Top Hollywood Celebrities Who Acquired Second Language

We are always super excited to hear celebrities’ spicy gossips and eager to learn about their lives. Their amazing acting skills and attractive looks inspire us all. But besides all this, fewer people know, some of these celebrities are very efficiently skilled at other languages. Some of them like Natalie Portman leave one jaw dropped with her ability to speak five languages fluently; nonetheless Jodie Foster can handle dubs in French-language films. Below, we will be talking in a little detail about these celebrities’ language skills.

 SANDRA BULLOCK

Sandra Annette Bullock was born in Arlington, Virginia on July 26, 1964. Her father John Bullock was a United States army employee and her mother Helga Meyer was an opera singer. John met Helga while he was stationed in Nuremberg, Germany and then married her there. Sandra was raised in United States and she always accompanied her mom on her opera tours throughout Europe. During stay with her aunt and grandmother at Salzburg and Nuremberg, she learnt German. That is why Bullock can spectacularly speak fluent German.

                                                             

 MILA KUNIS

Milena Markovna Kunis born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine on August 14, 1983 gained fame from her breakout film Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  Russian is her native language which she can speak very fluently. At the age of seven her family moved to Los Angeles, California. There she was enrolled in an acting school to help learn English, and that is where she was discovered by an agent. When Mila Kunis was admitted in school these are her views regarding it, “I blocked out second grade completely. I have no recollection of it. I always talk to my mom and my grandma about it. It was because I cried every day. I didn’t understand the culture. I didn’t understand the people. I didn’t understand the language. My first sentence of my essay to get into college was like, ‘Imagine being blind and deaf at age seven.’ And that’s kind of what it felt like moving to the States.” 

                                       

 BRADLEY COOPER

The 37 year old American actor Bradley Charles Cooper, known for his movies The hangover, A-team, Wedding Crashers etc, surprised everyone when he spoke fluent French during an interview promoting “The Hangover II”. According to Cooper during his college years, he went on a student exchange program to France where he learnt French.

                                                                         

 JODIE FOSTER

The super-smart Jodie Foster learnt French during her stay at French prep school, Lycée Français de Los Angeles. As a teenager she frequently stayed and worked in France. Foster still speaks French fluently and most surprisingly dubs the French-Language films too.

                                                     

 JOHNNY DEPP

Everyone’s heart throb, Johnny Depp also speaks fluent French. He lives in Paris with his partner, French model Vanessa Paradis. They both also have two bilingual kids.

                                                                               

   KIM CATTRALL

Kim Cattrall is an English-Canadian actress who is known for her role as Samantha Jones in the HBO’s comedy/romance series Sex and the City. She was born in Liverpool, England on August 21, 1956. Kim picked on learning German fluently during her stay at Frankfurt with her husband Andre. J. Lyson. But she admits that she has forgotten a lot over the years.

                                               

 VIGGO MORTENSEN

Viggo Mortensen can speak several languages. His mother was American and father was Danish, apart from that they settled in Argentina where he acquired Spanish in primary school. That is why Viggo is fluent in English, Danish and Spanish. Mortensen is conversational in French and Italian, and understands Norwegian and Swedish.

                                                 

 BEN AFFLECK

39 year old Ben Affleck is an American writer, producer, director and actor. In childhood, Ben lived in Mexico where he easily learnt to speak Spanish. Affleck while promoting his movie “The Town” in Spanish, he described his co-star Jon Hamm as “guapo” meaning handsome.

                                             

GWYNETH       PALTROW

Paltrow was born and raised in Los angeles, California. Her father is film producer/director Bruce Paltrow and mother is an actress Blythe Danner. She got special attention for her work in Seven (1995) and Emma (1996). Gwyneth learned to speak Spanish at the age of 15 on her student exchange program to Spain.

                                                 

 NATALIE PORTMAN

Natalie Hershlag (Natalie Portman) on June 9, 1981 was born in Jerusalem, Israel. She was three year old when her family moved to United States. Portman learned to speak Hebrew while attending Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School. Apart from English, Natalie had great interest in learning other foreign languages since childhood. She can speak fluently German, Japanese, French and Spanish. Some say that she had studied Arabic too.

Effects of Anxiety while Acquiring Second Language

Social anxiety is defined by “(1) feelings of tension and discomfort, (2) negative self-evaluations, and (3) a tendency to withdraw in the presence of others” (Schwarzer, 1984 ). It is a fact that students face a certain degree of anxiety on daily basis in their classrooms. This anxiety quadruples when students acquire a second language while taking a language course. For many students language courses are the most anxiety-provoking courses that they take (Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope, 1986). This psychological state of mind has been focus of research among many linguists as well as psychologists.

The focus of this article is the effect that anxiety has in second language acquisition (L2) among students. Majority of the studies up till now show a negative correlation between anxiety and acquisition performance. For instance MacIntyre in his “Modern language journal” talks about the negative correlations stated by different researchers. He says that significant negative correlations between language anxiety and course grade have been reported for languages such as Japanese (Aida, 1994), Spanish (Horwitz, 1986) and French (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991b). Language anxiety has also shown significant negative correlations with standardized proficiency tests, both written and oral (MacIntyre, 1995). Krashen (1985), in his affective filter hypothesis says that high anxiety among learners will be an impediment in reaching the language acquisition device. According to Horwitz (1986) language anxiety could compel students to postpone language study indefinitely or to change majors.

Although primarily anxiety is associated with low performance among learners but there has been research from positive perspective too. In Bailey’s (1983) study of competitiveness and anxiety in second language learning, facilitative anxiety was one of the keys to success, and closely related to competitiveness (Brown, 2000). And there are also some examples of different researches where the correlation is nil. When a study was done by Zhang Baoyan’s (1996) on students in Taiwan who were learning English as Foreign Language it was found that there was no relationship between anxiety and learning outcomes/progresses.

So, we can conclude from these researches that the relationship between anxiety and achievement is possibly not simply direct or linear. Other factors such as aptitude, classroom environment, culture, learner’s proficiency are also important. Krashen’s in his “Affective Filter Hypothesis” shows that motivaton, self-confidence and anxiety go hand in hand. According to him these factors together play a prominent role in language acquisition and prove to be vital in the process of language acquisition, thereby either improving or interfering with a student’s ability to progress.

Bibliography

• Brown, H. D. (2000). Principles of language learning and teaching. San Francisco: Prentice Hall Regents.
• MacIntyre, P. D. (1995). The Modern Language Journal. How Does Anxiety Affect Second Language Learning? A Reply to Sparks and Ganschow, 91.
• Schwarzer, R. (1984 ). The Self in Anxiety, Stress, and Depression. Holland: Elsevier.
• Horwitz, E., M. Horwitz & J. Cope. (1986). Foreign language classroom anxiety. Modern Language Journal, 70, 125-32