Surprisingly Good Foreign Language is currently defined as "the work got a foreign language right", which is considered noteworthy because "Horrible grammar and pronunciation of any foreign language is the expected norm in most works of fiction". This may be subjective since not everyone will be surprised by it, and the description even states that it's based on how the viewers react. A lot of examples are explained by an actor being fluent in the language, which hardly makes it surprising. It is also used for objective examples of a character knowing a language they logically would be unlikely to know, which is actually Inexplicable Language Fluency.

Along with "surprising" being presumptuous, portraying something accurately is not a trope in and of itself, and it's not that hard to get a translation. Suggesting a cut for all these reasons.

Surprisingly Good Foreign Language Wick Check

• hololive - Gawr Gura Ch.: Gura isn't fluent in Japanese and can't hold a conversation like Calli and Kiara do, but as someone with a very keen sense of rhythm, her singing pitch and pronunciation are shockingly on point, surprising even native speakers. For example, her cover of "Sorairo Days" with Matsuri was actually recorded back in October 2020 (with the music video being released in late March 2021), and her pronunciation, which was spotless, only kept improving since then. Her original song "REFLECT" has her singing entirely in Japanese (while speaking in English and Greek), something which completely took her senpai Marine by surprise. Surprising because she doesn't actually speak the language fluently
• Wedding Peach: Dean is American with no Japanese heritage yet speaks the language perfectly, surprising the Love Angels.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic: Goria was surprised that he talked to her in orc language and knew about orc customs.
• Gratuitous Japanese: After the family's last one million yen flies off with the wind, Homer yells out "Shimatta baka ni!"^note Subtitled, "D'oh!," though the Japanese more directly translates to, "Damned fool!" in frustration. Otherwise Bart and Homer speak accurate Japanese. They're American and no explanation is given for how they'd know Japanese
• The Simpsons S 3 E 11 Burns Verkaufen Der Kraftwerk: Mr. Burns' German during the dinner with the German businessmen is correct, even if it has a few grammatical errors. He's American, no explanation is given
• Youth With You Season 2: Jin Zihan, or Aria Jin, reveals herself to be a fluent English speaker during her phone call with her family. It turns out that although she was born in China, her family moved to Flushing when she was 14. Not inexplicable, but presented as surprising in-story
• American Mcgees Grimm: In Episode 3 of Season 3, Grimm tackles the tale of Fa Mulan. During the whole episode, he speaks in perfect Mandarin Chinese. Character isn't Chinese
• Peppa Pig: In "Pen Pal", Peppa gets a French pen pal who she also talks with on the phone and later meets. It transpires that Mommy Pig is fairly fluent in French. Daddy Pig claims to be, but is actually awful.
• Olsen-banden: In the Swedish version, he is suddenly revealed to know enough Finnish to spontaneously say something to a guard in it. While the line itself is nonsensical^note "A lot of snow, but no torch"... Said when he's on Mallorca, his pronunciation is fairly good.

• hololive English - Project: HOPE: IRyS is fully bilingual, as she can seamlessly transition from English to Japanese (and vice versa) with perfect pronunciation. She admitted in a Q&A that she can get by with conversational Japanese and read both kanji and hiragana fine, with the exception of the really difficult kanji. Aside from a slight American accent, she naturally speaks at the same quick pace as native JP speakers.
• PAW Patrol: Pronounces French words and phrases with surprising accuracy.
• Paradox Live: To emphasize the fact that all three go to an international college, their songs have a mix of Japanese, English and Korean.
• Rush Hour Film: Knows Japanese, likely due to his ties with Kenji.
• Sedem Chasa Razlika: He speaks Bulgarian fluently.
• The King of Fighters XIV: His VA is Chinese born.
• Titan Academy Teachers And Faculty Members: She's the only European/Russian character in the whole academy (other non-Singaporeans tend to hail from Asian countries), students or teachers alike because her actress is born Russian. As such, she can dabble in Surprisingly Good Russian.
• The Karate Kid (2010): Having lived in China for a while, he boasts fluency in Mandarin, as seen when he attempts to convince Cheng to leave Dre alone, only to be aggressively told off.
• The Simpsons S2 E11: "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish": All the Japanese in this episode is legitimate. It probably helps that all the people speaking it are Japanese.
• The Simpsons S 4 E 21 Marge In Chains: For Apu and Sanjay's brief lines of Hindi dialogue, the writers called the Embassy of India in Washington to get them to translate. The Embassy was not "interested or happy" but still did it.
• Traffik: The series was filmed on location, using native actors, in the UK, Germany, and Pakistan, so it's no surprise that English, German, and Urdu speakers are natively conversant. In brief sequences, Helen Rosshalde (a UK woman married to a German husband) speaks German to her house staff and local police. The German police handlers will speak German among themselves, but break into accented English to speak with their state's witness, Ledesert (a French citizen). Karl Rosshalde, speaking in competent but accented English, complains that Helen is lazy about learning German, forcing him to improve his English. Outright says "it's no surprise"
• Crazy Market: This game was made in France but 100% of the text are in English instead of using French, this bring their first international release. Lots of French people know English
• Fuller House: Before moving in to the Fuller House, Ramona is heard having a whole conversation in Spanish over the phone with a friend, while complaining about Kimmy. In Season 2, she tries to teach Kimmy Spanish and gets away with saying "I hope you never learn Spanish so papa and me can talk about you" very fluently.
• Ghosts of the Future: According to lore, while Sonic's accent in the Spanish language sounds horrible, Shadow's accent manages to be authentic.
• Casey Mongillo: Much like their roommate, they speak fluent Japanese. Troping real people
• Christopher Plummer: Though he didn't get to show it off a lot on-screen, he was actually quite fluent in French, having spent much of his childhood in Quebec. Troping real people
• Daniel Padilla: Although most of his roles are Tagalog, Padilla is actually Waray on his mother's side and fluent in the language. Troping real people
• Gordon Ramsay: It can be surprising to hear him speak fluent French^note he moved to France as a young man not knowing the language and quickly became fluent during the three years he trained there with his maître d's and other native-French speakers because he rarely does so on camera. Troping real people
• Jonathan Franzen: He has also published various short pieces, fiction and non-fiction, throughout his career, along with a translation of the German play Frühlings Erwachen, perhaps better known as Spring Awakening. Troping real people
• TwoSet Violin: Technically not that surprising as they were both born in Taiwan and emigrated as young children, they are both fluent in Chinese and can adeptly read, comprehend and sometimes point out subbing faults in the Chinese media they critique. Troping real people
• Jericho (MLP): The German—in-universe, it is called Teutsch—is all really well done, no errors. Surprisingly.
• Gravity:
  • Unusually for Hollywood, all Russian writing in this movie (such as button labels) features authentic Russian that actually matches what is happening on screen. This is probably because the actual Soyuz is not classified and so they could print the buttons to match the real deal.
  • They also managed to make the little bits of Chinese accurate too. All the text printed on the Shenzhou control panel are accurate and the emergency voice played in the deorbiting Tiangong is perfect. Both of these read like Shown Their Work
• 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 Truman Show: In the background of the scene where Truman's dad is being taken away, two arcs display the words "unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno", Latin for "One for All, All for One". Truman exists for the rest of the world's entertainment, and all of Seahaven exists for Truman. Perhaps better, Truman exists for the rest of the world's entertainment while that world cheers him on, resulting in some surprisingly accurate French and Japanese to represent the world at large.
• 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.
• The Good, The Bad, The Weird: Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin is spoken throughout the movie.
• The Fighting Seabees: the Seabees "We are" song is one of the best moments in the whole movie. The verse in surprisingly good Russian is an extra nice Bilingual Bonus.
• The Red Vixen Adventures: Part of the background of the wazagans 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.
• Confessions Of An English Opium Eater: De Quincey's use of Ancient Greek, which he spoke fluently.
• 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.
• 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).
• 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
• AKB48: Anna Iriyama's You Tube channel is in Spanish and Japanese, since she spent a few years in Mexico to star in a telenovela.
• Music/AOA: Jimin spent a few years studying in China with her cousin so she knows conversational Chinese. Troping real people
• Deathspell Omega: Their Latin contains at most a handful of grammatical errors, and there's reason to suspect that at least one may be intentional to create ambiguity between two possible readings (as explained under Gratuitous Latin above, "Dei nostri templum terrarum orbus est" may mean "The temple of the lands of our Lord is childless," or it may simply mean, "The temple of our Lord is Earth").
• Music/IKON: Jay lived in the Philippines for several months, and speaks Tagalog pretty well.
  • He also speaks Japanese and Mandarin pretty well.
  • Ju-ne can also speak Japanese, due to living in Okinawa for a while. Troping real people
• Hinatazaka46: The subunit name Lima Cantik is Indonesian for "Five Beauties", suggested by Sarina Ushio, who lived in Indonesia. But since they're still in the process of becoming "beauties", the Japanese rendering is りまちゃんちっく (lima chanchikku) instead of the more phonetically accurate りまちゃんてぃっく (lima chantikku), and it's in hiragana despite being a foreign phrase because they were Hiragana Keyakizaka.
• Junho: He sang for two Chinese drama soundtracks, one of which he recorded with Vanness Wu, who was surprised at Junho's Chinese language skill.