| rdfs:comment | - Sometimes, characters are casually given skills with languages which would be very remarkable in real life, if not downright unrealistic. Most people find it hard work to achieve native-level fluency in just one foreign language, even when they're a full time student of it, but a fictional character might speak thirty languages well enough to be mistaken for a native speaker in each. Or the character might somehow learn the local language fluently just by chatting while playing cards each evening for a few weeks. Or perhaps, due to having taken evening classes for a month when they were twenty years younger, they are able to win debates on metaphysics in a particular language. At the very least, they read the Genius Book Club books in the original language.
|
| abstract | - Sometimes, characters are casually given skills with languages which would be very remarkable in real life, if not downright unrealistic. Most people find it hard work to achieve native-level fluency in just one foreign language, even when they're a full time student of it, but a fictional character might speak thirty languages well enough to be mistaken for a native speaker in each. Or the character might somehow learn the local language fluently just by chatting while playing cards each evening for a few weeks. Or perhaps, due to having taken evening classes for a month when they were twenty years younger, they are able to win debates on metaphysics in a particular language. At the very least, they read the Genius Book Club books in the original language. Sometimes there may be justification for this -- perhaps it's a superpower, or perhaps they had an Upgrade Artifact. And sure, some people genuinely are good at languages. But sometimes, it just seems to be a case of Did Not Do the Research -- the author is just not aware that learning a foreign language properly can be quite difficult and time-consuming (perhaps because the author has never properly learned a second language himself). The result is a sort of Charles Atlas Superpower. Also has an annoying habit of being introduced via Suddenly Always Knew That; "Whoa, you speak Tagalog? You never mentioned that!" "Well, You Never Asked..." (Trivia: that's one of the languages not (yet) on Google Translate.) The fact that young children are better at learning languages than older children, adults, or teenagers makes this trope easier to justify if the character in question was either A) raised in a highly multilingual environment or B) a Child Prodigy who learned languages for fun when they were four years old. Such a character may be a Cunning Linguist, but that's a character role rather than a trait. A Mary Sue can easily have this feature. Also may be a trait of The Face: they know ten languages instead of fighting styles like The Hero. Not to be confused with the website "Omniglot". Examples of Omniglot include:
|
