Sugar Wiki / Surprisingly Good Foreign Language

96% isn't bad, right?

"I'll chisel your gravestone. Sleep well!"

— Wolfgang Krauser, Fatal Fury 2, proving that even SNK can get it right when it comes to proper English.^note The voice actor is American, though...

Truth #1: Foreign languages sound more exotic. Buying some body lotion is not the same as buying La Creme Luxueuse, and driving a car is not the same as driving a Motorwagen.

Truth #2: Unfortunately, not many people are fluent in foreign languages.

Truth #3: But sometimes, they are.

Horrible grammar and pronunciation of any foreign language is the expected norm in most works of fiction. Even if you do manage to get the grammar right (harder than it sounds), unless you either have an actor who is a native speaker or a very good language coach to help them, their accent is going to be blatantly obvious, and oftentimes won't even register to native speakers as the language in question.

But if you can get the grammar and the accent right, viewers will be pleasantly surprised. This allows for a number of other language tropes, such as Bilingual Dialogue and Bilingual Bonus.

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English examples:

Anime and Manga

• Angel Beats! TK can speak perfect English. It probably helps that his VA is American, and also that he doesn't have many lines in the anime. What he actually SAYS, though, ventures wholeheartedly into Gratuitous English territory. "Dive into your body!"
• BECK, where all the American characters speak ludicrously bad Engrish aside from John Lee Davis — who sounds, for some reason, remarkably like Martin Sheen... Quite a few characters in BECK are voiced by American expats - Leon Sykes, his henchman Goldie, Dying Breed, and the director of their documentary (that doesn't necessarily mean they can act, however). Two songs from the soundtrack, "My World Down" and "I Call You Love", are by British singers Gary Stringer and Mark Gardener, with lyrics by Tim Jensen, best known for his work with Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop, Wolf's Rain and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex amongst them).
• Maybe not quite as perfect as the previous one, but the Tonight, Tonight, Tonight song that is also from Bleach makes enough sense that any minor mistakes are forgivable.
  • Listen to the Hero Tales opening, and try to figure out what they're saying. It's the same guys.
  • Many of the opening and ending songs combine Surprisingly Good English and/or Gratuitous English with the Japanese in varying amounts.
  • The first ending song, Rie Fu's "Life is Like a Boat". It helps that she speaks fluent English from living in Maryland for three years and going to school in London.
  • Ichigo's theme song, "Number One", is sung in absolutely perfect English. It's a woman's choir in a rock song. It's really weird, but catchy.
  • A recurring song, "Nothing Can Be Explained", is in English and performed by a British singer - the guy who wrote the lyrics for Komm, süsser Tod, in fact. It's difficult to tell in show since his voice is rather faint, but it's clear on the soundtrack.
• Blood: The Last Vampire has an American military base on Okinawa as the setting, and all the dialogue in English is done by American voice actors, with several characters having double cast (this also highlights the difference in acting levels, with English VAs being noticeably wooden but over the top, but that's a different story.) Seeing as Blood was done before a lot of major series caused anime to take off in America, the fact that the VAs are actually not bad, if not a little wooden, is quite impressive.
• In [C] – Control, ATMs and Negotiations use English. Jennifer's boss at the International Monetary Fund is also voiced by a native English speaker, though Jennifer is not (since that character is not a bit part, most of her lines are in Japanese).
• "Blue", the ending theme for the last episode of Cowboy Bebop, is in flawless English. In fact, half the songs by The Seatbelts with lyrics are in Surprisingly Good English, thanks in no small part to Yamane Mai and American-born singers Emily Bindiger and Steve Conte, who between the three of them sing the vast majority of the series' English-language music.
• The Devil May Cry anime series has an episode about a ghost haunting people that played her Rock records. The song, "Future in my Hands" by Aimee B, is surprisingly well spoken English. Then again, this one probably shouldn't be "surprisingly", since her full name is Aimee Blackschleger and she is an American singer who moved to Japan for her career.
• The first Digimon Adventure 02 movie, Supreme Evolution! The Golden Digimentals!, starred Wallace, an American character who was also voiced by Nami Miyahara. Many people didn't even believe it was a single voice actress. Amusingly, she still pronounced his name "Warrace" (most likely because she was instructed to, in order for the Japanese audience to understand) which was odd considering how fluently she spoke every other English word. The other characters do speak English occasionally in this film as it takes place in America; while it's mainly common phrases (good luck, thank you, see you soon, etc), they get them right.
• The soundtrack to .hack//SIGN features several songs primarily in English, the main vocalist being American singer Emily Bindiger.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex likes to play everything backwards, and has both Gratuitous English and Surprisingly Good English side by side. None of the voice actors can pronounce English very well, and mangle the random English phrases. The opening themes are written almost entirely in Surprisingly Good English and Surprisingly Good Russian, with some verses even in Surprisingly Good Latin. The actual reason for this is the performer, Origa (Olga), being originally Russian.
  • The opening shot of the original film contains simultaneous English and Japanese voiceovers; the soundtrack of the second film contains two songs - "River of Crystals" and "Follow Me" - sung in slightly accented but grammatically correct, intelligible English by Kimiko Ito, the former of which was composed by Kenji Kawai specifically for the film.
• Guin Saga's song "This is My Road" has English lyrics, which aren't broken.
• Gundam
  • Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn has some surprisingly good English going on throughout the entire series. The Unicorn's AI speaks fluent English, and in the beginning of episode 1, assuming Translation Convention, we hear the prime minister speaking Japanese, and he is actually speaking really good English faintly in the background. There is also episode 5 which at the beginning has a whole dialogue in English, although one of the participants speaks with a heavy Asian accent. And then there's the contents of Laplace's Box aka The original Universal Century Charter as revealed in Episode 7, which is written in perfectly good English, being an official document and all.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam 00 (the Japanese version) features some somewhat accented but quite understandable English. For example, just listen to Allelujah in Episode 6 of Season 2 say "I have control".
  • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny and Bleach both feature ending themes (the third and first, respectively) which transition from Japanese to grammatically-correct English flawlessly. This should probably come as no surprise since the singer of both songs, Rie fu, spent four years in America and speaks English fluently.
  • Gundam Build Fighters contains a surprising amount of accurate English text. To give just two examples: Episode 8 has Nils Neilsen research his upcoming opponent Greco Logan online, and can be seen reading a fully-written article about Greco's rivalry with Italian champ Ricardo Fellini. Likewise, Episode 18 shows the Renato brothers reading message board posts praising Meijin Kawaguchi III, one of which contains the Pun "Is he amazing because he's A-Meijin?".
  • ∀ Gundam is famous for the way the series title is announced as "TURN A. GUNDAM." in both OPs by what sounds like a deep-voiced Brit... in fact, a deep-voiced Japanese man.
  • Steer from Gundam: Reconguista in G became a fan favorite (in spite of not having a role beyond, well, steering the ship) for the way she announced her actions in loud, well-pronounced, usually singular English words.
• Moscow 2160: Many russian signs in the manga are accurate, and there are even some things only those who are interested in Russia could write, such as ХУЙ on the wall
• Though not voiced by one of the characters, the opening theme to Hell Girl has the seemingly mandatory Gratuitous English sung in exceptionally good English, as the singer was raised in the US.
• Ozaru and Kozaru in Jubei-chan 2 have an "English Interlude" specifically because they hope that the show is becoming popular in the States.
• Lyrical Nanoha has English voice actors for the main characters' magic devices. In the first season, their lines are relatively grammatical, but in the second season, they have extended lines with more questionable grammar. Similarly with the German devices—their collective VA, Tetsuya Kakihara, was raised in Düsseldorf.
  • As is often the case in the voice recording business, although the hired voice actors are perfectly fluent in their respective languages, they have virtually no authority in changing the script, even if to improve it. Their clunky delivery, however, is apparently deliberate to emphasize their artificiality.
  • Although the Compilation Movie of the first season had the devices speaking very good English.
• In the third episode of Martian Successor Nadesico Yurika addresses a United Earth Force assembly in English. Her accent is thick, but her pronunciation is much better than the supposedly English-speaking extras. Her exact words are, "We'd like to reach escape velocity from the Earth in three hours, buuuuuuut... if you don't put the Big Barrier down for a moment, the Nadesico and the barrier satellites will be damaged. Would you mind pulling the barrier down PLEEEEEEEASE??" When UEF refuses her request she then adds, "So, we'll break through the barrier forcibly!"
• Nana is full of good English, from the songs that various cast members sing to various lines they say. When Shin says "Good night, Rena, sweet dreams", it's actually shocking how good his English is, considering this is the first time he's used it. It's fitting, since the character was raised in America; being a series with no small amount of time dedicated to vocalists Nana pays a lot of attention to the accuracy of its voice acting.
• There isn't much English in Neon Genesis Evangelion, but there is lots of English writing on the computers screens, e.g. "God's in His Heaven, All's right With the World". All of it is perfect. All of it can be credited to translator Michael House, who was hired on as an in-house English consultant by Studio Gainax at the beginning of the show's production.
  • House himself even has a voice cameo in the intro scene for Episode 18, playing an American pilot communicating over radio with flight control, who are played by two of his friends. All dialogue in said scene is entirely in English, and translated with Japanese subtitles.
  • The End of Evangelion has not one, but three songs (four, if you count the one cut from the final release of the film) sung in perfect, unaccented English with entirely sensible (and appropriate) lyrics. Of course, it helps that composer Shiro Sagisu went abroad to have these songs recorded by native English-speakers.
• Momoko on Ojamajo Doremi is nearly a native English speaker, and learned Japanese shortly after being introduced as a character. Her lines in English- even a simple "Yeah!"- can be quite shocking when unexpected and all this despite having a local VA. Nami Miyahara moved with her family to Austria when she was young, and she speaks almost fluent English and German because of that. Similarly, Momoko moved to America with her family and lived there for most of her childhood. It should be noted, however, that one episode has her referring to her earring as a "pierce", which is the Japanese translation for earring.
• Honey in Ouran High School Host Club. "I'm... still... sleepy...!" and the hired American film crew ("Yes, boss!")
  • Words cannot express how creepy and startling Honey's line is when you first hear it, what with the differences in voice and this trope.
• Both Persona 4: The Animation and Persona 4: The Golden Animation, as with the original game, feature intro songs performed in perfect English. Some of the lyrics themselves are a bit shaky ("It's constantly costuming with lots of fake") but the performances are flawless.
• The opening scene of Project A-Ko has astronauts working on a space probe, and speaking perfect American English.
  • Also, Project A-Ko is reckoned to be the first anime ever to have had the soundtrack songs in the original Japanese version recorded entirely in English.
  • Crest of the Stars has a very brief scene in the first episode that can cause similar reactions.
• In Sakura Wars: The Movie, Maria delivers a couple of lines in near-flawless English and manages something vaguely akin to a New Yorker accent, since (despite being Russian) she was supposed to have lived in New York for a while before coming to Japan. Ironically, the "American" characters in the movie speak typical Engrish.
  • With the exception of Ratchet, who's pronunciation (with the exception of "please") and inflection are actually pretty decent, as seen here.
• The baseball episode of Samurai Champloo features Admiral Joy Cartwright and his translator being voiced by- gasp- actual Americans. (Inverted possibly by the translator's Surprisingly Good Japanese?) The opening theme to the series, "Battlecry", was also done by someone who knows how to actually speak English: Shing 02, who had the benefit of a champloo-ish upbringing born in Tokyo; childhood in Tanzania, England, and Japan; and adolescence in the States.
  • As a side note, the episode with the Dutch East India Company contains some Surprisingly Good Dutch too.
• Serial Experiments Lain makes extensive use of Surprisingly Good English, from the opening theme to computer interfaces, C programming, English lessons, multiple allegedly historical documents, and different aspects of the Wired.
  • The opening theme is actually a song written by a now-defunct British band, Boa, which features two of Paul Rodgers' children. Hardly surprising the English was so good, really.
• The opening and ending songs for Super Dimension Century Orguss have perfectly pronounced English within both. This can be contributed to the fact that their singer, Casey Rankin, was raised in the United States until the age of 25 before moving to Japan.
• Makoto Shinkai's movies Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no koe) and The Place Promised in Our Early Days (Kumo no mukou, yakusoku no basho) both feature English lines spoken by native speakers; in the former, it's a series of public address announcements on the ship Lysithea (Donna Burke, who also voiced Nanoha's Raising Heart, and performed the Metal Gear songs "Heavens Divide" and "Sins of the Father"), while in the latter, it's a brief conversation between an American intelligence agent and military officer. Oddly, though the accent is (naturally) perfect, the actual words are All-your-base-are-belong-to-us weird ("Their block exists in orbit").
• The four songs on also Shinkai-directed Your Name's soundtrack were rerecorded with English lyrics by the original band RADWIMPS for the English dub and, with a few exceptions - like a gratuitous untranslated "zenzenzen" in "Zenzenzense" - RADWIMPS guitarist and vocalist Yojiro Noda's delivery is fluent and grammatical. It probably helped that he spent a few childhood years in the US.
• The voice actor Ryō Horikawa for Heiji Hattori in the Case Closed anime is proficient in English, leading to his character speaking better English than a character who is supposed to be American. When he was a child, his family hosted an American girl. He helped her learn Japanese, she helped him learn English. Also the anchorwoman from the sixth Detective Conan movie. Extremely unnerving having the first lines in a Japanese movie being in perfect English— justified as that's Boston, she's supposed to be a Boston-area news anchor.
• The opening animation for Jyu-Oh-Sei features approximately 50/50 Japanese and English. The English makes about as much sense as the rest of the song does, and there is relatively little accent or "Japanese-isms".
• Also, Bleach's Theme Music Power-Up song, Number One, a Motown-esque song sung entirely in English. It is a step more surprising, however, because the lead singer sounds distinctly African American. Which she is (sort of): the song is sung by UK artist Hazel Fernandes.
• The closing theme to GUN×SWORD, "A Rising Tide", was written by a native English speaker and sung by a native Japanese speaker. Thus, the only time there's a goof involves the L/R problem - "give me my sword" sounds like "give me my soul".
• Thankfully, the English parts of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's "Libera Me from Hell" were very good, with a couple easily-ignored exceptions, such as pronouncing "don't" as "dahnt"
  • There's also Viral's theme music, "Nikopol", which is not only perfect English but also has lyrics that sum up Viral's philosophy very well.
  • The Eye Catch sting, however- "RAW! RAW! FIGHT DA POWER!"- sounds like "ROW ROW! WHITE POWER!".
  • And the full version of the song is actually in quite good English (and has a ridiculously long name^note  "Rap is a Man's Soul! Heads Up and Listen to the Man Who Seeks the Heavens, Kamina's Theme!" Told you so.). It's also what the English parts of "Libera Me from Hell" are taken from.
  • There's also "Gattai nante Kusokurae!!", the background music played in a lot of fights at the beginning of the series (you'll probably remember it by the line "Into the eye of the storm"). This song (and "Nikopol") is arranged by Taku Iwasaki and performed by qadtbep. It's sorta-kinda Kamina's theme.
    • "Gattai nante Kusokurae" is the track known in English as "To Hell With Gattai (aka "Combine")", as the name would imply it tends to play when Kamina & Shimon aren't combined. And since Lagann exists only for the Fastball Special when the two aren't combined...
    • The English actually spoken in the series is another matter. Some of it is pretty good, such as "Infhinity Bigu Bangu Sthorm" (letters added because of the accent). On the other hand Gimmy and Darry horribly butcher any English they're given.
• "Mr. Raindrop", the second ending theme to Gintama, was sung completely in perfect English; the band attended a school taught primarily in both English and Chinese.
• Kate in Sketchbook, who is Canadian. Also, her Japanese is heavily accented and far from perfect. Not many characters pull this off.
• Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl has NASA using some well pronounced English in episode 1, which sounds like it was spoken by actual Americans. It's generally grammatically correct, unfortunately it doesn't sound like anything a real person would say and then it falls apart at the last second ("A CALL TO THE PRESIDENT!"). Also, it sounded like they just grabbed some random tourists off the street and paid them to read the lines because it's really badly acted.
  • While it doesn't sound like anything an English speaker would say, the words themselves are a practically perfect literal translation of the Japanese subtitles displayed, which themselves represent appropriate dialogue for those characters. This all goes to show you that there's more to translation than literally interpreting what was said.
• Ergo Proxy's opening song, "Kiri", is a flawlessly-sung all-English song courtesy of Japanese rockers Monoral (Anis Shimada and Ali Morizumi). Considering that lead singer Shimada was born in London and is quadrilingual (apart from Japanese and English, he can also speak French and Arabic) and Morizumi is Japanese-American (though born and raised in Tokyo, he can speak both languages fluently himself), this is quite understandable.
• The ending theme of Trinity Blood is sung in English; although it has a rough Japanese accent, the grammar is actually fluent.
• Angela Burton from Genshiken is an example of this trope: actress Yuki Kaida's English is clear and mostly properly inflected, if unnaturally slow and stilted (her biggest problem is only due to the accent common when trying to change from one language to another. It's not surprising that she likes to speak English in real life from time to time). And it's a good thing, because in the episode where she first appears, she has long stretches of unsubtitled lines. In contrast, Ohno (voiced by Ayako Kawasumi) sounds like she has no idea what she's saying when she and Angela converse: despite the grammatical accuracy of her dialogue, her poor pronunciation renders many of her lines unintelligible. And this, when Ohno's supposed to have lived in America for ten years. Kasukabe's voice actress, Satsuki Yukino, also speaks in a very good neutral English accent, probably the best international English of all the cast members. In all, though poorly pronounced, all the other character's English were easily intelligible (unless you just refuse to listen).
  • In Second Season, which has an entirely new voice cast, Ohno - now voiced by Yukana - has much better English, as shown when Angela returns for an episode and the two have a conversation in a couple scenes.
• "For the love of life", the first ending to Monster, is sung in perfect, completely understandable English. Of course, it's written and sung by David Sylvian, an Englishman, so, really, there was little else to expect. The second ending proceeds to mangle the words 'harmony' and 'purity' in the expected Japanese fashion.
• An episode of Kimagure Orange Road had the Power Trio on vacation in Hawaii, and kidnapped by a gang of thugs who mistook Hikaru for a local shipping heiress. Madoka spoke passable English (appropriate for the high school student she was). The Hawaiian thugs all spoke English, oddly accented, but easily hand waved in that these were low-rent Mooks who spoke with a regional accent.
• Although only one word, hearing Chihara Minori say "unique" in Haruhi Suzumiya may arouse suspicions of fluency in the listener.
• "All kids hold an egg in their soul, the egg of our hearts, our would-be selves, yet unseen..." the quote that plays right before the opening of every episode of Shugo Chara! may threw watchers for a loop the first time they hear it, to the point where they might mistake it for a dub. The sentence itself doesn't make sense, but it doesn't sound like a Japanese accent.
• The soundtrack to Haibane Renmei has some songs by native speaker Paula Terry.
• The episode title cards in Last Exile have the titles read in surprisingly fluent English. (In fact, it only becomes apparent that it's not a native speaker in episode 5, in which "Positional" is pronounced "Pogitional".) "Last Exile" itself though, is not pronounced even remotely right most of the time, being rendered as "Rasuto Egisaiaru".
• Texhnolyze's second ED that plays at the very last episode, "Walking in this Empty Earth" features English lyrics and while they are heavily accented the grammar is correct and understandable. There is also the short intro spoken in the mostly instrumental OP, it may only amount to one sentence but it is uttered without an accent.
• ef: A Tale of Memories uses English for its theme song lyrics, some parts of the novel written by Chihiro and in the post-episode trailer, which aside from some pronunciation-issues is well-executed.
  • Same deal with ef: A Tale of Melodies except all the text in the background is in German.
• Genesis of Aquarion's opening theme has been performed by Akino and Bless4 (her siblings) in both Japanese and fluent English: they grew up in the US.
• Karen in Ichi the Killer.
  • She goes one better and later speaks Surprisingly Good Cantonese as well. The actress portraying her speaks all three languages fluently.
• Yakitate!! Japan has "To All the Dreamers", a disco-ish rap song, for the second ending theme. You can be caught off guard at how perfect the English parts of the song were when played in the credits.
  • Not only is the English pronounced well, but the rapper sings in Japanese with an American accent, too.
• In episode 5 of Negima! Magister Negi Magi's first anime adaptation, Nodoka - played by Mamiko Noto - is able to read a long sentence in perfect English without a slip-up besides the word 'asked' (a-Su-ka-do). Ironically, Negi - played by Rina Satō - who was supposed to be giving the English lesson could barely speak a word of coherent English despite the surprised reaction from the class who apparently thought it sounded good. Interestingly, the Latin used in the series is spoken somewhat well.
• The first trailer for Kiddy Grade was accompanied by the song "If I...", which was a mix of Japanese and Surprisingly Good English. To untrained ears, it might even sound like the Japanese is English-accented, rather than the expected reverse.
• All the English spoken by the native English speakers in the first episode of Eden of the East, as well as all the written signs and the OP (which is done by Noel Gallagher) is in perfect English, even getting the accents acceptably well down.
  • In addition, almost all portrayals of DC are entirely accurate, down to the interior of Dulles International Airport.^note The only exception is the cars and trucks that drive next to the White House, the roads in front of the White House have been closed since 1995 due to the Oklahoma City Bombing.
  • That doesn't stop a little bit of hilarious Gratuitous English from being snuck in there.
  • This isn't really surprising given that all the native-speakers were, in fact, voiced by Americans. (And yeah, one should suppose Oasis can sing in perfect English).
• Lots and lots in Code Geass.
  • And also plenty of subversions: OLL HEIL BULITANIA! (Just check the Narm page for Code Geass).
• The Big O's Award-Bait Song "And Forever" duet has near-flawless English grammar, pronunciation and inflections. Additionally, each episode title is in English, with each next episode preview featuring a dramatic reading of the upcoming episode's title. Of course, the show is set in what was New York City, but that sort of thing doesn't tend to help in these situations.
• The opening and ending to Wolf's Rain. It’s justified in the opening because Steve Conte is originally from America.
  • The anime contains some pretty good Russian, too. Especially surprising is the voice announcement on the railway station. It's in perfect unaccented Russian.
• And Steve Conte has collaborated with Yoko Kanno in other times, too. He sang various songs from the next anime series. Brain Powerd (with the song "True Love"), Cowboy Bebop (with various songs, such the male version of "Rain", "Call me call me", "Words That Couldn't Say", etc...), Wolf's Rain (the opening song "Stray", as mentioned before, and other songs, such as "Heaven's Not Enough" and "Could You Bite My Hand?") and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (with "living inside the shell"). Outside the anime material, there are two more songs: "Nowhere and Everywhere" from Yoko's album Song to fly, and "THE GARDEN OF EVERYTHING ~Denki Rocket ni Kimi wo Tsurete~", with backing vocals from Maaya Sakamoto (who is herself reasonably proficient in English, though she's admitted she lacks confidence in her language skills).
  • Second Gig has Surprisingly Good Russian and English combined in the theme, "Rise". The singer, "Origa" is Russian. The theme was written by her friend, composer Kanno Yoko.
• Sword of the Stranger's English dub has a lot of surprisingly good Chinese speakers. Only one character spoke hard-to-understand, heavily accented Chinese...the transplanted European.
• The teaser trailer for the tenth One Piece movie — One Piece Film: Strong World — is, for no apparent reason, narrated in surprisingly good English (except possibly because the characters are supposed to be speaking English), even though it's for the Japanese release and so is the rest of the text.
• Lucky Star: Don't. Touch. Me.
• A rather hilarious example in The Legend of Black Heaven: the English was very good (and voiced by an actual American), but the voice did not match the character at all.
• The ending theme of Black Butler, "I'm Alive", is in perfect English; not really that surprising, given that the singer, Bec "Becca" Hollcraft, is an American native.
• The opening theme to Ginga Hyouryuu Vifam is written and performed in almost flawless English.
• The beginning of the newest Naruto opening is grammatically correct, though it is quite noticeably accented. The very first ending straddles the line between this and regular Gratuitous English.
  • The fourth Shippuden opening "Closer" includes perfect English ("And the closer you get to something, the tougher it is to see it, and I'll never take it for granted, let's go!"), because the song's performer (and writer and composer) Joe Inoue is a Japanese American born in Los Angeles.
  • The ending Wind from the original series is also sung surprisingly well.
• In an episode of Daphne in the Brilliant Blue There are a few lines by some people from Siberia City who speak English flawlessly, though it's highly possible that the people who did the English speaking spoke English as their native tongue. Also Rena speaks English as well. Assuming her VA speaks English, she did a damn good job.
• Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- has a few songs that have some good English in them, which shouldn't be horribly surprising considering Yuki Kajiura composed them—she's also the one who composed "Obsession" and other .hack//SIGN songs. "Tsubasa", an insert song is entirely in English, and although the singer has a recognizable accent, you can still understand what she's saying without subtitles. "You are my Love", is another insert song entirely in English and there's very little accent that's only noticeable with a few words (that don't have Rs or Ls). The insert song, "Ring your Song", is also all in English and is very easy to understand. The only word that the singer seemed to have minimal trouble with was "Ancient."
• Soul Eater has some really good English on the OST. "Psychedelic Souljam", "Soul-Eater (So Scandalous)", "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Have a Nice Dream" and "STEP UP" all come to mind; all of them are rapped and the English is grammatically correct. (Most of these are by the USA-raised rapper Lotus Juice, mentioned further down the page as part of the Persona soundtrack). "Black Star (Never Lose Myself)" has some good English, too, although the singer has an accent it's still easy to understand him. "Death the Kid (So Crazy)" also has nice English. The female vocals have an accent, but subtitles aren't needed at all. Surprisingly, the song "Butterfly in the Still" by the same composer, Taku Iwasaki, has just plain horrible English. Whole phrases are almost entirely incoherent; it's a shame since it's a beautiful song... just impossible to understand.
• The OST to Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas has flawless grammar and perfect pronunciations, even on difficult phrases like "Realm of Athena". It's startlingly good, to the point that it feels like a taunt to the English-speaking fandom that will never see an official release of the series in their language.
• Tokyo Tribe 2 has a minor character in episode 6 who speaks English... to a Japanese guy. Later on, we have Surprisingly Good Mandarin with Sunmi and Jadakings. The latter's Mandarin is so good, it actually confuses Kai as to what he's saying ("Where is the princess?")
• The Japanese ending for the Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai (known in Japanese as "Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl the Movie: Dialga VS Palkia VS Darkrai") was sung entirely in English, by two British singers. See for yourself.
  • Also, a number of Pokémon related songs were done by a trio known as "Suzukisan". The songs often featured a large amount of Surprisingly Good English, mostly due to one of the members being an American. (Said American also provided the voice of the pirate trainer at the start of the Japanese version of Pokémon: The First Movie.)
• Chiyo-Dad in Azumanga Daioh speaks grammatically correct English, courtesy of one Norio Wakamoto. The intonation is actually perfect ("How ah YOU?" "FINE, SANK you"), even pronouncing Ls and Vs correctly, sounds which don't exist in Japanese. He doesn't get the "th" right, but very few foreigners do.
  • In an earlier episode, Yukari gives a speech in perfect English, though slightly accented. She was giving a speech about how Japanese English students are embarrassed about their poor English and would rather speak Japanese than bad English.
• It's amazing how Hellsing OVA VI ending theme "Magnolia" was sung in remarkable English, as was Schaft when they sang the ironically titled trailer song "Broken English". And the end credits sequence had actual English spoken in the talk balloons.
• Eyecatches in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood have series’ title said by someone who gets his pronouncing done perfectly. Not the faintest sign of r's.
  • It's made even more obvious because of the difficult nature of the two main characters' names to Japanese speakers. Remember the issues they have with definitive L and R sounds, then look at EDWARD and ALPHONSE ELRIC. Bonus points to the fact that each name gets 2-3 extra syllables thanks to pronunciations. Aside from the names, there's only the barest smattering of Gratuitous English in the series itself.
  • A note left by Dr Marcoh in the original series is written in fragmented but accurate English. Given that Marcoh is trying to reveal as little information as possible for fear of it being leaked, this actually makes sense.
  • The certificate that the Military gives Ed (the one with his new title of "Fullmetal Alchemist") is written in good English. It's in plain spoken English, something the real military would never write in, but it's far from Engrish.
• Barefoot Gen: "Weather Observation Plane Easterly, calling Enola Gay. Calling Enola Gay. Weather's fair and clear over Hiroshima. Conditions favorable for bombing."
• The eponymous Death Note was written in perfect English because, according to Ryuk, it's the most common international language of humans. It is the international language of business, after all. Light can read it because, as we see in the beginning, he's one of the best English students in the country, even understanding qualifiers like "as" (which lots of Japanese have trouble with), "therefore" and "whosoever". There are a couple spelling mistakes (like "looses" instead of "loses"), which is understandable, as the misspellings are all words that some native speakers have trouble with. There's also one or two misplaced commas (again, something natives have trouble with). But overall, it looks like it was written by a native English speaker very familiar with legalese. Obata must have learned by reading all those ToAs in English software.
• Rainbow pulls the English off very brilliantly. Not only do all the American soldiers speak real English (it's highly likely that their VA's are actually American since they have the accent to boot.), the Japanese talking English have the regular 'Engrish' you have in other anime. This makes the situations where Japanese (with their natural accent) talks with an American (who talks real English) completely realistic. Respect for pulling that off.
  • On top of this, the opening song, "We're not alone" by Japanese band Coldrain, is written and sung in excellent English that also fits the plot really well. It helps that the lead singer, Masato, is American.
• Most of the songs from the Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt soundtrack have perfect English. Honorable mentions go to the Ending Theme "Fallen Angel", "D City Rock", "Champion", and "CHOCOLAT".
• Invoked in the cold opening of the first episode of Giant Killing, with the random Englishman's properly... English (as in British!) sounding voice, and with the Japanese observers' properly but not unintelligibly accented English. Sadly, the trope is subverted not more than a few seconds later in the opening theme.
• Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence features two songs in English with sensible lyrics, sung with only a slight accent by jazz singer Kimiko Ito. The ending song, "Follow Me", is in fact an arrangement of a song originally written in English, but the earlier one, "River of Crystals", was written for the movie by Kenji Kawai.
• The English spoken by the British soldiers in the Imperial Japan era Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors sounds pretty authentic. Now, considering that Japan was a fascist nation at the time which didn't like foreigners very much, who voiced the British soldiers?
  • Propaganda film means they probably had access to native English speakers (Nisei) who had been attending school in Japan when the war broke out. The intelligence services grabbed most of them (willing or not).
• A fun example from the Sukeban Deka OVA. One of the Mizuki sisters makes a drug deal with an American dealer. The supposed American speaks terrible Engrish, but the girl's English is flawless.
• The opening of the first OVA episode of Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas may count. It is entirely in English, and makes complete sense.
• In a rather hilarious example from Hetalia: Axis Powers, the character who is supposed to be the personification of The United States of America cannot speak English to save his life. And yet... his pet alien seems to manage it just fine.
  • Creator Hidekaz Himaruya's English is very good. It's justified, since he spent about six years in New York.
• The debut trailer for REDLINE opens with a bit of fairly decent English, spoken by Australian-Japanese actor Mark Okita (also the voice of the Transformation Trinket from Kamen Rider Decade). Most of the vocal songs are in English and sung by native speakers, such as the theme song "Redline Day".
• Tiger & Bunny is set in a futuristic, No Communities Were Harmed version of New York, and so the English text seen is clear and accurate, everything from ticker tape news on TV screens to articles on newspapers. Episode 1 even features a detailed notice of foreclosure written in perfect English with Japanese subtitles on screen (ignoring the question of why something this detailed is posted across two screen doors rather than, say, as a letter). While the main character apparently can't read the English titles of the episodes, this seems to be a Running Joke rather than an in-universe fact.
  • The show's (second) closing credits include whole screens of English-language translations of the featured characters' lines from previous episodes.
  • The voice for the Good Luck Mode also has pretty clear English. And sounds remarkably like the Decadriver...
• In the Great Saiyaman arc of Dragon Ball Z, Son Gohan has an English teacher who, despite having a slight accent, speaks very good English. Of course, Fridge Logic sets in when you note that everyone on Earth (and even aliens in most cases) in Dragon Ball appear to speak the same language...
• There's an infamous Engrish scene in Itazura Na Kiss, but as bad as the pronunciation is, the grammar and syntax are perfect.
• The opening song to Deadman Wonderland is performed entirely in English by fade, a Japanese band that has four members raised in America. Three of the members are Japanese-Americans, and lead singer Jonathan Underwood was born and raised in Seattle.
• An episode of Sacred Seven features an auctioneer voiced by a British expat.
• Sailor Moon had an episode where the characters went to a party at the British embassy, and the main characters spoke the language at various degrees of ability: Usagi and Makoto were terrible (apparently Makoto thinks 'thank you' is a form of salute); Rei and Mamoru can speak it decently, if accented; Ami and Minako were speaking almost perfect Queen's English. Justified in Minako's case, as the anime version had her fighting youma in London for a period and she's hinted to have lived abroad for years (in fact Minako herself states she had already known one of her friends in London before the anime stint).
• When Senjougahara from Bakemonogatari says "Parent Teacher Association", this trope is clearly evident.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross: While none of the main cast speaks English onscreen, it's made fairly obvious that English is the default language of the show. In both the original series and Macross: Do You Remember Love?, there are shots of English writing (in the series, Minmay displays a letter from an agency offering her an audition, while in the movie, we get a close-up of Misa's handwritten lyrics to the title song) that show that either someone on staff was fluent in English or knew someone who was. Additionally, Do You Remember Love?'s background dialogue includes a fair amount of pretty good English, which is particularly noticeable with the Macross's intercom system.
  • There was also a bit of the series's theme that was rather decent English. "Will you love me tomorrow?", for example.
• The manga of Black Lagoon counts. The anime doesn't do as well, but it shines when Rock translates for Balalaika during the meeting with the Yakuza, and when Revy is talking to Ginji in the same arc.
  • Amusingly, flipped while played straight in the dub; Brad Swaile is proficient enough in Japanese to do actual translation work on the side.
• Love Lucky: When Fuuta and Kirari travelled to Hawaii, they met a foreigner asking for directions in English. To the readers (and Kirari's) surprise, Fuuta spoke English. He then explained to Kirari a former girlfriend of his tricked him into buying tapes made to teach people English and he decided not to waste the money.
  • It's made even more surprising when, up to that point, one would expect Kirari to be better than him at English.
• The anime adaptation of Kiniro Mosaic obviously had someone on staff who knows their English. Two of the main characters are British girls who occasionally speak their native English, and the first episode is set mostly in England. The pronunciation of some of the words is off, but the grammar is near perfect.
• Isao Sasaki once sang an English version of the Mazinger Z theme song in natural sounding English, if a bit accented. Ichiro Mizuki's English version on the other hand....
• "Somewhere", the last ending theme to Slayers Try, is sung by Houko Kuwashima. Kuwashima demonstrates surprisingly good English for the vocals. (It is also of interesting note that Megumi Hayashibara does not sing this song, making it the only Slayers theme song she doesn't sing.)
• Squid Girl had an episode where Cindy (an American) was teaching the main characters how to speak English, where she actually speaks fluent English even if her line reading was a little flat, although it's not the usual actress for that line.
• "Before My Body is Dry" from Kill la Kill sort of skirts the line between this and plain ol' Gratuitous English. On one hand, Mika Kobayashi pronounces the lyrics fairly well. On the other hand, the lyrics themselves are a tad broken. There are good bits, such as the lines "you're the only one who can help me out/we'll be as one", and "I gotta find out who killed my dad", both of which make perfect sense, but then there are lines like "may you surprised so much" and "this is the way to be more strong", which don't really add up. There is, however, a rap part in the middle of the song done in perfect English both pronunciation and grammar-wise; it's just not very good.
  • Also Mako's theme, "Light Your Heart Up", which is sung in perfect English by Aimee B.
• American Alexandra Garcia in Kuroko's Basketball speaks English with decent pronunciation and fairly natural inflection. Yuki Kaida's attempt at an American accent isn't bad either.
  • From the same show, there's Tatsuya's introduction scene. While the pronunciation is so-so, the dialogue is actually pretty fluent. The video also showcases some of Taiga's American friends who speak perfect English... but with ridiculously hokey acting. They are also apparently Australian immigrants to America.
• In the Gun Gale Online arc of Sword Art Online, there's a mini-game called "Untouchable" where a cowboy NPC tries to shoot you, and taunts you at the same time. It's perfectly obvious that they got an actual American to voice him in the anime. His lines are still the tiniest bit stilted (which sometimes happens when English actors are directed by people who don't speak the language), but he's just a program, so it's justified.
  • "Crossing Field", the season 1 opening of the anime, also has an English version performed by the original singer. It's both gramatically correct and fluently performed, the accent notwithstanding.
• An episode of Free! is set in Australia, and actual Australian voice actors perform minor and bit parts. Additionally, although Mamoru Miyano is struggling with the pronunciation, Rin's lines are grammatically impeccable.
• The source of the current trope image, Assassination Classroom has some very well written English, to the point where ironically the only error in an English newspaper article in episode 2 was misspelling a Japanese word. (Specifically, misspelling "Hentai" as "Heitai".) In a later episode, some of the Japanese characters speak English to some American one-shot characters. Every sentence is correct, and spoken with a surprisingly decent accent.
• In Operation 04 of the OVA of Sentou Yousei Yukikaze, a pair of Japanese Navy F/27s that intercept Yukikaze speak English when they demand Rei and Jack disarm and follow them. Though their pronunciation of "disarm" leaves much to be desired, the sentence "You have been intercepted" is quite clear and easily understood. About a minute later, after the Japanese fleet commander orders his ships to shoot down the JAM fighters closing in on them, the fire control officer says "All stations, launch SAMs" in English.
• In "Uta No Prince Sama", Starish speaks English quite well in their opening theme, "Maji Love 1000%," with the expection of them saying, "Let's song!" in the beginning. They do say the grammatically correct, "Let's dance!" later, though.
• The opening scene in the YuruYuri Nachuyasumi OVA. Despite the fact that it has no reason to be in English, in addition to the heavily accented pronunciation, the dialogue itself is grammatically sound. Though the phrase "never mind" seems to be used differently than how an English speaker would use it.
• Attack on Titan: Several songs in the soundtrack have perfect English grammar, such as Calling Your Name. Special mention goes to DOA, which not only has grammatically perfect lyrics about what it's like to be a member of the Survey Corps, but is also pronounced perfectly as well. This one is because the song is performed by Aimee Blackschleger, an American singer living in Japan who has also contributed music to Guilty Crown and Final Fantasy XIII-2
• Fairy Tail: Most of the character's powers are in English. Pitch perfect English.
  • It also helps that at least the main hero's seiyuu is confirmed to be able to speak 5 languages, one of which is English itself.
• This bit from Nisekoi.
• Terror in Resonance has Five's FBI handler Clarence talking to his superiors on the phone in flawless English, and though his actor is Japanese he's apparently fluent. Five speaks pretty well herself albeit with a bit of an accent but this is justified as she was a Japanese orphan originally.
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes has three opening themes in unaccented, perfectly structured English. The fourth opening theme is also in English, though with a noticeably thicker accent.
• In the anime of La Corda d'Oro, the opening song, performed by Kanon, breaks into perfect English at certain points. It isn't quite that surprising, given how she spent most of her childhood abroad.
• Kyo Kara Maoh! has a rather surprising example, as the character songs for the series contain a near perfect rendition of "Love Me Tender", performed by none other than Toshiyuki Morikawa. It's quite uncanny when you hear it.
• Panzer World Galient's opening theme has several lines of English (in fact, the original singer, EUROX, also recorded a 100% English version), and its ending theme is almost entirely in English. Not only is the pronunciation is pretty good (though a Japanese accent is still occasionally noticeable), but the grammar is perfect.
• Yuri!!! on Ice has several instances of this, since it has a multicultural cast and it's often implied that most of them speak to each other in English.
  • The lyrics of the opening theme, "History Maker", are entirely in English and are for the most part grammatically correct and well-pronounced.
  • If you pause at the right moments, the skaters' comments on their Instagram photos during the ending credits are all written in decent English.
  • In Episode 4, Yuko's text to Yurio is written in English, and it seems she's quite fluent in the language.
  • Jean-Jacques Leroy's short program theme music, "Theme of King J.J.", has lyrics that make sense (save a few) and are well-pronounced, as expected of a theme song about a Canadian character. It's sung by Swedish singer Linus Norda rather than J.J.'s voice actor.
  • Yuri's slurred "Be my coach, Victor!" in episode 10 is surprisingly understandable, especially for a character who is, at the time, incredibly drunk.
  • Though the title is definitely Gratuitous English, the lyrics for Georgi's free program song "A Tales of Sleeping Prince" still fall into this trope thanks to being sung by Japanese-American R&B singer AISHA.
• In the 9th episode of the Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card anime, Syaoran manages to speak decent English with only a slight accent to an English-speaking couple, much to Sakura's surprise. The Funimation dub changes it to French.
• Overlord (2012): The names of the spells used are all in English (the series takes a lot of inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons), and are generally correct barring a few exceptions like Zenberu's [Resistance Massive]. In the anime, however, it's jarring to hear heavily-accented English in the middle of a Japanese dialogue.
• In Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san, Honda meets an attractive older gentleman who apparently can only speak English. The anime adaptation has him speaking quite clearly. Subverted by Honda himself, though, who tells the audience in very clear terms that he can't speak English well.
• Episode 6 of Tokyo Mew Mew introduces Mary Mcguire, a pianist who speaks perfect English. Ryou and Keiichirô also speak to her English, but with accents. Unusual for an anime is that all three have full conversations in English that detail information about the plot
• My Hero Academia: The song "Hero Too", performed, In-Universe by the students of Class 1-A, in English. Out of universe, the song is performed by Chrissy Costanza (In-Universe by Kyoka Jiro).
• The Higurashi: When They Cry ED "Why, or Why Not" features English lyrics that, while spoken with an accent, reproduce the structure of the language quite faithfully, save for a few spelling slip-ups.
• Love Lucky: When Fuuta and Kirari travelled to Hawaii, they met a foreigner asking for directions in English. To the readers (and Kirari's) surprise, Fuuta spoke English. He then explained to Kirari a former girlfriend of his tricked him into buying tapes made to teach people English and he decided not to waste the money.

Asian Animation

• In one episode of Motu Patlu, the characters speak English with (almost) full sentences.
• Most of the voice actors in Rimba Racer are Malay. Their accents slip from time to time, but they otherwise speak perfect English.

Fanfiction

• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan fiction Jericho (MLP). First-Person Smartass Jericho, whose first language is Teutsch, an expy of German, speaks “Equestrian” incredibly well. It gets lampshaded a few times, too, such as by Good Samaritan Lyra:
  Lyra: But you don’t even have a foreign accent at all!
  Jericho: Neither do you.
• In the The King of Fighters fic Sore ga Ai, Deshou?, when Andy first meets Mai's father Kazutaka, he notes that he speaks "really good" English. Kazutaka explains that he studied a semester in Boston.
• Doing It Right This Time: Kensuke shows this after causing Asuka to experience a rare non-verbal example of a Bilingual Backfire, when he sees the cover of the book she just picked up from the only foreign-language bookstore. Turns out that he's read quite a lot of classic Western science fiction and fantasy and worked hard to learn English so he could experience them in the original.
• In-Universe case: in Fortune_Lover_(TGS Beta)(SARU_rip)[T+Eng0.75_Sincere].zip, "Sincere"'s translation tends to take creative license to make the writing flow better in Englishinvoked, in comparison to the more common STP translation, which tends to be literal. "Sincere"'s translation is also noted for its lack of typographical or grammatical errors. Both of these are even more striking as Parasite_Ib found "Sincere" is most likely a Japanese.

Film — Animation

• In-universe in Pocahontas. The film employs a Translation Convention for whenever the Powhatans are speaking to each other, but when Pocahontas first encounters John Smith, it establishes they speak different languages. Through the magic of listening with her heart, Pocahontas then speaks English to John, prompting a Jaw Drop from her friends.
• Atlantis: The Lost Empire: The Atlanteans have their own language and speak several others. After Milo discovers they are multilingual, Roark tentatively introduces himself in English. Kida then reveals she's fluent in English too, as are the rest of the Atlanteans we meet.

Film — Live-Action

• The Japanese film, Ichi the Killer, features Hong Kong-based Singaporean actress Alien Sun playing Karen and speaking primarily in fluent English, with only a slight accent. The actress is fluent in four languages.
• The first Japanese Death Note movie has an American playing Lind L. Tailor, L's decoy, and speaking in English while a voice-over speaks in Japanese.
• The female lead in Densha Otoko speaks a bit of English to an ambassador near the end of the film in a damn British accent.
• The aristocratic German and French officers in Jean Renoir's masterpiece La Grande Illusion both speak each other's languages fluently but use English as a sign of class solidarity, giving the audience a trilingual bonus.
• Inglourious Basterds:
  • A French character (Shoshana), who never spoke any English at any other point, makes a speech to a large audience of Germans, in perfect English. Because her family was slaughtered in part due to their inability to understand English, it makes sense that she would have made an effort to correct that lack. This was apparently the idea of her actress Melanie Laurent, as the original plan was for her to deliver the speech in French.
  • A wide range of German and French characters are revealed to be perfectly fluent in English. Bridget von Hammersmark (played by the German-born Diane Kruger, who had to exaggerate her accent when speaking English) lampshades it when she asks with exasperation if the American soldiers speak any other language than English, implying that being multi-lingual is simply standard for Europeans.
• Jackie Chan's Around The World In 80 Days features several fellow Hongkong actors in cameos - while in real life, only one of them (Sammo Hung) did not speak Surprisingly Good English, the movie had all of them with halting accents except Karen Mok, playing the Black Scorpion chieftain, presumably for the creepy factor.
• And the David Niven film Around the World in 80 Days has Fogg talk to a stereotypical looking wise old Chinese man in loud Pidgin English, only for him to turn out to be fluent with a perfect accent.
• In the Live-Action Adaptation of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Diamond Is Unbreakable, Jotaro has a scene where he speaks to Joseph Joestar on the phone and Yūsuke Iseya displays near perfect English.
• The Deliberately Monochrome film The Juniper Tree, loosely based on The Brothers Grimm fairy tale, is shot in Iceland, yet its characters (one of them played by Björk) speak very good English.
• In The Karate Kid (2010), Dre speaks Chinese to an Asian passenger on the trip to China, who retorts, "I'm from Detroit."
• Johann Krauss has a better vocabulary than Hellboy.
• Dr Schultz in Django Unchained being told to speak English by a couple of Americans when his vocabulary is too sophisticated for them
• The pronunciation and grammatical structure in the Bollywood film Aaina is excellent. However, it occurs so randomly and often unnecessarily (for example, after some antique bathroom furniture is delivered to the house, after yelling at the daughter in their native language, her father suddenly blurts out, "I don't have money to burn on this antique rubbish" in perfect English.) it feels more like Gratuitous English.
• Tetsuo: The Bullet Man's dialogue certainly counts. It helped that the script is translated from Japanese, not to mention this being (so far) the only film to feature Americans.
• The insert song "Give Me Some Sunshine" from 3 Idiots.
• Uco in The Raid 2 speaks English at one point with his yakuza counterpart Keiichi. Keiichi has a stronger accent, whereas Uco is more proficient. His father converses with them in Japanese, which angers him (given that Japan has previously occupied Indonesia during WW2, this isn't too surprising, plus there's his belief that their family should be dominant in Jakarta), meaning there's an actual character-based reason for him to speak in another language.
• Almost every character in the 2014 Live-Action Adaptation of Lupin III speaks surprisingly good English, to the point where there's probably just as much spoken English as there is Japanese.
• In Night at the Museum, the Egyptian mummy of Pharaoh Ahkmenrah speaks English with a refined British accent. When asked about it, he explains that he's been an exhibit at Oxford for a while, where he, presumably, picked up the language and the accent.
• In the musical version of Flower Drum Song Mei Li and her father are poor Chinese immigrants who speak perfect English. This is a slight adaptation change from the book where they were already living in America for a while when they're introduced, whereas the musical begins with them arriving. Master Wang too has very good English, which was the case in the book too — where he knew English but refused to say anything beyond 'yes' or 'no'.
• The World of Suzie Wong: Suzie and her friends speak in some broken English but have no problem understanding it, and Gwennie Lee is able to read English perfectly. As the majority of their clients are British and American, one could assume they picked it up over time.
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona's Maria Elena has to be ordered to speak in English whenever Cristina is around — and it's clear Spanish is what she prefers. But she speaks English just as well as Spanish.
• Shanghai Express establishes that Hui Fei is a High-Class Call Girl when she speaks perfect English. Although she appears to be a Chinese native, her actress Anna May Wong was third-generation Chinese from San Francisco.
• Last of the Mohicans: The Huron chief Magua surprises some British colonists by stating, "Magua speaks English... very well!" He is more or less fluent, though he's a Third-Person Person and uses other Native American flourishes in his word choices.
• We are first introduced to Hana-ogi in Sayonara when Gruver constantly sees her from afar, and doesn't actually come face to face with her until over an hour into the film. He spends the evening talking to her, unsure if she can understand anything she says - as the other Japanese character in the film Katsumi has limited English and mostly speaks Japanese with her husband. Then Hana-ogi reveals she can speak perfect English and was remaining silent because she wasn't sure what kind of person Gruver was.
• Okoye of Black Panther (2018) speaks mostly in Wakandan when outside the city, as it's handy for espionage. Everett Ross asks T'Challa if she speaks English, and Okoye deadpans "when she wants to."
• Java Head has the 19th century Bristol protagonist bringing home his new wife from China. Tao Yuen speaks English in a very refined manner, to the shock of the narrow-minded citizens who expected a "heathen". An Anna May Wong biography notes that the actress added certain inflections and speech patterns to imply that English was not her first language.

Literature

• The Alice Network: Several characters reveal that they're bilingual.
  • Eve speaks perfect German, French, and English. Since she rarely has occasion to use more than one or two of these with someone, people are often surprised by her skills. For example, she helps Charlie with a clerk who can't understand Charlie's American-accented French and Charlie remarks that she didn't know Eve could speak French so well.
  • Captain Cameron asked Eve to translate a letter into French, but later switched to French when speaking with her. It's implied that he asked her to translate the letter to test her language skills, not because he needed the help.
• Considering Dracula is depicted as an uncouth, filthy warlord in Anno Dracula, many characters are surprised by his excellent, accent-less command of English.
• Dracula: Dracula is remarked on as speaking very good English, and spends a lot of time with Johnathan Harker in an attempt to become not only good, but fluent as well. He explains that if his handle on the language isn't perfect, he would just be seen as another Funny Foreigner in England, and he is too proud to let that happen. It's also implied that he didn't want to stand out, for obvious reasons.
• A classic example occurs in John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Adam Trask's cook Lee speaks perfect Engrish when he's first hired, but that soon is revealed to be a ruse; Lee speaks perfectly good English, but he found it ran so counter to people's preconceptions that the only way he could be accepted in American society was to conform to the stereotype.
• In Murderess, this applies to James, the boy from Chopped Tree Inn, and to the Dark Ones’ king, who is particularly eloquent.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the Bulgarian Minister of Magic pretends to not speak a word of English during the Quidditch World Championship. British minister Cornelius Fudge, not the brightest man even in the best circumstances, bends over backwards to try and convey himself to his colleague. Only after losing the match, the disappointed Bulgarian strikes up a conversation in decent English (with a pretty thick Bulgarian accent, though still grammatically correct) with the shocked Fudge.

Live-Action TV

• Duke Watari from Cutie Honey: THE LIVE often switches between Japanese and English, even in the middle of conversations. He also swears in English when angered. This is due to actor Mark Musashi, while born in Japan, is half-American and grew up in Maine before returning to Japan to act.
• In Deadwood, Mr. Lee, the new Chinese arrival from San Francisco and rival to Wu, speaks perfect English. After years of trying to overcome Wu's single-digit vocabulary, Al Swearengen is visibly shocked when Lee reveals this.
• The opening narration of GARO is spoken entirely in grammatically correct English. Garo also features Mark Musashi as the mute Kodama until an appearance in the Mind Screw DVD-only episode Garo Gaiden: Smile, where he literally appears out of nowhere and verbally assaults the female lead with a whole string of Surprisingly Good English, with Medium Awareness thrown in.
  "Oh, you must forgive me because I usually don't have any lines and I have SO MUCH that I've PENT UP that I WANT to SAAAYYY!! Oh, but you know if I get out of hand the directors will be so upset with me... so if you don't mind I think I'll just call it a day, please continue with your... 'performance''..."
  • This is followed immediately by the female lead complaining that she could not understand a word of what was just said due to his thick Kansai accent.
• Kamen Rider has more than one example:
  • Kamen Rider 555 from 2003 has, in early episodes, a rather creepy commercial that's in very good English (it doesn't make perfect sense, but it's not supposed to: 555 has a bit of Mind Screw to it). At the end of each episode, the ominous voice from the commercial introduces the preview of the next episode with "Open your eyes for the next Faiz" (and for the finale, "Open your eyes for the last Faiz.") The transforming belts have computer voices that also speak decent English (however, the phrases are one or two words only, and the only time you get awkward English in 555 is when a computer phrase gets longer: When summoning the Jet Sliger rocket-bikes, the computer says "Jet Sliger, come closer.")
  • Leo, The Dragon of 555's Non-Serial Movie, is apparently an American, and speaks perfect English. He was not introduced as such, and didn't speak until his second scene, so it was very jarring. Leo's actor, Peter Ho, is Chinese-American and speaks Chinese, Japanese, and English. Supposedly, the filmmakers found his Japanese bad, so they had him say the lines in English instead.
  • Kamen Rider Blade is an exception, since, unlike 555 and Kabuto, its computers speak horribly accented English which is a shame, since they have an awful lot of lines.
  • Kamen Rider Kabuto from 2006 has its computers speaking very good English. Typically, the Rider will call "Raidaa Kikku!" and the computer will repeat "Rider Kick" flawlessly. Also, in a few post-credit scenes (not part of the series continuity), Tendou Souji reveals that he can speak English with almost no accent if he puts his mind to it.
    • His actor, Hiro Mizushima, was raised in Europe at a young age and can speak perfect English. It's quite jarring when, in one of the post-credit bonus scenes, one character talks about Kamen Rider "Stron-gaa" and moments later Tendo refers to him as "Stron-ger", the correct English pronunciation of the name, and even puns off of his name by saying Kabuto is "strongest". Mizushima gets to show off his talent more in some of the Super Hero Time Crossover bumpers, affecting a falsetto voice to "impersonate" Zuban and mess with Kagami's head. "No, no, repeat after me!"
    • In the Non-Canon Movie, The computer on the ZECT Space Station speaks in Perfect English, however Kagami (who gave the orders to the computer) speaks in heavily accented Gratuitous English.
  • Kamen Rider Decade doesn't seem to know what to do with this trope sometimes. The voice for the tools for both Decade and Diend calls out various rider names and attacks in seemingly random accents. For riders with English words for names, they're called out in clear English accents. Some attacks with English names are called out in gratuitous English accents. Others still are actual Japanese words or phrases that are spoken as though it's new to the language.
  • There is a Blink and You'll Miss It moment in Kamen Rider Double: A to Z - The Gaia Memories of Fate. In the opening the helicopter pilot has 2 lines, both in perfect English (the actor being a Westerner): "What the..." and "Kamen Rider". Also, Aya Kujo in "The T That Came Back" pronounced English fairly well, Justified by the fact that she had spent several months in Los Angeles.
  • Kamen Rider OOO has its own brief moment in an early episode when Chiyoko, thinking Ankh's rather coarse Japanese is because he was raised overseas, determines to correct it and starts the lesson with a perfect 'Repeat after me.' Given the character is an international traveler it’s not too odd but it’s still sufficiently polished to cause a double take.
  • Kamen Rider Saber's Opening Theme has its introductory lines sung in perfect English; such english is not found in any of the Wonder Ride Books except Solomon's transformation line, and all of the speeches and finishers from the Grimoire Wonder Ride Book.
• In Tomica Hero Rescue Force, the Supreme Commander, Natsuno "Nancy" Nanbu/Rescue Universe, unconsciously speaks coherent English while in the heat of battle. Her teammates (most of which can't understand English) ask her to speak Japanese in very broken Gratuitous English.
  "Please... Talk... me... Japanese. JAPANESE!!"
• Several times in Super Sentai:
  • Mirai Sentai Timeranger, Time Fire's Transformation Trinket, the V-Commander, spoke several complete sentences of Surprisingly Good English.
  • In Ninja Sentai Kakuranger, we have the English-speaking NinjaBlack played by Kane Kosugi. Apart from being raised in America, he's better known for being the son of Sho Kosugi.
  • In Mahou Sentai Magiranger, an episode features Makito responding to an American tourist in perfect English after a particularly bad response from his brother Tsubasa.
    Tourist: Excuse me. Can you help me find this place?
    Tsubasa: Ai. Kanto. Supiiku. Ingurisshu.
    Tourist: Oh...
    Makito: Yeah, sure. Where would you like to go?
    Tsubasa: Nani?! ("What the?!")
    Tourist: Oh, thank you, I'd like to go to the station.
    Makito: Yeah? Go straight, and turn left. At the end of this road, then you'll see it.
  • The narrator for Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters does this at the title card when saying Mission (insert number)
  • "Crime no Theme", the Villain Song from J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai is strewn with lines such as "Go and kill 'em!" and "Go to hell!" in perfect English, which is pretty unnerving if you're not expecting it. It should be noted that the voice in the song says "JAKQ" as "Jacker", adding to the effect.
  • Masato Shimon's rendition of Seijuu Sentai Gingaman's opening theme in English is very well pronounced due to his fluency in English, however the translation is not that good, which is naturally not his fault.
  • In Juken Sentai Gekiranger each of the core 5 has a Surprisingly Good English line.
  Unbreakable Body
  Honest Heart-o (This is the only one with a accent)
  Fantastic Technique
  Iron Will
  Amazing Ability
  • Tensou Sentai Goseiger's Leon Cellular is a rather jarring example, speaking perfect, unaccented English in a season otherwise full of poorly pronounced Gratuitous English.
  • Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters has the Go-Busters' equipment say some short phrases in perfectly unaccented English (though a few grammatical errors, such as "Let's Driving" still exist).
  • Shuriken Sentai Ninninger has an example for unsuspecting viewers. Episode 34 starts out with a civilian calling for help in perfect English. This becomes less surprising, but possibly more awesome, when you learn that the civilian was played by Yoshi Sudarso.
  • Uchu Sentai Kyuranger has most of the English words used during the Transformation Sequence enunciated exceptionally well, with the exception of the word "Voyager" - which may have been intentional. This carries over into the toys as well - in particular, the countdown used by Gigant Houou sounds like a native English speaker, even though it's the same voice actor as all of the other spoken sounds used in the series and toys.
• Ultra Series
  • Ultraman Gaia: One of XIG's Bridge Bunnies Georgie Leland (portrayed by the British Maria Teresa Gow) demonstrated this, even once helping Gamu as an interpreter when he had to visit Canada.
  • Ultraman Max similarly had Sean White on DASH (played by the American Sean Nichols). While he rarely says English lines more complex than something quickly shouted during the heat of battle, they were always grammatically correct and without an accent.
• Persons Unknown has an interesting Meta version of this trope. When the captives first meet Tom, the owner of the Chinese restaurant, he can only speak in very bad Engrish. In later episodes, however, he speaks English perfectly due to his true identity being revealed as a member of the organization behind the kidnappings who was putting on the accent just for show.
• Invoked in the original Japanese dub of Sesame Street. The dub's intent was to teach proper English to Japanese children, and did so by keeping several parts of dialogue un-dubbed, producing this effect.
• A common occurrence in Scandi crime dramas, which can throw English watchers of them, are characters breaking into English, sometimes with very English accents.
  • Brigitte Nyborg in Borgen is a case in point; when she speaks English (i.e. to a foreign leader) she almost sounds Australian.
  • Katrine Fonsmark sounds like a robotic version of CJ Cregg from The West Wing. This is perhaps not surprising as the actor based her line delivery on CJ.
• Mexican-American Game Show host Marco Antonio Regil is a very fluent English speaker. As the host of various Spanish-language adaptations of Family Feud, he says "strike" on a regular basis with no noticeable accent. Also, during one episode, he teased a contestant for mispronouncing the word "tequila" by pronouncing "tortillas" and "frijoles" the way an English speaker who didn't speak Spanish would pronounce them.
• This clip from the Korean sketch comedy show Tokyo Breakfast demonstrates some actually decent English, but be warned; the writers don't seem to be aware of the concept of N-Word Privileges, so, uh... yeah.

Music

• Israeli singers Geva Alon and Ehud Banai both have songs written completely in perfect English, even though Geva's song is just a remake of an old song.
  • Israeli singing competitions nowadays usually feature a lot of English-language songs, although some try to tone it down and promote (or outright require) singing in Hebrew. The quality of the accent ranges significantly, with examples of this popping up frequently.
• Both X Japan vocalist Toshi and bandleader/drummer Yoshiki have VERY good English. For Yoshiki, it's a result of his having lived in the US since the early 1990s and have studied the language since long before then. He writes songs such as Art of Life with quite coherent English lyrics, blogged only in English, regularly speaks in English, and otherwise is stunningly good with it for a non-native speaker. Toshi can sing in quite coherent English and could as far back as 1989 with the song "Desperate Angel".
  • hide also demonstrated the ability to sing in English with his band Zilch and as seen on What's Up Mr. Jones only had a slight accent; otherwise, the pronunciations is near-perfect. Hide's solo song "Lemoned I Scream" is, however, incoherent even by Japanese standards
• Likewise, visual key artist Gasket is a fairly fluent, though accented, speaker of (mostly American) English. He's made the comment that a good part of his book collection is in English, since that's the language a lot of the more interesting things are published first. He also speaks a fair amount of Mandarin Chinese. His French, on the other hand, is nigh-indecipherable...
• Ex-Galneryus vocalist Yuma-B not only sings in perfect (albeit heavily accented) English, but posts in it on his site BBS.
• Several songs by Itou Kinaki are sung in Japanese mixed with some English, but she always sings it without an accent. In an OST for a BL Game Lamento-BEYOND THE VOID by Nitroplus CHIRAL, she sang a song with Watanabe Kazuhiro, both voices singing entirely accent-less English. Even Watanabe's voice sounded like someone singing a song out of Lion King (in the sense that his accents are so English-like, rather than Japanese-like). They also each sing one completely-English song well in the Original Image Soundtrack of Fate/Zero.
• The song "Candy Pop" by the Heartsdales, made famous outside of Japan through the Haruhi Fan Vid "Skittles". Much like the above, this is quite understandable, as the group consists of two sisters who were born in Japan but raised in the US.
• "Appetite of a People-Pleaser" by GHOST is a Vocaloid song utilizing the voicebank v4flower. What makes it fall into this is that v4flower doesn't have an English voice option, yet not only is the song in English, it features multiple complicated words ("obsequious," "irreconcilable," and "subservient" are some notable examples). v4flower is able to pronounce these words with little issue and barely any accent.
• In the Complete Symphonic recording of Les Misérables (a must-have for the die-hard fans of the musical), the role of Eponine is played by Japanese-cast-member Kaho Shimada. She sings in English with hardly any accent, despite not knowing any English at the time of recording.
• Listen to Space Sonic by Ellegarden. Sounds like a typical rock band from the USA? But the band is entirely Japanese. Having a vocalist that worked for nearly a decade in California sure helps.
• L'arc-en-Ciel sings in both Japanese and English. Their opening track for Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) (as well as the ending song for the movie, Conquerors of Shamballa) switches between the two, but the ending song they did for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was fully in English, and while not absolutely perfect, is very easily understandable. Their lead singer, Hyde, actually pays an American woman to proofread his lyrics and provide him with a pronunciation guide.
• Rie Fu. It helps that she spent three years in Maryland, and went to school in the UK. She basically has an American accent with her English, which is also grammatically correct.
• Singers Utada Hikaru and Crystal Kay threw many people for a loop upon exhibiting flawless English. Utada was raised in America, but the fact that Crystal Kay sounds like an American R&B singer despite being born and raised in Japan is still considered astounding (her father is African-American, however, so it is justified in a way).
• Maaya Sakamoto has some songs with nice English. Wolf's Rain's "gravity" comes to mind. A song on her latest album Kazeyomi has "colors", which is entirely in pretty well spoken English. "THE GARDEN OF EVERYTHING" which she sang as a duet with Steve Conte (mentioned above) has flawless English vocals, both in her backups and solos. Funny enough, a comment from the Nikopachi Singles compilation album the song is featured on has a comment from Maaya saying, "Steve emails me all the time, but I can never respond back because I don't understand English!". And then there's this, and this.
• BoA (aka Boa Kwan) has some nice English. Born in Korea, she knows Korean, Japanese, some English, and has sung one or two songs in Mandarin. She has full songs in English, including a translated version of "Every Heart", "Amazing Kiss" and other pop songs she's done—she also has "The Christmas Song" and "Last Christmas" on two of her holiday singles. Her English is accented a little, but she's improved a lot over the years.
  • She recently had an American debut album and her English sounded pretty good. There were even some songs where it was hard to tell that she had an accent.
• Yuna Ito has flawless English. This isn't surprising considering she was born and raised in the United States. Her English songs are amazing—she's done "My Heart Will Go On" originally by Celine Dion" and "All I Want for Christmas is You" by Mariah Carey.
• Jyongri has perfect English. She's of Korean descent, but was born and raised in Japan, and speaks both Japanese and English fluently—she did attend an international school, though. Her song "Winter Love Story" is about half English and half Japanese.
• The Korean band Clazziquai has vocalists who can sing and rap in solid English, resulting in a good number of English-language songs.
• Japanese band Godiego (pronounced Go-dye-go) has songs that are partially in English or entirely in English, not surprising as two of the five members are American, although their main vocalist and lyricist are wholly Japanese (their lyricist did however spend her childhood in Montreal and after that lived in New York). Their songs include "The Galaxy Express 999" and "Monkey Magic", the theme songs for the Galaxy Express 999 movie and Monkey, as well the soundtrack for the cult surrealist horror film Hausu. The soundtrack they performed for Monkey titled Magic Monkey consisted of 11 entirely English tracks and was the Number 1 Record in Japan for 1979. They also have the distinction of being the first rock band to play in China and Nepal.
• Loudness, being a band that takes heavy inspiration from American hair metal and The New Wave of British Heavy Metal, more or less required this. They also took this trope to its logical conclusion when they had a need to replace their vocalist by hiring an American instead of another Japanese singer. But when they rehired a Japanese singer, they chose Masaki Yamada, who became an American citizen in the 1990s and speaks English with virtually no accent.
• Italian singer Adriano Celentano released a particularly catchy single sung in "surprisingly good English-sounding gibberish" which supposedly sounds very authentic to people who don't actually speak English. In fact, it's pure gibberish in any language.
• Hyadain's take on Terra's Theme, which is entirely in English, must be heard.
• Los Angeles native Joe Inoue is essentially a polyglot. His debut EP in Japan featured songs entirely in English and entirely in Japanese, while his first studio album was all in Japanese with his native English peppered in, like "CLOSER" which was the theme for Naruto Shippuden. His subsequent project is TENGUBOY where he raps in Japanese AND English and he has also taken on Portuguese in his vlogs as he tours Brazil.
• Miyavi of the Visual Kei band Dué le Quartz spent six months studying English in California. Consequently, he speaks pretty good, coherent English and blogs in both Japanese and English; granted, the latter is mainly text speak, but this just seems to be his idiolect, since he renders "with" as "wiz".
  • It's Miyavi-ish, more or less. His Japanese is the same way, when he's not making a particular effort to be more formal. The English in his song lyrics is pretty coherent, insofar as any of his lyrics are coherent in any language, and in one song he even managed to not mangle some Spanish. He's also no longer with Dué le Quartz — he's gone solo and started his own label.
  • Being married to a Hawaiian probably doesn't hurt either.
• Lotus Juice may be part of the Pantheon of Surprisingly Good English. In all fairness, he did spend a good chunk of his childhood going to school in the United States.
• There's a group of German musicians who call themselves Fiddler's Green. They perform Irish folk, both old and new standards and their own work, in English that makes you go "What's wrong with his accent?" instead of "Dear Gods that's a German trying to sound Irish." It's not surprisingly good, it's surprisingly amazing. “The Night Pat Murphy Died”, admittedly a song from Newfoundland, and it STILL sounds like a weird Irish accent.
• Bonnie Pink is also quite good, if Ring a Bell is anything to go by.
  • She covered "Your Eyes" by Tatsuro Yamashita, who is another example of this trope, having released multiple songs like this one in perfect English, and inserting completely correct English into otherwise Japanese songs.
• Both Koshi Inaba and Tak Matsumoto AKA B'z is fluent in English. Considering how they have worked and played with many western artists such as Slash, Billy Sheehan, Pat Torpey, Eric Martin, Larry Carlton, Aerosmith, etc, this is easily understandable. In their latest live in USA and their special live together with Linkin Park, Inaba easily change between English and Japanese. The band also employed many western artist for both studio recording and live performance and many times in their live DVD, it's shown that they talked to them without translator. This is an example of a B'z song in English.
• This English version of Denji Sentai Megaranger's (the Japanese source for the U.S.'s Power Rangers in Space) full opening theme is in surprisingly good English, barring the (very) few odd grammar intonations and native accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YwwYB9Qlbk (Right now, the full lyric list can't be found, so some lyrics might be hard to interpret.)
• Tokyo Incidents can pull this off, as proven by Noudouteki Sanpunkan. The first time you hear it, you may be shocked by the sudden transition to Japanese.
• While Miliyah Kato usually only sprinkles English phrases here and there throughout her songs, she's rather good at it. Granted, she does make a few mistakes, but it's actually a surprise when she messes up.
• Original Pilipino Songs (OPM)'s. especially the ones sung by Jose Mari Chan plus the old 70's songs don't sound local at all. Some examples to go by, mostly love songs though and some rock too.
• BENI - aka Beni Arashiro, is half-Japanese, half-American, therefore, she is fluent in both English & Japanese. This can be seen in her cover of The Boy Is Mine with Tynisha Keli, & also in some of her Japanese songs
• MiChi - Japanese-British & speaks English fluently with a British accent. Wanna see?
• Japanese-American Anna Tsuchiya - Although her English is not perfect (she was bilingual at a young age but her parents divorced & her father went back to the states), she has a pretty good accent
• OLIVIA - aka Olivia Lufkin - is Okinawan-American. She speaks both English & Japanese. She even has an English version of her song Wish.
• Japanese singer and actress Ayaka Komatsu released an English-language single with excellent pronunciation (you can hear it here). In a strange case of Ink-Suit Actor, she was in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon playing the role of Minako Aino, who in the anime version was another example of this trope.
• J-Rock singer Miz has outstanding English. Check out these English versions of New Day and Backseat Baby.
• DREAMS COME TRUE can pull off some excellent English, in both grammar and pronunciation. You may know them for their song "Sweet Dreams", but another song of theirs, "Winter Song", is sung in completely coherent English.
• Man With a Mission's Jean-Ken Johnny and Tokyo Tanaka sing in remarkably good English despite being Japanese Ultimate Life Forms created by Jimi Hendrix with the heads of wolves on human bodies. A good listen to "Database" and "Raise your Flag" is enough proof.
• ABBA English was always good due to being Swedish, but what makes it especially apparent is Bjorn's ability to make his songs funny, e.g. Does Your Mother Know and Two For The Price Of One. this interview clearly explains
• Marie Serneholt was interviewed on Finnish Television, note just like ABBA, she's from Sweden, and yet her English is noticably interesting. Her ability English to speak sounded more American than the British version she and the rest of the A-Teens were taught; this was due to having been in the United States and having friends from the country as she explains.
• Ylvis, a Norwegian talk show host and band, have several songs in English with only slight accents. That their songs are uniquely odd is entirely beside the point.
• Namie Amuro's "Neonlight Lipstick" inexplicably has more English than it does Japanese, but said English is fairly well pronounced and manages to make sense.
• Even for a musician born in Japan who moved to America during high school, Angela Aki can move very smoothly between English and Japanese. Non-Japanese-speakers who start listening to her "Kiss from a rose" thinking it's just another Japanese song are likely to not notice when she switches from Japanese to English until at least a few lines after it happens.
  • Not that surprising since her mother is an American, and her father is the founder of one of the biggest English schools in Japan.
• Long Runner rock vocalist and fashion pioneer Kenji Sawada, fluent in French and English, who produced an entire album in English, The Fugitive exclusively for Europe(It was later rereleased in Japan with the subtitle Ai no Troubadour.).
• FEMM has all of their songs in English with next-to-perfect pronunciation and grammar. For example, "Kill the DJ".
• Ayumi Hamasaki has, since her RAINBOW album in 2002, started gradually sprinkling English lyrics into her songs. Her accent is still prominent - though it's improved in the past twelve years - but lyrically, the English lyrics she writes tend to be grammatically sound and present clear ideas. And it's incredibly rare to hear her mix up the l/r pronunciation - even back during RAINBOW, she nailed that part. She did, however, have a little practice with her NOTHING FROM NOTHING mini-album back in 1995.
• J-Pop Girl Group E-girls has this in the usual "throw in some English words for flavor" fashion. But they usually make sense and are pronounced well.
• Japanese rapper COMA-CHI displays this in a similar fashion, usually in the form of rap clichés. But they're well-pronounced rap clichés. She does have more of an accent, though.
• Shiina Ringo's English is very good (albeit still somewhat accented), no doubt helped by a two-month stay in London. Some of the English lyrics she sings are her own, and they're free of grammatical errors or similar writing flubs.
• Münster native Marian Gold, lead singer of Alphaville, sings and writes lyrics in such excellent English that it's hard to place him as a native German, though his pronunciation of the "th" sound, which doesn't exist in German, is inconsistent.
• Singer nano, best known for doing themes for shows like Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Btooom! and a ton of fan covers of songs posted on Nico Nico Douga, effortlessly switches between English and Japanese in her music with barely a hint of an accent. She's done several interviews and even a podcast appearance where she speaks entirely in fluent English. She is a Japanese-American who was born and raised in New York City and moved to Japan when she was in her mid-teens.
• This shows up in a lot of 1980s Japanese pop and funk music, e.g. Toshiki Kadomatsu's "If You Wanna Dance Tonight", Hitomi "Penny" Tohyama's "Let's Talk In Bed", and Minako Yoshida's "If You Want It", a duet with Tatsuro Yamashita (as mentioned above).
  • Another notable example is Tatsuro Yamashita's wife, Mariya Takeuchi, who speaks and sings English very well. This is noticeable through her international hit, "Plastic Love", but various other songs in her discography are also sung in full English, with only small traces of her native accent (for example, "Broken Heart"). Considering she spent a year of high school as an exchange student in Illinois, this is perhaps unsurprising.
• Hyakka Seiran, a CD series with Japanese voice actors covering famous anime themes, has a near-unaccented and perfectly intonated version of Skies of Love, the first Legend of the Galactic Heroes opening. It was sung by Minoru Shiraishi and - YMMV - he gave the original artist a run for her money.
• One of the draws of Finnish Alternative Rockers Poets of the Fall. Vocalist Marko Saaresto learned English from a young age, and affects an American delivery at will, with remarkably few tells.
• The various international versions of The Voice feature this to a truly staggering extent, combining it with Singing Voice Dissonance. Several auditionies in non-English speaking countries flawlessly match the original acccent of the song despite having their native accent when they actually speak in English.
• Masato, frontman of Japanese post-hardcore band Coldrain, has some of the best English pronunciation of any rock vocalist in Japan. He's half-American and half-Japanese, and sings with zero trace of a Japanese accent.
• Kenta Koie of electronicore band Crossfaith is able to conduct himself rather well in English. His screamed vocal style masks some of his Japanese accent, but as the band have included more cleanly sung vocals on their recent albums, he's still able to sing in English very well, and speaks it well enough (albeit with a strong accent) to give interviews to Western media.
• "I'm a Lady Now" is sung entirely in English by a then-5-year-old Japanese girl. There are a few pronunciation mistakes due to singing a rather uptempo song, but Hotzmic otherwise seems to know English amazingly well for someone her age. This song was also used in Rhythm Heaven Megamix. (More on that under Video Games.)
• Japanese heavy metal musician Demon Kakka spent several years of his childhood in New York, and as such is fluent in English. Many of his songs, including those written and performed for his old band Seikima-II, have grammatically correct English lyrics peppered within, and Seikima-II has even released several English self-cover albums!
• Ryo Kinoshita of Japanese metalcore/deathcore act Crystal Lake is practically fluent in English. His pronunciation is spot on and the grammar in his lyrics is more or less perfect. If there is a member of the band to be interviewed, it will be Ryo for his English ability. That said, the other members know enough English for conversations and do press with Ryo from time to time.
• Yui Kawashima and Yuto from Japanese metalcore act Earthists write all of their songs in English, justified as Yuto was an English literature major in college. Yuto's clean singing is free of any accent and after Yui's Vocal Evolution his pronunciation got much better. Whether you can understand Yui while he's screaming his brains out is another story.
• Downplayed with Yuzo Koshiro. On Twitter, his tweets alternate between Japanese and somewhat clunky English. On YouTube, he sometimes posts videos explaining his process in natural, casual English with a subtle accent. Half the comments just talk about how good his English is.
• French singer (of Italian ancestry) Caterina Valente could speak six languages and sing in eleven, and was notable for sounding very natural in all of them. Her 1955 rendition of "The Breeze and I" was a huge hit in America, and with her lack of an accent, many listeners probably weren't even aware that she wasn't American.
• Selena was a megastar in the US Hispanic community and in much of Latin America, singing in Spanish. Shortly before she was murdered in 1995, she began a crossover into the English-language market, releasing an album that featured six English and seven Spanish tracks. What most English-speaking Americans didn't know was that Selena, though of Mexican heritage, was a Texas native whose family mostly spoke English at home. In fact, when she started singing professionally in Spanish as a child, she did so from a phonetic lyrics sheet. While she eventually learned Spanish, she wasn't 100% fluent, speaking that language with a distinct American English accent.
• Icelandic jazz-pop singer Laufey grew up between Iceland and Washington, D.C, and studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She sings and speaks in an American accent that sounds very native-like, so much so that many people are surprised when they learn she's from Iceland.
• Mariya Takeuchi was once an exchange student, which allowed her to learn English as a second language. In fact, here's her comedically interviewing famous actor and fellow singer Tetsuya Takeda in perfect English. Would you expect anything less from a woman who won a national recitation contest?

Professional Wrestling

• In Major League Wrestling in 2003, CM Punk was working Heel and claimed that the Japanese wrestler Nosawa was Straight Edge like him, with announcer Joey Styles usually talking about seeing Nosawa at the bar. At MLW War Games, September 19, 2003, Raven defeated Nosawa. Punk started criticizing Nosawa for letting him down, and Nosawa responded, "I don't give a [bleep!]," with Joey saying, "He speaks very good English."^note Although Joey Styles was the announcer at the original event, he has been replaced on the DVD by Kevin Kelly. This led to Punk basically getting Squashed immediately after by the returning Vampiro.
• Satoshi Kojima combined this with Hypocritical Humor during a Ring of Honor match with Homicide in which he claimed (in near perfect English) that he couldn't understand the referee's instructions because, "I am Japanese goddammit!" Naturally, the stuff he allegedly couldn't understand just happened to be admonitions to stop fighting dirty.
• Kenny Omega reversed it after a grueling match with Hirooki Goto during the G1 Climax in 2016, speaking fluent Japanese for the first time in front of an audience (previously he had been sticking to English as part of his Evil Foreigner shtick).

Video Games

• A3 has the track Just For Myself. While the main track is in Japanese, the chorus repeats the title line with barely any inflections in it.
• Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War and Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War both feature surprisingly good English in the Japanese versions — this is because they were originally dubbed in English and Japanese in the original version. In fact, the only major difference between the original version of 5 and the export version is that the Player Character's nickname is changed, due to the fact that Blaze's original nickname "Booby" is an English slang term for breasts.
• Konami's Famicom Disk System game Ai Senshi Nicol has an incredibly sappy ending text crawl about The Power of Love that is in perfectly good English, with not a single spelling or grammatical error in sight. For a game released during a time where Japanese games were rife with Gratuitous English (it released in the same year as Pro Wrestling, which gave us the infamous "A Winner Is You!"), an example such as this is extremely surprising:
  "Nicol and Stella, they were destined to be together. His love for Stella gave him courage and power, and her love for Nicol led him to her. Nobody can deny that in troubled times the two were bound together by destiny, wicked power can never destroy their love. May their life be happy and full of love. And may their love last forever."
• The King of Fighters '96: American actor B.J. Love plays as Krauser, so his English voice is spot on (technically, Krauser is German, but the fact that SNK brought in non-Japanese talent just for a character in fighting game was an achievement for its time). However, SNK pulled off an even more incredible feat with The King of Fighters '96 Neo Geo Collection, a Neo Geo CD exclusive bonus material only released in Japan. This disc contains fictional interviews of the '96 roster, and sure enough, Krauser also gets one, voiced completely in English with very few grammatical errors and Japanese subtitle to go with. SNK fighting games of the 1990s were often marred by mediocre English translation, so it's shocking SNK got it right for something only a small number of Japanese fans would watch.
• In Strider (Arcade), all of the characters actually speak their respective language (the Russian government speaks Russian, Strider speaks Japanese, Ton Pooh speaks Chinese, etc. etc.)
• The Fighter's History series also had characters, for the most part, speaking their respective languages fluently. It almost lets you forget how big of a Large Ham many characters, like Ray, are ("BIG TORNADOOO! DYNAMITE!")
• The ending songs for the Xenosaga games are in English, in both the Japanese and English releases. Unlike many Japanese songs in English, the words would be intelligible if not for the fact that the lyrics tend to be a bit overshadowed by the melody. In This Serenity (the ending song to the anime) isn't quite as well done, but is better than a lot of gratuitous English songs you hear in anime...
  • Ditto for the original Xenogears. Yasunori Mitsuda composed the songs for Gears and Saga Episode I, and Joanne Hogg, from Ireland, sang them.
  • Again for the game Xenoblade Chronicles X. Hiroyuki Sawano composed many themes, even battle themes, with English (possibly as a reference to the fact that the survivors of the apocalypse are from the United States).
• Considering that most American characters in the Fatal Fury games speak Gratuitous English (Mr. Bogard being the worst of the bunch), it's a bit of a shock to fight Wolfgang Krauser, who has an actual English voice actor, B.J. Love (who also doubles as Fatal Fury 3's announcer).
  • The great irony of this all being that Krauser is quite explicitly German. So...we have All-American-ish Terry Bogard speaking with such blatantly over exaggerated Engrish to the point of parody...and on the other side, we have German Noble Wolfgang Krauser, speaking in perfectly clear, American-accented English. Yeaaaahhh.....
  • B.J. Love also does Franco Bash, an Italian.
  • Another SNK example is from the Fu'un Series and first main boss, King Leo. While his shadow, King Lion, speaks with a clear Japanese accent, King Leo speaks perfectly American accented English courtesy of John Hulaton.
• Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike also does this with Alex, Gill, Urien, Hugo, Dudley, and Q, all of which have not only English VAs, but ones who do their characters various regional accents fairly well (especially Dudley).
  • For its time, Street Fighter had some limited but good English spoken.
    • Elmuh Fudd Syndwome notwithstanding. "Wat stwength! But don't fowget dew aw many guys wike you, aww ovah da wowld!"
• DonPachi. While spoken by a Japanese actor, the accent is minimal and the grammar is correct. Granted, the acting isn't always perfect and some of the lines are downright corny, but it remains believable and sets the mood well enough.
• One song in Katamari Damacy, "Que Sera Sera", is fully-sung in English by Charlie Kosei, who apparently grew up with English-speaking parents. While indeed Surprisingly Good English, if you listen to the song closely, you can tell he's not a native English speaker. Peppered throughout the song are such lyrics as "word you up" ("wad you up"), "lup up" ("lump up"), and "wizyuu" ("with you"). The remainder of the lyrics are pronounced in a perfect American accent — which is actually another tip-off; all English-speaking Americans speak with some sort of regional accent.
• The entire intro to the original Star Ocean is spoken in English with Japanese subtitles and doesn't have any real glaring errors to speak of, this probably being mostly due to natural speakers delivering the lines. This doesn't carry over to other uses of English later in the game though, as seen from a computer that asks "CONNECT WITH WHAT?" when prompting for a username and responds to a successful input with a "COLLECT".
• Before it was released internationally, Sonic Battle had the default Japanese script and an English script that could be turned on in the options. The latter is entirely grammatically correct and understandable by a native speaker - so much, in fact, that the only change made during localization was the removal of a mild swear word from Rouge's dialogue in her respective chapter.
• The Japanese video game Metal Wolf Chaos is voiced entirely in perfect English — it's horribly cheesy English, but perfectly pronounced and structured nonetheless. If not for the Japanese menu text and subtitles you would have sworn it had been made in America.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Thracia 776, one of the games in the series which never left Japan, has its entire opening in excellent, grammatical English, only really fudging up insofar as an occasional lack of commas in the appropriate places. Of course, it also has Japanese subtitles. Dummied Out data for the later The Blazing Blade shows that at one point they intended to do the same for it, except it... wasn't well-written.
  • The Japanese logo of Fire Emblem: Awakening has a vague outline of the game's plot described in English underneath the stylized and very Japanese title. It's good enough that the actual English logo doesn't change it at all.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The song "Eyes on Me", from Final Fantasy VIII, is sung with good English pronunciation by Chinese diva Faye Wong (and is actually used for part of the ending medley). The grammar leaves something to be desired, however ("Whenever sang my songs"/"Whenever said my words" and "If frown is shown then"/"Just reach me out then").
  • The ending theme of Final Fantasy IX, "Melodies of Life", is performed in both Japanese (for the Japanese version) and very good English (for every other version) by Emiko Shiratori.
  • Final Fantasy XII has "Kiss Me Goodbye" sung in English and Japanese by Angela Aki.
• The intro of Mega Man X includes a warning from Dr. Light not to disturb the capsule X is kept in until his 30-year diagnostics are complete, with an explanation of what X is, and why the diagnostics are being performed. In the original Japanese release, this is written entirely in fully understandable and 100% mistake-free English, with Japanese subtitles running along the bottom. Consequently, when it was released in North America, Europe and Australia, literally nothing was changed about it apart from removing the subtitles and spelling Dr. Light's name differently.
• One of Gradius Gaiden's attract demos, a Star Wars-like narrative, is narrated by an announcer speaking perfect English, though he puts unusually high emphasis on the "di" in "Gradius".
  • The other voice samples have good grammar and speech too, and not just in Gaiden, in fact all the way back to Salamander, the first Gradius game with English voices. In the Japanese too.
• A large number of Konami original songs in DanceDanceRevolution, beatmania, and other Bemani games have perfect English—Naoki's songs ("Dynamite Rave" and "Love Again Tonight" just to name a couple), in particular, have a lot of natural-sounding English thanks to the addition of Western vocalists such as Paula Terry. Some other English-language songs, like "Moon", "Roulette" and other songs sung by Erika Mochizuki, on the other hand...
  • And for yet another "on the other hand" case... there's "Gold Rush".
  • The announcers from DanceDanceRevolution and Dance ManiaX speak in perfect English. Those of other Bemani games, not so much, with a few exceptions (the announcers from Pop'n Music 16 and beatmania IIDX 16 are two such exceptions).
• Raiden and Eagle's lines in Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium sound, like, really good. Hell, Raiden's "ICHIBAN!" actually sounds like a non-native Japanese speaker is saying it. It's even grammatically correct and totally in character for him. "SAY YOUR PRAYERS, WIMP!"
• Billy Kane in the Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters series sometimes speaks good English. While he gets the occasional line like "I wish I could tear him apart!", most of his intros feature him saying generic things like "HEY HEY HEY!"
• Tekken makes almost everyone (except those two from Brazil) speak their countries most widely spoken language, often times having two characters speak to each other in different languages at the same time. So it was surprising to hear Jin speak English in Tekken 4.
  • As of Tag Tournament 2, Christie and Eddy speak their appropriate Portuguese, Miguel his Spanish, Leo her German, and Lili wrongly accented French.
  • Lei Wulong is also another example. Despite being Hong Kong, he's an International Super Police, so he's fluent in many languages, English included. The surprise is that he constantly speaks English voiced by a Japanese guy (Hiroya Ishimaru, the official dub voice of Jackie Chan, the man Lei is based off on)
• All spoken dialogue in the game Sin and Punishment is in Surprisingly Good English, only marred by the somewhat muddy audio quality caused by the game originally being cartridge-based.
  • Justified by the little fact that the game was always developed with an American release in mind, a release that was only canceled due to the Nintendo 64's pre-death decline stateside (the Virtual Console release proves that people would have bought it if it was released before).
• Persona:
  • The character Eriko from the Japanese version of the original Persona spent some time studying abroad in America. As such, she periodically slips into English that, although technically gratuitous, is generally well-formed and sensical. This is likely due to Atlus' willingness to do the research (this multilingual aspect was entirely dropped, rather than shifted to another language, for her counterpart Ellen in the American localization).
  • The lyrics of Persona 4's soundtrack are almost completely in English, much of it decently grammatical. Barring a few lines (The "My Life" in "I reach out to the truth of my life", for instance), they're pronounced relatively fine, if a little hard to make out due to speed.
  • Persona 3 has a fair deal of Engrish in its soundtrack's lyrics, but the rapping segments are in fairly good idiomatic English (accounting for the intentionally loose grammar), since rapper Lotus Juice spent most of his formative years in the United States.
  • Starting with Persona 4: Arena, the series's main English lyricist is Benjamin Franklin (obviously not that one), a native English speaker. Since then, the English lyrics been completely fluent and idiomatic, as well as more clearly thematically resonant, even though the actual pronunciation by the native Japanese singers is still sometimes less than stellar.
  • Persona 5's UI is filled with English text, which surprisingly enough is completely accurate and totally understandable, to the point that non-Japanese speakers can easily navigate menus even if they're playing the Japanese version. As with the previous Persona games, the game also has half a dozen songs with English lyrics ("Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There", "Life Will Change", "Last Surprise", "Rivers in the Desert" and "Beneath the Mask"), all of which have benefited from the Benjamin Franklin treatment.
• The main poster◊ for the (currently Japan-only) Pokémon merch line "My Rentorar's Story", revolving around the Shinx evolutionary line, contains a short story about a Shinx told in grammatically correct English.
• The soundtrack for Space Invaders Extreme features English narration telling the story of the invasion between each group of songs. It doesn't explain much, but it's voiced perfectly.
  • Both SIE announcers too, especially the one for Space Invaders Extreme 2.
• In Punch-Out!! for the Wii, every character speaks their native tongue (except for the voiceless ones, like King Hippo) and is incredibly spot-on. Next Level gets bonus points for giving Great Tiger fluent Hindi. Not only is there Surprisingly Good Hindi, but also Turkish, Russian, Spanish, French, Japanese, and German.
• In the Exit (2005) games (PSP, DS, Xbox 360), just about everything was in Surprisingly Good English, from the voice acting (more hits than misses), to the menus and text bubbles that show up in-game.
• Silent Scope: Bone-Eater has never been released outside of Japan, but features grammatically correct English subtitles.
• Capcom's X-Men vs. Street Fighter has Surprisingly Good English from all the Marvel characters - thanks primarily to the voice actors of the 90's X-Men animated series.
• No More Heroes is a great example of this, as almost all the voiceovers are performed by professional American voice actors, the game features several songs in English, and even the in-game billboards are written in perfect (and oftentimes downright funny) English. And a number of minor characters in the game (namely the Part-Time Job guy, the clerk at K-Entertainment, the owner of Area 51, and Thunder Ryu) speak in thickly accented Engrish. Note that this is a game unafraid to leave its players scratching their heads.
• Capcom has a tendency to do this with their games when voice acting is involved. Viewtiful Joe and Resident Evil both have English voice acting, even in Japan. Viewtiful Joe's is excellent. Resident Evil's is... not so much. It improves by the fourth game though. This also hods true for the Devil May Cry series. It’s easy to mistake it for a dub. Granted, the voice acting is very cheesy, especially in Dante's case, but anyone who plays it soon realizes that's practically the entire point of the series.
• Nearly half the dialogue in Siren: Blood Curse is in Surprisingly Good English. The rest is either in Japanese, or intentionally heavily-accented English.
• Even though it was a Japan-only title at the time, the entire game Pulseman is spoken in good English (even by characters that are meant to be Japanese). While the English is correct, it doesn't technically match what it should be ("Water will destroy Pulse Man" doesn't mean Super Drowning Skills).
• EZ2DJ and DJMax have the song artist Ruby Tuesday, which have some good English, if not cheesy, lyrics for Korean games.
• In DJMAX Portable Clazziquai Edition, there is a bonus behind-the-scenes video about the video for the song "Dark Envy". The protagonist's actor answers the interview questions in fluent English with, oddly enough, no subtitles in Korean.
• Guilty Gear is a mixed bag, for the characters that actually have moves with English names. Somewhat ironically, Chipp has fairly good English pronunciation... and instead yells gratuitous Japanese because he's a wannabe ninja. Also, the announcers from XX onward speak perfect English, justified that they are Americans (Gregory Payne in XX to Slash and Neil Moody in Accent Core).
• Genetos. All of the English was translated by (a) Japanese speaker(s), and with the exception of a few odd word choices, could be understood by a kid who doesn't know what Japanese is. The English help HTML file even has a slightly heartwarming message from the author asking if "his friends overseas" would send him an email to correct any mistakes in the manual and the game. Of course, make sure you see the little prompt in the game's menu screens that says L SHIFT = English.
• The very first Gundam: The Battle Master game had only one voiced segment in the entire game and it's the very intro itself, spoken in complete fluent English (with Japanese text) by an American narrator, the very same one who doubles as the announcer.
• Steins;Gate 0 has the character Doctor Leskinen, whose speech in English near the start of the game is actually pretty good and doesn't have awkward pauses between words. It’s all the weirder by this speech being narrated over by a native Japanese speaker translating it (and thus being harder to understand), and by his later English dialogue having those issues despite no translation.
• Super Mario Sunshine has English voice acting in all its cutscenes in all languages, and the only dialogue that needed to be re-recorded for the English release was some lines by the Pianta prosecutor at the beginning.
• In Super Smash Bros. Melee, all characters (except Jigglypuff) retain the same voice actors between the Japanese and English versions. This results in some characters speaking in Gratuitous English due to their Japanese voice actors, but Princess Peach is voiced by an American actress and speaks in perfect English. The same applies to Mario and Luigi, although they have heavy Italian accents and only speak in very short stock phrases. In Brawl, while there are a lot more characters with different voice actors depending on version than in Melee, Captain Falcon, Zero Suit Samus, and Peach retain the same voice actors between the Japanese and English versions and speak very perfectly passable English, as do a number of Assist Trophies. Mario, Luigi, and Wario all have heavy Italian accents, but this makes sense.
• In the PaRappa the Rapper video game series, including Um Jammer Lammy, all characters speak, rap, and sing in surprisingly good English, even though the video game series itself was made in Japan. (By the way, isn't it odd that future Grey's Anatomy star Sara Ramirez voiced Lammy among the list of the games' American voice actors?) This would seem to be because the games use American voice talent (though, funnily enough, Ramirez is Mexican), but this is with one exception: Ryu Watabe voices Chop Chop Master Onion, Joe Chin, Ma-san and Captain Fussenpepper, who, while sounding appropriately Engrishy for Onion, sounds like the stereotypical hillbilly for the Captain. And it is this man who wrote the lyrics for every song in the entire series, which, aside from the occasional odd wording and bizarre spellings for certain onomatopoeias, leave no trace that this was ever devised by a Japanese person.
• In Tengai Makyou Fuun Kabuki-Den, when Kabuki travels to London to try to rescue Okuni there, the British people he finds when he lands in England at London's customs speak in perfect English. Zeami (his partner) then uses a translating spell so that Kabuki can speak and understand English, which renders all of the text and dialogue into Japanese for the players' benefit.
• Tales of Vesperia has its theme "Ring a Bell/Kane wo Narashite" sung in perfect English/Japanese by Bonnie Pink.
  • Same happens with Mamoritai/White Wishes, the opening of Tales of Graces, sung in English/Japanese by Boa.
• The X Men arcade game from Konami has an odd mixture of both this and the "other" kind, with the latter instances being the most famous (at least among gamers).
• Sunsoft's Galaxy Fight features the than fighting game standard Scary Black Man Golden Done, voiced by an actual native English speaking black man. His theme song (as horribly cheesy as it is), a lot of the incidental flavor text, and a few ambient announcements made during one stage are all fluently spoken/rapped and/or grammatically correct, as well.
• The very well-known incantation for Archer's Unlimited Blade Works in Fate/EXTRA. The quality is such that some even believed the whole of the game's Japanese audio had been translated.
• Baraduke has an international version named Alien Sector which is pretty unnecessary, since the whole game had all texts in mostly correct English anyway. Even the lone bit of digitized audio ("I'm Your Friend!!", spoken by the first Paccet at the beginning) sounds good, with only a little hint of Japanese accent due to being done by Junko Ozawa, a female sound composer at Namco.
• The vocal songs in the Sega Saturn game Clockwork Knight were written and sung by Japanese people, and they came out decently enough. Special mention goes to the Ending Theme, "A Lullaby", which, save for the line "when loneliness bring you down", is sung in near-perfect English.
• A lot of the written English in Super Robot Wars is nearly perfect, even in the anime version - just try taking a look at the Alt Eisen and Exbein Boxer's screens sometimes. In Inspector, if you take a closer look, the Exbein's tiniest and most illegible text actually DOES read Weapon Selector (the creators didn't slack off, even on things people can't see well).
  • Granted, Banpresto tends to use several different languages in the franchise, from German to Spanish and most of it tends to be correct. So they probably just do their research well.
• FromSoftware's Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne have no Japanese voice track; the English dub is the original. The Japanese releases still have Japanese subtitles, though.
• All jubeat arcade games have a tutorial with announcer commentary in perfect English, despite the game being released primarily for the Japanese market.
• Though most foreign shipgirls in KanColle (as well as Kongou, who despite being the personification of a Japanese ship was born in England) tend to use Gratuitous Foreign Language, British battleship Warspite's English is nearly flawless, with her only mistake being her odd pronunciation of "Admiral". She even goes so far as to use a proper British accent whenever she speaks English.
• Rhythm Heaven:
  • While the first game was exclusive to Japan, the English lyrics used in its Karate Man stage are perfectly pronounced, though with some odd exaggerations in pitch. On the other hand, while the lyrics are grammatically correct, they don't really form a coherent whole.
    "Hey, baby, how's it going? This beat is non-stop! Hey, baby, listen to my phrase. I can give you a sense of rhythm."
  • The song "I'm a Lady Now" from the Honeybee Remix in Megamix is in meaningful English even in the Japanese version. The singer, a then-five-year-old Japanese girl going by Hotzmic, is fluent in English, though not a native speaker. As a result, it was the only song to remain intact for the game's English dub, while the rest had their lyrics removed. (More on the song itself under Music.)
• Most of the lyrics in The World Ends with You's soundtrack are written in perfectly fluent and idiomatic English. Though a few of the singers are obviously less than fluent, many of them are actually native English speakers from the UK and the USA, and even some of the native Japanese singers have excellent pronunciation.
• Super Metroid: Samus' narration in the game's intro is in English even if the game's language is set to Japanese, with Japanese subtitles at the bottom of the screen to translate it. Setting the language to English just removes the subtitles.
• Ensemble Stars! has something of a meta example. The character of Tsukasa is meant to be fluent in English, and often peppers Gratuitous English into his speech, but his pronunciation is not very good (he sounds as though he's perpetually clenching his teeth). However, the voice actor for Kaoru actually is fluent in English due to having grown up partially in America, as demonstrated in this famous (and much memed) video of him introducing himself in-character in English. Sadly, it doesn't fit Kaoru's backstory for him to know English, so it's never come up in-universe.
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has an English Opening Crawl, even in the Japanese version. (With provided Japanese subtitles, similar to how the opening of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood was in German). It's written in perfect English, though it is obviously translated from Japanese since parts of it are phrased strangely. (For instance, instead of ending with "and none can say who will triumph", it says that perhaps only the moon knows who will be victorious). Strangely enough it was completely rewritten for each of the English releases.
• Yakuza 3 features an American as one of the principle villains, voiced by an actual American VA (Charles Glover) among the predominantly Japanese voice cast. Said villain speaks perfect English and is somehow able to hold a conversation with Kiryu who only speaks Japanese. Additionally, the English spoken by the Japanese Joji and Yoshitaka, while heavily accented, is quite grammatically sound and perfectly comprehensible, even without subtitles.
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon, in its original Japanese voiceover, has a substory open with an American tourist asking Ichiban how to get to a train station, delivered with a clean, natural-sounding American accent. This works to contrast against a Japanese passerby who studied English belting out the directions with comedically hammy, engrish-y delivery.
• The obscure Playstation 1 game Metaphlist arguably only redeeming factor, where for an obscure Japanese shooter game (and a mediocre one even for the time), all the plot narration especially the beginning Framing Device is voiced in pitch-perfect English with native speaker.
• Minna de Puyo Puyo includes the option to play through the game with English text (which wasn't reused when the game was published overseas as Puyo Pop). The English in this version is very good, and is even more faithful to the characters' personalities than in the overseas version (Arle's Jerkass Ball and Deadpan Snarker tendencies are more clear). The only noticeable mistake was translating "Batankyuu!" as "Baba Bing!" instead of "Oh no!", as it's the case on all other games in the series that have English translations.
• Most of the dialogue in Star Fox is just gibberish with subtitles, but the emergency announcement during the initial launch sequence and final radio call during the end credits are both fully voice acted with fairly good English, even in the Japanese version. The only slip-up is that Fox's actor says "Corneria" a bit like "Cornelia" once, but he gets it right the second time.
• The Great Ace Attorney duology, set mostly in Victorian London, has a lot of grammatically- and period-correct English text in signs and such. Longtime Ace Attorney English localization director Janet Hsu was brought on board to ensure the English text was accurate.

Web Video

• The 15 Experience: Despite being a French production taking place in Paris, the characters all speak perfect English, albeit with French accents.
• The Gumdrops introduces Sadia slamming the door in Pete's face apparently only understanding Spanish. The very next scene reveals she speaks perfect English, knew fully well what he was saying and was just trolling him for being late.
• Various girls in hololive qualify.
  • The two most notable on the Japanese side are Akai Haato (Haachama) and Kiryu Coco. Haachama went to school in Australia and is capable of holding a conversation in English, while Coco was born in America and natively speaks English.
  • Pretty much every member of the Indonesian group can speak fluent English and more. It probably has something to do with English being one of the most popular foreign language among Indonesian youth. Some of the more notable examples would be Anya Melfissa and Vestia Zeta who are famous for their native-level fluency in Japanese and English respectively.
  • Though she's part of Hololive English, Takanashi Kiara qualifies as she was born in Austria and natively speaks German. She's also fluent in Japanese.
  • Over at holostars, Kishido Temma takes his English learning very seriously, even translating his own clips into English in one such instance. Arurandeisu is also surprisingly good at English, even managing to understand jokes that are difficult to translate, and is usually the one to host collabs with Holostars EN.
  • Oozora Subaru once partook in a foreign-exchange program in Canada, allowing her to get a decent grasp of English. It somewhat degraded since, but has relearned it and even managed to do an English collab with Kiara and Reine.
  • Lui Takane surprised everyone with an amazing grasp of English, being able to complete full sentences and even use some slang. Her English-learning stream with Calli showed her capabilities even more.
  • Chloe Sakamata's grasp of English is not too bad, given how she largely avoids adding paragogic dummy vowels to her English. Her English is good enough that she once evaded having to explain some jokes involving Koyori and a Khezu by replying in English, saying: "Oh sorry I can't speak Japanese." Her Duolingo stream also shows her ability to understand English sentences and translate them into Japanese and back, and the times she has to read the English sentences aloud, Duolingo occasionally passes her before she even finishes, much to her annoyance. It helps that Chloe brushed up on her English before debuting.
  • From the DEV_IS side, Ichijou Ririka also has a good grasp of English due to her brief study overseas following her father's job and has expressed interest in increasing her fluency so she can communicate with her overseas audiences as well as EN and ID senpais. This enables her to do all-English collab streams with Bijou and Kiara.
• Lumi is a Finnish VTuber who speaks English with a near flawless American accent. During a question-and-answer video, one of her viewers even asked if she really was from Finland. She replied yes, and while she could speak English with a strong Finnish accent, she chose not to.
• Pikamee Amano of VOMS Project speaks fluent and grammatically sound English as well as Japanese. Most of her streams have English peppered in, and she also holds primarily English streams as well.
• VShojo
  • Matara Kan stated in a stream that she learned Ukrainian, Russian, French, and English, in that order, making her an EAL speaker.
  • Kson and Henya the Genius also have a very good grasp of English, often blending her streams with English and Japanese (in Kson's case, she's American-born and fully bilingual, so she has a native speaker's grasp of both English and Japanese).

Western Animation

• In the early French computer-animated short Computer-Home, from 1989, the Mega Fright video game taunts the player when they power it on. In both the French original and the English dub, it is spoken in correct but noticeably-accented English:
  "Hello, Starfighter! Welcome aboard the shuttle! Are you ready to be scared to death? Huhahahahahahahahaha!"
• In-universe example in the Pinky and the Brain episode "Brainania": Brain addresses the islanders in some sort of South Pacific pidgin English, only for their chief to reply:
  (heavy Australian accent) "G'day, mate. D'you speak English?"
• Rugrats - Kira's English is perfect, which is very impressive for a Japanese woman who spent a good portion of her life working in France. Although since she was in a very prominent position when she was introduced (as Coco's assistant) she would be expected to know English for business reasons. She never appears to run into a language barrier with Chaz.

Real Life

• Perhaps YOU, dear troper, should you not come from the Anglosphere. Bonus points if you can even tell the difference between various English variations (American, British, etc.).
• Japanese Actor Kei Hosogai. Many Gokaiger fans outside of Japan were surprised by his fluent unaccented English. Many Power Rangers fans upon learning this are hoping he would reprise his role of Basco on Power Rangers. Though when one learns he spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Seattle and Hawaii, it's not surprising.
• Actor James Hong is fluent in English, being a Minnesota native. For most of his acting roles, he's actually had to fake a Chinese accent (not always successfully).
• Noriyuki "Pat" Morita was born and raised in California and spoke perfect English, faking a Japanese-sounding accent for his most famous roles in Happy Days and The Karate Kid.
  • When initially casting for The Karate Kid, he was rejected for not "sounding Japanese enough". So he went to an elderly relative, who immigrated from the old country, and brushed up on his "authentic Japanese" accent and mannerisms. His second casting call was much better received. The accent he used in the film was one he learned from his stunt double Fumio Demura, who actually was a recent immigrant from Okinawa.
  • He mentioned in an interview that one of the reasons he learned how to do this, and part of why he never saw it as being offensive, is that when he worked in a Chinese resturant as a part time job once he found the recent immigrant cooks there were actually unable to understand natively accented English very well and he needed to speak to them in the funny Engrishy accent in order to help them understand what he was telling them the customers were ordering. So as far as Morita saw it he was helping Asian immigrants in the audience who might be drawn to his character's understand them better.
• Comedian Henry Cho is an interesting variant. Being a lifelong resident of Knoxville, Cho is a Korean-American with a completely natural Tennessee accent, which he freely permits is okay to find funny.
• Rie fu was raised in the U.S. state of Maryland and attended college in English, so much of the English in her music sounds like actual English.
• Yukio Mishima spoke really eloquent and excellent English. Even more impressive as he taught himself the language - as a student in post-WW2 Japan, Japanese students weren't permitted to study abroad, and so he listened to tapes of English speakers every day. He could apparently speak German and Chinese as well.
• Utada Hikaru is bilingually fluent in Japanese and English — in fact, their debut album, released in Japan was made up exclusively of English songs. It helps that they were raised in New York.
• Mari Iijima, of Macross fame, is fluent in English (though she still speaks with a noticeable accent). Her language skills were good enough for ADV to ask her to reprise her iconic role for their English release of Macross.
• Yūko Gotō is very proficient in English. Directors in Japan will occasionally take advantage of this, as did Bandai USA during their Haruhi promotions.
• Members of small nations who don't share their language with any other countries, such as Scandinavians and in particular, the Dutch. It is because foreigners seldom bother to learn their languages, so they are taught English (and other foreign languages) at school, and have a large incentive to remember it because not doing so means being cut off from a lot of international communication and culture.
  • It's also because their languages are closest to English in terms of verb structure and in the case of Dutch, has some of the same words. In Scandinavia, movies are shown in English with subtitles, and much of the music people listen to is done by English-speaking artists, and the Swedish musicians often have perfect English as well. Many people you try to talk to in their language will realise you are a native English speaker and speak to you in it instead.
    • English, Dutch, and German are all in the same language branch (West Germanic) and are thus very closely related. If you speak one of these, the other two will be MUCH eaiser for you to learn than any other foreign language. The Scandinavian languages are a different (but still fairly closely related) branch called North Germanic. Not quite as closely related to English as the other West Germanic languages, but still within the same general family.
    • Old Norse (the ancestor of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian) had a strong influence on Old English (back when those languages were still very similar to each other), so the similarity of the Scandinavian languages to English is greater than you would expect just by looking at the family tree of Germanic languages.
  • Israel is also a notable case. Like many other countries formerly ruled by the British and currently heavily exposed to American media (which it never dubs unless aimed at children), most Israelis now speak at least enough English to get by, and a tourist never has to ask anyone if they speak English. For a while, there was a generation of Israelis who learned English through the European Cartoon Network (the only kids channel in English with no dub and no subtitles) developing a fairly impressive accent, but nowadays it no longer airs in Israel.
  • Many people in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) speak fluent English, due to British influence, to the point where it is a national language.
    • Exploited by many tech support scammers, particularly in India, who send out fraudulent calls to people in Western countries to trick them out of their money (sadly overshadowing call centers that are legitimate). One such operation even trained its scammers to speak in American accents while impersonating US law enforcement agencies.
  • The same would go for many African countries, which would surprise many Westerners.
• The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, though born in Japan, has lived in England for most of his life (since age 5, to be exact) and it shows.
• Similarly, Japanese tennis superstar Naomi Osaka has lived in the U.S. since she was 3, and it shows every bit as much.
• Korean singer PSY went to college in America, and is fluent in English, which helped a lot during the "Gangnam Style" craze as he could easily appear on American talk shows.
• Japanese idol Ayaka Komatsu speaks and sings very good English. Amusingly enough, the character she played in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon is Minako Aino, who is another example of this trope.
• AKB48 member Sayaka Akimoto is also great at English. Her Filipino Mother probably taught her the language well.
  • Played straight with Rina Hirata as she was raised in Arizona for most of her life and she was the main English announcer for AKB48 when they had their concert in Washington DC. She also uploads 30 second English lessons on her Google+ on a regular basis.
• Alexander Skarsgård. Although he has an noticeably thick Swedish accent while he speaks off-the-cuff, when he has time to prepare, he speaks American English well enough to play All-Americans like Brad Colbert in Generation Kill, in spite of being well into his twenties when he moved to the U.S. to pursue his acting career.
• Many other Nordic actors are so good at English that they'll frequently play American or British characters; such as Mads Mikkelsen.
• Tiffany and Jessica of the Korean girl group Girls' Generation were born in America. They've surprised more than one American morning show host who assumed all members are native Korean.
  • This trope is actually fairly common throughout the whole world of Korean Pop Music, due to the near constant influx of Korean-Americans choosing Korea as where they'll try their luck at a music career. From idol groups to hip-hop, it's not at all unusual to run into an American or two while looking into Korean music.
• It might not be obvious from the way he chews out other developers on the Linux kernel mailing list, but Linus Torvalds is actually a native Swedish speaker, being part of Finland's native Swedish-speaking minority. Linux's success has been partly attributed to Torvalds' fluency in English making him able to attract developers over the Internet.
• As shown by Linux, English is, for better or for worse, the lingua franca of computer science. Programming language documentation is in English and very rarely translated, as are forums and IRC channels. This means that there's a real incentive for developers to acquire a reasonably good command of English, even in countries where most people don't bother.
• Kotaro Uchikoshi, the writer for the Infinity and Zero Escape series, claims his English is not that good but is competent enough to communicate with fans on Twitter and Facebook. He is also known to make ridiculously complex English anagrams used as important plot points in his games.
• Charlize Theron's first language is Afrikaans and she learned English with an American accent. As a result people unfamiliar with her just assume she's American - and she rarely plays non-Americans.
• Anna May Wong ran into this in her time during the 1920s. As someone who got famous during the Silent Era of films, people assumed she either only spoke Chinese or Engrish. But as she was a third-generation Chinese American who grew up in San Francisco her English was perfect. She even got vocal training at Cambridge when she worked on the stage in England.
• Nancy Kwan likewise ran into this merged with I Am Not Spock thanks to The World of Suzie Wong, where she played a poor prostitute who spoke in broken English. In contrast to her character, Nancy had a privileged Eurasian upbringing and spoke perfect English.
• Gail Kim says that when she was in WWE, people from the creative team kept asking if she spoke any Korean and seemed exasperated when she replied no because she was born and raised in Canada. She suspected they may have wanted her to do a gimmick similar to Tajiri.
• Alexis Bledel surprises many people when she reveals that her first language is actually Spanish, and that she's of Mexican and Argentinian descent (as she is quite pale skinned).
• Gong Li in fact knew no English when she starred in Memoirs of a Geisha and had to learn her lines phonetically. And she ended up getting the strongest reviews out of the cast. Ziyi Zhang also had to learn English for the film. These days, Gong Li is actually fluent in English but prefers to only use it for acting, and thus usually gives interviews in Chinese.
• Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung speaks perfect English with a London accent because she moved with her family to London at the age of eight and lived there for the next ten years.
• Most non-Anglophone heads of state at least speak passing English. At lot of this comes from them having been educated at American and/or British universities. The only leaders of top-twenty GDP economies who don't speak a lick of English are Chinese premier Xi Jinping, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, despite coming from a country with high English-speaking rates, isn't quite fluent because she grew up in communist East Germany where it was't taught as prominently. Late Japanese PM Shinzo Abe and current French President Emmanuel Macron also aren't 100% fluent but have given speeches to the US Congress in English. Japan's current PM Fumio Kishida is at least as fluent as his predecessor; see this video for an extended example. (He spent a decent chunk of his childhood in the US.) Indian PM Narendra Modi speaks English fluently and has done rallies in the US and given speeches to the Australian Parliament. The three most recent Prime Ministers of Israel—current PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his two immediate predecessors Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett—may be the best at English. Netanyahu spent the the majority of his time between his high school years and his early thirties living in America; Lapid split his childhood between Tel Aviv and London; and Bennett, though born and mostly raised in Israel, grew up speaking English at home as the son of immigrants from the San Francisco Bay Area, giving him a Northern California-influenced accent. Netanyahu has even held staff meetings in English, and a critical April 2021 meeting between him and Bennett during the process of forming a new government was held in English.
• Hideki Kamiya is notorious for having a foul mouth whenever he interacts with English speakers on Twitter. When asked about speaking English in public, he feels too embarrassed as he thinks it isn't good enough. From what English is shown in this Mega64 clip, he sounds like a natural.
• Shuu Uchida was born and grew up in Sydney, Australia. Her English fluency really shows through her voice portrayals of Ark Royal, Gambier Bay, Perth, and Warspite in KanColle and Mia Taylor in Love Live!. She also has an entire podcast session in Trash Taste where her interview was held in English.
• Eva Green is often assumed to be British, due to how her accent has changed since working in Hollywood. She's actually French, but went to an English-speaking school at fourteen.
• Miyoshi Umeki often had to deal with people assuming she spoke in the same pidgin English as her character in The Courtship of Eddie's Father, and that itself was something she would rather not have done, but only did it because she needed the work. Japanese was her first language, but she got her start singing American pop songs in a revue, so her English was pretty good by the time she moved to Hollywood the previous decade.
• Both Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II were fluent English speakers, which perhaps isn't surprising as both were grandsons of Queen Victoria. Nicholas actually preferred to use English in his daily life as it was his wife's first language, whereas most other Russian nobles of the era preferred French. Wilhelm was famous for speaking English with a strong Received Pronunciation accent, though one British interviewer knew he wasn't a native speaker by his use of arcane, Victorian-era slang he had learned as a child.

Non-English languages:

Anime & Manga

• Accel World dural / Magisa Garden has surprisingly good Russian from Lilya, in part due to its editor being Russian.
• Takahiro Sakurai as Richard in The Case Files of Jeweler Richard worked incredibly hard to be able to speak not only English for Omniglot Richard, but French, Arabic, and others. His pronunciation has been lauded.
• Johnny Yong Bosch as Izaya in Durarara!! speaks a couple lines of Russian rather fluently.
• The "Brothers" song from Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) is sung in more or less decent Russian.
  • This is because some Russians are singing the song.
• The Mandarin Chinese spoken in episodes 3 and 4 of Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid is actually pretty good, though somewhat lacking in the tension expected from the setting.
• In Giant Killing, the French spoken by Mr. Blanc is grammatically correct, and his voice actor Yukata Nakano does a very good work, even pronouncing the "r" and the "l" right. Aside from a rare Japanese accent slipping here and there, the only thing to betray him is the intonation.
• Gosick is chock-full of perfectly written French, including accentuated character and adequate idiotisms. The English parts of the ending are also very well pronounced.
• Grand Blue: Upon taking the train home for the summer holidays, Iori, Kouhei and Chisa encounter two foreigners who don't speak a lick of Japanese. Their dialogue consists entirely of German.
• One of the Glaciesan pilots in Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing, Viola, speaks fluent Russian, courtesy of her native Russian voice actor, Jenya Davidyuk.
• The quality of various foreign languages in Love Live! are quickly increasing as multilingual characters and voice actresses are introduced:
  • Mia Taylor, who is fluent in English besides Japanese. Though her English accent is more closer to Australian rather than proper American.
  • Keke Tang, Mandarin courtesy of her native Shanghainese voice actress; and
  • Lanzhu Zhong, Cantonese plus Mandarin, English and Japanese. Her first image song flexes all four of her languages.
• Moonlight Mile: The error screen of the Russian space simulator doesn't totally cornhole the Russian language like always in an animé (only one violation of the capitalization rules and being stylistically not quite OK).
• Asuka Langley Soryu from the English dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion peppers her speech with some amazing German, courtesy of Tiffany Grant (contrast with the Gratuitous German in the Japanese version).
• Nichijou: Surprisingly Good Malay or Indonesian:
  • Yuuko and Mai were greeting each other in Malay/Indonesian in Episode 1. Not only what they are saying is correct (including Yuuko correcting Mai that she should have replied "Selamat pagi" (Good morning) just like what she said earlier, not "Selamat malam"(Good night)) but their pronunciation was good as well.
  • "Selamat tinggal" also. Meaning "Farewell".
  • There is speculation about more surprisingly good Malay/Indonesian. It's the Kuma (bear) joke. When Mio's sister takes the money from Mio, she says "Aru toki wa kuma, soshite aru toki mo ku-ma", which means "Sometimes I'm a bear, sometimes I'm a be-ar". In Malay/Indonesian, kuma (bear) is translated "beruang". It could be separated into ber-uang (ku-ma), which means "has money". If it's intentional, the author speaks surprisingly good Malay/Indonesian, to the point that he can make Malay/Indonesian puns that possibly no Japanese person will understand.
  • There's also a few "Gamelan" posters here and there. A gamelan is a traditional Indonesian and Malaysian instrument
• The Nodame Cantabile second season's ending is sung in perfect, unaccented French. As the singer uses colloquial French with a Paris accent she is definitely native.
• Sound of the Sky: Minor character Aisha speaks more or less OK Roman (actually German), though with a crazy accent.
• In Tokyo Godfathers, the Hispanic immigrant mother (and the boy who gets her involved) only speaks Spanish, and it is Surprisingly Good!
• One of the ending themes in Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase is sung in Surprisingly Good French!
• In Umi Monogatari, the shrine maiden's song is sung in the Amami language, which is on the verge of becoming an extinct language and is officially considered a Japanese dialect.
• Wolf's Rain has Surprisingly Good Russian. The announcement on the railway station is spoken in flawless Russian, without any accent.
• The manga Gantz has minor characters with lines in several foreing languages written in correct grammar, including English, German, Italian and Portuguese.
• Nonna and Clara in Girls und Panzer der Film tend to speak very fluent Russian when shown together, much to Katyusha's chagrin. Justified on two counts: Nonna's seiyuu, being a massive Russophile, studied Russian previously; while Clara's seiyuu is Russian.
• The ending theme of Fantastic Children, 'Mizu no Madoromi', has two versions- the normal Japanese version used in the present-day episodes, and an alternate version used in the episodes that flashback to Greecia, sung in Russian. Both versions are sung by the late Ol'ga Vital'evna Jakovleva, better known as Origa. The Russian version is, if anything, even more beautiful than the superlative Japanese version, possibly because it was originally written in Russian before being translated into Japanese (the Russian version's lyrics rhyme noticeably better).
• Origa's beautiful Russian singing gave her quite a notable career in anime soundtracks, with her most famous performances probably being 'Inner Universe' and 'Rise', the openings of the first and second seasons of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

Comic Strip

• The World of Lily Wong: After Lily tells Erma to stop speaking Tagalog as it would confuse Crystal this. Erma tells Crystal this:
  Erma: Achtung! wir müßen nur Deutsch, Lateinisch oder Russisch sprechen.
  Crystal: я голоден
  Stuart: Next time we hire a maid without a Master's Degree!

Fan Works

• Zany To The Max provides multiple languages well spoken by Sikko, most notably Finnish.
• This happens a lot in the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal where the various Discworld languages tend to be one-for-one representations of their Earth equivalents. The author is assisted by fans who are native-speakers who have occassionally suggested corrections and better idioms. Creating "South African" characters actually incentivised him to really start learning Afrikaans. And by extension, Dutch.

Films — Live-Action

• Black Widow's interrogation scene in the beginning of The Avengers has the dialogue in perfect Russian, although the Russian general has a weak but noticeable foreign accent (due to the actor being Polish) and Natasha herself speaks with a very heavy American accent. The text on the billboard briefly seen outside the building appears to be gibberish, though.
• At the beginning of the 1931 Dracula film, Transylvanian peasants are heard speaking in perfectly authentic Hungarian (even though what they say is not subtitled, so it could've been foreign-sounding nonsense). It probably helped that Bela Lugosi was a native Hungarian.
• Brad Pitt's character "Wardaddy" Collier from Fury (2014) is clearly not a native speaker of German, but it's not as if he's supposed to be. His command of German is both good and intelligible throughout, and a comment by one of his comrades that Wardaddy spoke German before he ever fought against the Nazis in World War II led fans to speculate on whether Wardaddy is the son of a German immigrant to the United States who learned at least some German at home as a child, and perhaps if this background feeds into his absolute loathing of the Nazi Party.
• The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a Korean remake of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly IN 1930s MANCHURIA!, features (as one would expect from the setting), a lot of Mandarin and Japanese, as well as Korean (the three central characters are all Korean exiles). The Mandarin and Japanese are surprisingly good.
• In The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes Madame Petrova speaks perfect Russian. To be expected, because she was played by Tamara Toumanova, an immigrant from Russia. Event her slight accent (she was half-Georgian) was perfectly plausible for that time and her social standing in-character.
• In The Fighting Seabees one of the construction crew workers sings a verse of "We are" song and later prays in perfect Russian.
• Entire cast of How I Unleashed World War II consists of Polish actors. Yet there are dialogues in nine foreign languages and they are all perfectly performed. Bonus points for being made in Polish People's Republic, where knowing foreign languages other than Russian was frowned upon. The only exception might be the Austrian farmer, who speaks in fluent German, but doesn't have a highly distinctive Tyrolian accent, but that's just nit-picking.
• Amrish Puri, who plays Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, is really a Bollywood actor, which leads to some great bilingual bonus lines: "Maaro, maaro, sewer ko! Chamdi nocho, peelo khoon!" ("Beat the pig, rend his flesh, drink his blood!")
• At the beginning of Les Misérables (2012), Javert hands to Valjean a "badge of shame" that identifies him as a dangerous criminal and that he shall carry with him until he dies. While only shown for a brief moment, the document itself is extremely well written. It is also wrong, as it identifies Valjean as a 1.6 meters tall (Hugh Jackman is 1.9) green-eyed (Jackman's eyes are brown) freed convict.
• In Mad Max: Fury Road, the Buzzards (the gang in the porcupine-looking spiked cars) communicate among themselves in perfect Russian. The actors who played them are all Russians and even have matching Moscow accents. More than that, apparently they are speaking a form of Russian slang used by criminals for extra authenticity.
• In Six String Samurai the Russian army speaks with an audible accent, but their phrases are correct.
• Slap Shot: The two French-Canadian characters are played by French-Canadian actors. So they speak both French and English like French-Canadians would.
• Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice manages to speak good German with a slight Polish accent, exactly as her character would.
• In Tropic Thunder, the armed, violent bandits in the rain forest (in an unidentified Asian country) speak proper Mandarin Chinese.
• The French film A Very Long Engagement features a star studded cast of French actors and actresses... and the American actress Jodie Foster in a relatively minor role. However, Foster spent years as a child in France, studied French in school, and has dubbed herself numerous times in French, and thus speaks it excellently.
• In X-Men: First Class, Erik Lehnsherr and the Nazis he encounters (and, a bit later, kills) in the bar speak surprisingly good German. The actor playing Erik (Michael Fassbender) was born in Germany and the actors playing the Nazis are most likely German.
• The Zohar Secret presents a wide variety of those: good Latin, Hebrew, Turkish, Spanish, French and Russian, all grammatically correct, all sound nice.
• The Walk: While Phillippe only speaks French sparingly, with the in-universe reason being that he's trying to practice his English before heading to New York, whenever he does it's surprisingly very good, especially given that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an American. Levitt studied French poetry at Columbia University and is therefore fluent in the language, and he was taught how to speak it in a Parisian accent by the actual French actors on set.

Literature

• In Royce Day's The Red Vixen Adventures part of the background of the wazagan race is that their world suffered a Prime Directive failure, so much of their own religion and culture was dumped in favor of a oddball combination of Christian and Muslim. As a result, the wazagans tend to use a lot of Arabic for flavor. Fortunately one of Day's cover artists is a native of Saudi Arabia, ensuring the Arabic translations are authentic.
• By the end of the sucky road trip in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, the Heffleys' van's heater breaks down and one of the tires goes flat. A van passes by and they stop them for help, who turn out to be Spanish-speaking men who cannot understand English. Manny turns out to have learned perfect Spanish from listening to the CD and he saves the day, as well as convince the men to drive to the petting zoo to retrieve the pet piglet.

Live-Action TV

• In Alias, the main character once had quite a few lines in Swedish. She couldn't have passed for a native Swedish speaker, but spoke better Swedish than many foreigners who have lived in Sweden for years. Having Swedish Lena Olin in the cast probably helped.
• There’s almost always someone who speaks another language on the US based version of The Amazing Race during any given season. It’s usually Spanish with the occasional other language like French or Mandarin. The most surprising instance of this was two separate people from season 30 who could speak decent enough Arabic which is notoriously tough for native English speakers. When the teams got to Morocco, Cody shocked his girlfriend (now wife) Jessica by switching right to it when their cab driver told them he wasn’t fluent in English. He picked it up in the military. Evan who’d spent a semester abroad there in high school also spoke it well enough to get them where they needed to go.
• Brass Eye includes a faked advertisement for a supposed Japanese product called "Canibliss" which allows its user to take drugs via a dog. Astonishingly, this is rendered in perfect Japanese by a native Japanese speaker, despite this being patent nonsense and - importantly - not intended to fool anyone who could be reasonably expected to understand the language, let alone understand the nuances in pronunciation between a native and non-native speaker.
• On Charmed, Cole speaks very good Italian.
• Danger 5. Despite being a completely over-the-top parody of Sixties and Eighties TV action dramas the series contains correct English, German, Russian, Italian, French, Japanese, and Cantonese. This is a result of being produced by Australia's premier multilingual channel SBS, which prides itself on its linguistic diversity.
• In Daredevil (2015), Karen Page speaks Spanish extremely well, far more fluently than her claims to have learned it in high-school would account for.
• Flight of the Conchords: When Bret performs a Korean Karaoke song, both on the HBO show and on stage, his pronunciation is unexpectedly good.
• In the tenth series of Friends, it turns out that Phoebe is fluent in French.
• Good Omens: The dialogue in the scene at the "Firebird" submarine is spoken in perfect Russian with authentic accent, and all the intonation quirks English speakers almost never get quite right.
• In an episode of Grimm, Sean Renard speaks fluent Russian, although with a noticeable accent. Sasha Roiz's parents immigrated to Israel from the USSR. Some of the other Russian characters in that episode did a better job than others (at least one was Polish, another was born in Ukraine, and a third has Russian parents). In another episode, Juliette speaks fluent Spanish. Indeed, Elizabeth Tulloch has spent some time in Spain, Uruguay, and Argentina (in fact, Spanish was the actress's first language, despite being born in San Diego).
• On Heroes, both Masi Oka's and James Kyson's (Hiro and Ando) Japanese is surprisingly good (although they still have noticeable accents) considering Masi moved to LA when he as 6 and Kyson is from Korea. Masi even provided the translations himself, after being given lines in English.
• On JAG, it's practically a Running Gag that in any episode set in or involving The Middle East, someone will remark on Mac's flawless Farsi. Actress Catherine Bell is fluent in the language.
• Whenever a Jeopardy! clue comes up that uses a foreign term, the host will try to read the term in as close to that language as he or she can muster.
• In the second episode of Loki, Tom Hiddleston speaks in near-perfect classical Latin (albeit with an English accent) while in Pompeii testing his theory. Perhaps not that surprising considering he graduated from Cambridge with a double first in Classics.
• Several episodes of MacGyver (1985) set in East Germany feature excellent (and grammatically correct) German.
• Patrick Jane in The Mentalist speaks excellent Spanish as shown in the episode My Blue Heaven when he is living in an undetermined Spanish-speaking country, even when in-universe dialogue from two local characters could make you think otherwise.
• On That Mitchell and Webb Look, one of their trademark sketches (the parody Game Show "Numberwang") was done entirely in Gratuitous German. The accent was a little off, but the grammar was actually quite good.
• Never Have I Ever: Ben learned Mandarin, all in the name of his rivalry with his intellectual equal Devi.
• In Scrubs, Elliot speaks fluent French and German, just like her actress.
• Stargate Atlantis:
  • The episode "Duet" features two startlingly flawless lines in German from an extra. (There are no subtitles. The lines translate to "Ew, this is like the birth of my nephew." and "Damn, I knew this was going to happen!" respectively.) This is because the lines were ad-libbed and the actress was born in Germany.
  • Dr. Radek Zelenka. David Nykl, who personally translated some of Dr. Zelenka's lines into Czech, ad-libbed some swearing, and otherwise puts on a fairly good Czech accent for the role. He has Czech parents and spent some years in the country as a baby and as an adult. However, some credit for Zelenka's popularity with Czech viewers also has to go to the writers who managed to give Zelenka a very good Czech name that avoids obvious pitfalls such as the character being named some variation on Jan Novák or being a Famous-Named Foreigner - making him far less of a token Czech and far more of an actually relatable, distinct Czech character.
• Same with the episode "1969"' on Stargate SG-1. Michael Shanks apparently did work with a Russian language coach, which paid definitely off.
• The British TV game show Taskmaster often features competitors speaking in different languages.
  • Series 4 had a team task which incorporated a rule that no one was allowed to speak English while completing it. Hugh Dennis and Mel Giedroyc were paired up and both demonstrated a grasp of rudimentary French, so this rule was not a problem for them.
  • In Series 11, Mike Wozniak does a creditable job recording a funny in-flight announcement in passable German, having studied the language in school.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?:
  • The game "Foreign Film Dub" with guest star Sid Caesar is actually a subversion. One of Caesar's gags is his apparent fluency in many languages, but he actually only speaks English and Yiddish.
  • And Stephen Fry in a "Questions Only" game set in ancient Rome using only Latin (until he gets flustered when asked about the Parthenon).
  • Colin, having been raised in Montreal, will occasionally bring in Quebecois French in a game.
  • Jeff Davis in the American version speaks actual Spanish during a round. (Not that Colin Mochrie translates any of it properly.)
    Jeff: Señor, necesito un burro. (Mister, I need a donkey.)
    Colin: ("translating") Hey, nice pants!
• Artemus Gordon of The Wild Wild West uses a number of different languages over the course of the series, occasionally at some length, and does it very well. Mostly due to the fact that Ross Martin had an ear for such things and spoke something like seven languages fluently. Martin also put his skills to good use while playing a Hispanic in Mr. Lucky.

Music

• If you didn't know that salsa band Orquesta de la Luz was from Japan, you could never tell by the excellent Spanish they sing. And even if you do know, it's still hard to tell.
• The Swedish Heavy Mithril band Dragonland did a cover of X Japan's song "Rusty Nail", and the vocalist's Japanese skill has to be heard to be believed.
• On his album Twang, George Strait did a surprisingly accurate rendition of mariachi singer José Alfredo Jiménez' "El Rey" entirely in Spanish.
• Deathspell Omega's Latin qualifies, being pretty much free of grammatical errors.
• Mika and Petula Clark are two British singers who many people are unaware speak fluent French and have released records in that language. (Mika was born in Lebanon and lived in Paris until he was 9.)

Video Games

• American McGee's Grimm: Episode 3 of season 3 covers the story of Mulan, and the voice-acting is done entirely in flawless Mandarin Chinese. Not so surprising, as the studio was based in Shanghai.
• BEMANI: Several songs by artist TaQ are noted for being in excellent German, which isn't surprising considering he was raised in Germany.
• Jagged Alliance: Ivan's Russian is completely fluent, particularly notable considering he's the only character in the games (at least until his nephew joins in) who speaks Russian.
• Jotun: Despite the game being developed in Canada, all the dialogue is in perfectly fluent Icelandic spoken by native Icelanders (Jotun is rooted in Norse mythology, and Icelandic is the closest living relative to Old Norse).
• Johnny Yong Bosch, Zero's English voice actor in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 pronounces the Japanese names of his attacks surprisingly well, so much so that Japanese people are surprised that Bosch isn't a native Japanese speaker.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Soviet soldiers fighting in Afghanistan speak in perfect Russian, so players with knowledge of Russian can understand their radio communiques without the need of a translator. This is also true for the African mercenaries on the Angola-Zaire border, who speak nice Kikongo, Afrikaans and other african languages. Slightly averted on some text banners.
• Resident Evil: Revelations 2 takes place on an island off the coast of Russia. Over the course of the game you will encounter posters and audio transmissions, all in good Russian.
• Saints Row:
  • Inverted in Saints Row 2 with Ronin leaders Shogo and Kazuo Akuji and their enforcer Jyunichi, who each speak Surprisingly Good Japanese.
  • Likewise, Saints Row: The Third offers us Belgian criminal mastermind Phillipe Loren, voiced by native French speaker Jacques Hennequet. While Phillipe mostly avoids the Gratuitous French trope, the few lines he actually speaks in French are flawless.
  Phillipe Loren: Oh putain de merde... OUVREZ-MOI CETTE PORTE!!! Je veux sa tête !" ^note "Oh the fucking shit... OPEN THIS DOOR!!! I want his head!"
• The Wii Punch-Out!! game has the enemy boxers speak their respective native tongue very well. This is even more impressive considering the number of different languages spoken (French, German, Japanese, Hindi, Spanish, Russian and Turkish).
• The PC Engine CD/TurboGrafx-16 CD version of the Japan-only soccer game Super Formation Soccer '95 Della Serie A, the opening narration is narrated in surprising good (but corny, since the narrator over blows how popular is the Serie A league in Italy) Italian. The funniest thing is that the narrator, Edison Mineki, is a Brazil-born Japanese-Italian.
• Wolfenstein: The New Order: Both German and Polish feature prominently, and are depicted accurately.
• Solatorobo: Red the Hunter has soundbites used for various emotions in recognizable French. Swearing is rather tame due to being on the dated side, however. The same applies to the French voice tracks for Fuga: Melodies of Steel and its sequel, which have far more voice acting on top of it.

Web Original

• David Murray, The 8-Bit Guy, surprised viewers by speaking German fluently during a trip to Thoman Synth Reactor 2019. In a follow-up video, David explained that he studied German in high school and even spent an exchange semester in the country.
• Xiaomanyc is an American who started learning Mandarin Chinese at the age of 18 and found he was really good at learning foreign languages. His Youtube channel is filled with videos of him continually surprising native speakers of many foreign languages that he can speak to varying extents.

Western Animation

• The Chinese writing in Avatar: The Last Airbender is flawless and period-appropriate, thanks to Dr. Siu-Leung Lee, a Hongkonger.
• In Code Lyoko, Odd speaks good Italian (the only school subject that Jérémie seems to have trouble with), likely due to his Italian heritage (his surname is the very Italian "Della Robbia"). Also, Yumi seems to be bi-lingual, with her native tongue being Japanese.
• How to Train Your Dragon has an ending theme with parts in Surprisingly Good Icelandic, because it was done by an Icelandic singer. Specifically, by Jonsi Birgisson of Sigur Rós.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot has one episode with Surprisingly Good Japanese. After a mission in Tokyo, Jenny loses her English-language disc, and can only speak Japanese for the rest of the episode. Her voice actress, Janice Kawaye, is bilingual and her lines are absolutely flawless^note There is a translation error in the script, but it's minor.
• In Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated Professor Pericles speaks surprisingly good German, when he does more than peppering his sentences with German words. It's mostly when he commands the 'bots (invented by another German character). It helps that Pericles is voiced by an actual German actor, Udo Kier.

Real Life

• In the Roman Catholic Church, a candidate for Pope must be at least trilingual. For example, Pope John Paul II was believed to know as many as 12 (other than his native tongue, Polish), and utilized 9 languages as Pope.
• To become an official translator of any EU institution, you have to know at least three different languages: your mother tongue, then English and then either French or German. If your native language is any of those three, you need to know either all of them, or one of them and then a smaller language. Once you're in, you've got the opportunity to learn new languages and get paid for it, with translators ending up knowing any number of languages from at least half a dozen up to twenty different languages.
• English rugby icon Jonny Wilkinson took one of his college A-Levels in French, and is fluent enough in French to conduct all of his interviews with French media in that language, with no interpreter. (He played his last five years of club rugby in France from 2009–2014.)
• British comedian Eddie Izzard took French in school, loved it, and speaks it very well. In "Dress to Kill" she has an entire sketch based around speaking French, starting with the idea that common phrases found in high school French textbooks are very hard to easily slip into a conversation. She then proceeds to do the entire sketch in French showing just how nonsensical those phrases are, ending with recapping the movie Speed. She also does the entire sketch in English at another point. At the beginning of the former, she says that she had taken her last show to France and did it entirely in French, much to the surprise of her audience.
• Comedian Bill Bailey speaks both French and German well, though admittedly keeps his accent, and frequently incorporates both into his music and routines. By his own admission, however, he's not skilled with Spanish and Mandarin.
• Israeli news anchor Yonit Levi displays her fluent command of Italian whenever something big and interesting happens in Italy (for instance, when someone tried to attack then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, or the COVID-19 outbreak in Lombardy) when she interviews someone in it. It happens rather rarely, leaving many Israelis very surprised when it does happen.
• Russian author Vladimir Nabokov grew up in a multilingual sophisticated family but he wrote his first books in Russian. He then transitioned to writing in English. The books he wrote in English, Lolita and Pale Fire, contain prose in perfect English.
• Jodie Foster is perfectly fluent in French, having attended an exclusive California private secondary school that teaches its classes in French. She can speak the language without a trace of American accent, and frequently dubs her own roles in it.
• Yukio Mishima taught himself English after World War II using nothing except a tape recorder and a stack of comic books left behind by American servicemen, and spoke it so well he conducted his famous 1969 interview in Time magazine without an interpreter.
• People were often surprised that Elizabeth II spoke fluent French. On state visits she addressed the French parliament without an interpreter. Once, she was phoned by a prankster radio host from Quebec, pretending to be Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. When he suggested that they switch into French, he was startled when her instant response was, "Bon, allez."
• Former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman, now based in Japan, speaks Japanese well enough to host his own show.
• Jake Adelstein is an interesting example. Being the first American journalist to work as a Japanese-language reporter for a major Japanese newspaper, Surprisingly Good Japanese was a requirement; he even scored better in proficiency tests than native speakers. The flipside: because he spent so much time speaking it in an all-Japanese environment, when a case required him to interact with English speakers, he found himself stuttering over his words and even veering towards Engrish at times. He recovered pretty quickly.
• Associated Press Correspondent Philip Crowther gained attention for reporting fluently in six languages: English, Luxembourgish, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German

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