I just recently watched Robinson Crusoe (1997 Pierce Brosnan) and thought, how awfully quickly Friday learned English. He even learned the word “spirit”.
Another example, in my dive into old movies, Enemy Mine (1985) comes to mind. The “enemy” quite rapidly learns english.
“Robinson Crusoe on mars” is another example, The marsian (or what he is) Is suddenly speaking broken english.
Do any of you people have got any other examples?
I dont know about Avatar or any new stuff, maybe there are recent examples?
If I recolllect correctly, in The 13th Warrior, the Arab protagonist suddenly can understand his Norsemen companions‘ speech within one single scene (albeit after spending some time traveling with them and not understanding them).
I don’t think that’s meant to actually be instantaneous; it’s just storytelling shorthand for “he eventually learned their language and we don’t want to keep on using subtitles for every scene”. In much the same way that they also had the main characters speaking English, instead of Old Norse.
I was able to converse in Russian after six weeks at a language camp at the age of 17. Absolute beginners were allowed to speak English only in the first couple of days. The rest of the time, only Russian was used. I wasn’t a complete beginner, but up until then I had only had a few private lessons the year before.
It helped that I’d already had two years of high school German, so I was used to dealing with a foreign language. But nothing compares to complete immersion in one.
I suppose it’s technically a “single scene”, but it’s also a montage of several months, showing him gradually understanding a little bit more every week. It might be the best “learning a language” scene ever.
I don’t think any of the movies show it, but characters like “Mr Clark” in Tom Clancy’s novels seem to learn foreign languages in record time. Of course, immersion helps; but they all master languages well enough to pass as native speakers after only a month or two. This is completely unrealistic. After 50+ years of speaking Russian (and German), it’s still relatively easy for native speakers to peg me as a foreigner, if not an American. (Russians often ask me if I’m from Bulgaria or the Baltics.)
Many people for whom English is not their first language claim to have learned it watching TV. This was (and still is?) common on game shows like Bob Barker’s Truth or Consequences, which was taped in California. I remember Bob interviewing a lot of contestants who had emigrated to the US from Spanish-speaking countries and elsewhere.
Rocky is able to understand English quickly because Eridians have photographic memory - he only needs to hear a word once to remember what it means. For Grace, he’s piecing together the language word by word by asking Rocky what his word is for a thing or concept and entering it into his computer. The book goes into more detail about how they start this process with numbers and elements before moving on to more complex ideas.
The Fifth Element So Leelo is the perfect being and learns English in an afternoon watching television. Cool. I think that would affect her speech tho.
Corban Dallas: “Leelo, we need to get on the Cruise Ship.”
Leelo: “Waaaazzzzaaaaaap.”
