language

I never watch movies that are dubbed.  I also don't like it when Japanese characters speak in English to each other like in Hollywood films (which I think often fail to distinguish between Japan and China).

I mean, obviously, it's impossible to express the fragility, gracefulness, politeness etc. of the Japanese language in English.  A Japanese cannot be quite Japanese without speaking in Japanese.

I think when you speak fluently in a foreign language, you lose something of your own culture that is embedded in your mother tongue.  When the foreign language takes over your thoughts, it kills all the cultural and non-cultural concepts that are reliant to your native language.  At least, that's the only way I can explain how my personality slightly changes when I express myself in English.

Zwick, when talking about DiCaprio's accent in Blood Diamond, said dialect had an effect over a creation of a character. It apparently allows an actor to be as different from himself as he could be based on the fact that he sounds utterly different. It's a freedom someone often gets from speaking in a foreign language. There's a French expression that says"to possess another language is to possess another soul (複数の言語を所有するものは複数の魂を所有する)".  Zwick thought that happened to actors acting in dialect.

So if you can't possess two souls at the same time, you lose a soul while your other soul takes over.  That's what I used to think.  But Woody Allen makes one of his characters in Vicky Christina Barcelona explain that his father refuses to speak any other language than Spanish.  He's a poet and he writes the most beautiful sentences in the Spanish language but doesn't believe that a poet should pollute his words by any other tongue.  I never thought my Japanese soul and English soul polluted each other, but maybe they do.  My English character probably does show sometimes when I'm speaking in Japanese and vice versa.

As a related topic, works by Haruki Murakami sound great to me when translated, not because it still sounds Japanese but because the western flavor of English goes well with his works.  Murakami's quirky humor is not quite Japanese in the first place, and his characters' speeches sometimes even sound like they're translated from English when I read the original piece in Japanese.  They're simple, witty, and sarcastic - the impression I get from the English language.

It intrigues me how languages can effect or even define a character.  In the end, we're made of our thoughts and our thoughts are made of our language.