semite. Fighting the evils of...Monoglot Master and his linguaphobic minions?

[embryomystic]

ooooo. Can I be Babel Boy?

[tisoi]

Watching Heroes right now. :-D I love Hiro.

[aindreas]

Man, I really really want to see this show. But I can't let myself, because I haven't the time, and I'll just get addicted .... garrgh.

But my Japanese teacher commented on the main fellow's Japanese, and said it was really very flawless. She said some of the other minor character had kind of bad Japanese, and obviously didn't really speak it.