Multi-lingual Bond actors
Number24
NorwayPosts: 22,334MI6 Agent
I know Roger Moore spoke Italian. But did he speak more languages besides English and do the other Bond actors speak more than one language?
If we expand the question to other actors with major roles in the Bond series I immediately think of Christopher Lee. I belive he spoke 5-6 languages. Are there many other good examples?
Comments
I think Sir Roger must have spoken some French.
Tim may speak some Welsh? Perhaps some Russian from his previous relationship with a Russian artiste.
I imagine people like Dame Judi and the older generation have a decent level of French, given it was a key subject at school then, more so than it is now (sadly).
I've seen Britt Ekland and Maud Adams speak Swedish, but I don't think we should count people's mother tongues. Five languages for Adams is impressive!
Maud Adams is practically perfect in every way.
It's not unusual for Europeans to be able to speak three languages, even though the skill levels may vary. Mother tongue, English and a third language.
When I visited the Netherlands a few years ago I was really impressed with most people's facility to speak other languages. Everybody appeared to speak English and in Amsterdam it almost seemed like English was the second language. I think people in Europe tend to be more multi lingual in general. Here in the USA, it seems the only folks who speak more than one language are immigrants or people who need to for their jobs.
I always got a kick out how in the Bond films, Bond was always fluent in whatever language he needed to speak at the moment, including Japanese.
My daughter did a semester of college in Amsterdam and fell in love with the place.
I always thought Amsterdam should have been used more as a location in Bond films.
When we visited her I couldn't help but notice how parents and their children were switching back and forth between Dutch and English.
IMO, I think one of the big problems in the USA is how foreign languages are taught in the schools. They don't teach the languages conversationally but as an academic exercise. I had three years of Spanish in high school and didn't learn much at all. After three years, you should be able to actually speak/understand a language somewhat passably.
HowardB said:
IMO, I think one of the big problems in the USA is how foreign languages are taught in the schools. They don't teach the languages conversationally but as an academic exercise. I had three years of Spanish in high school and didn't learn much at all. After three years, you should be able to actually speak/understand a language somewhat passably.
I agree with this. In English speaking Canada, mandatory French class was always just rote memorization of conjugated verbs, I never absorbed a maudite thing. In my late twenties I went to Quebec for a summer immersion course, where the teachers had us tell stories and take part in debates, basically using what vocabulary we had on the fly to express ourselves, and it turned out I could do that! thats how you learn a language! Unfortunately when summer was over I returned back to the West Coast where very little French is spoken, and what I learned that summer did not stick.
My experience in American cities is there's so many Mexican / Latin American restaurants everywhere, there's opportunity to practice Spanish if you want, and Spanish speakers are far happier to hear an Anglo butcher their language than a francophone is.