Friday, May 4, 2007


This is a video by one of my more favorite singers, Utada Hikaru. However, im not going to talk about her, but rather bilingualism in general. As you might be able to tell from watching this video, the singer is completely bilingual, speaking in fluent Japanese as she introduces her song, and then convering an English song without an accent. All in all, she speaks/sings like a natural in either language.
I admire this because no matter how many years of a language you may study out of a textbook, it's very hard to achieve the level of fluency where you could pass as a native speaker. Something will always betray your foreign origins. Whether its something basic, like mis-conjugating a verb or forgetting a word, or something more complex, like not using a local expression, somethign will always give you away. I've taken spanish (honors) since the 7th grade, and I would consider myself a pretty decent speaker. Yet, I could never pass as a native. Once, when I went to Madrid, I asked someone on the corner where I could catch a "guagua" (a bus), having forgotton that while guagua meant bus, it was really only used in peru and other such countries. In spain, you would never call a bus a guagua, you'd call it an "autobus." For reasons like these I admire bilingual individuals, and hope one day my language studies will reach the point where i can pass myself off as a native as well.
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