Cringing at foreign languages on TV

As a European that does NOT have English as my native tongue and a fluent speaker of 3 languages and have practical knowledge of 3 more I am always intrigued when I see actors trying to speak other languages that English on TV shows. And most of the time, they speak it not too well.

In NCIS:Los Angeles, Callen is supposed to speak Russian and he does that, although it´s with a dreadful American accent. Hanna speaks Japanese but the one time he spoke it, I was cringing the entire time. It´s not many times I have heard such a well rehearsed speech in foreign language with such a dreadful accent. But I also gladly acknowledge that Japanese is a very hard language to speak and Russian too. More importantaly, the actors make up for their language ability by being very funny!

So when I heard Kensi was supposed to use French to communicate with a couple of Vietnamese people I was ready to squirm but was pleasantly surprised. The actress actually had a really good accent, scrolled the R´s very well (something I can do too) and it was a delight to listen to her (the actress grew up in Portugal so she probably studied French in school). So kudos to Daniela Ruah for pulling off French!

I got the same delight when I heard Ziva on NCIS pull off Spanish for the first time. Since the actress, Cote de Pablo, is a fluent speaker of Spanish it was awesome to hear the way it sounded (much much better than Emily Prentiss on Criminal Minds!). Ziva is supposed to speak like 5 languages fluently (which is entirely possible in the real world) and in my opinion the actress generally pulls it off well when she speaks other languages than English (although I do wish she spoke more Hebrew).

But my most favorite thing would have to be Ziva messing up English idioms. I just love to hear the way she messed up idioms again and again and mixes them up and it´s always believable. As an EFL I can vouch for the difficulty of English idioms and listening to Ziva mess up and then being corrected has even helped teach me some (such as "look who´s calling the pot black").

So watching American actors mess up foreign languages continues to entertain me and I keep on learning.