I was watching an American TV show yesterday, and there was a scene set in Colombia.
Posted by Sammich on December 4, 2025, 10:49:32
The characters who were supposedly Colombian were speaking Spanish, but I can't imagine the actors were all actually from Colombia, or even native Spanish speakers, so I'm sure their dialects and accents were pretty scattershot. I've heard this complaint about a lot of foreign language scenes in American TV; one that comes to mind is the Mr. Sparkle commercial in the Simpsons, where some of the Japanese being spoken doesn't even match the subtitles.
This made me wonder: does this happen the other way around with shows produced in other countries? Like, are there Korean shows with "American" characters who speak English in a way that would be instantly risible to actual Americans, but is close enough for Korean people to accept it?
Also, are any of you fluent enough in another language to notice regional accents? I certainly am not.strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime
You might be interested in Glenn Close's Farsi in Tehran season 2
She spoke so well I wondered if it was actually her speaking. Kudos to her for her effort, and for an excellent performance.
Close, who plays a CIA agent Dr. Marjan Montazemi on the second season of the thriller, said she worked with a coach three times each week to learn Farsi.
"It was very challenging. It has a different sentence structure. It's more like German, with the verb at the end. You use your mouth differently. It has certain sounds that we don't have in English," Close explained. "But I had a phenomenal coach in Anna Bayat....
Apparently the results were good enough to satisfy the native speakers in the cast. I wish I had six months to prepare! But my goal was to speak Farsi well enough so that a Farsi speaking person would think I was fluent. I got as far as being able to pronounce all the words pretty well, my accent I think was pretty good. But I couldn’t translate it as I was saying it, so it was a series of sounds, and some sentences were more difficult than others. And then you have to make sure that you have the right intonation and emphasis on the right word, even though you have no idea what it is. (Laughs) So after studying for two months, I got there.
The characters in Tehran who are not native English speakers have very good English with an interesting mix of accents.
Related: American colonists did not have a modern British accent
on December 4, 2025, 10:49:32