Basic Trope: A character understands a language they've never seen/heard before.
- Straight: Bob goes to France. He automatically understands everyone with no explanation.
- Exaggerated: Bob corrects a French child who is still learning how to speak like an adult due to their young age.
- Downplayed:
- After spending 20 minutes reading an English-to-French dictionary, Bob is able to fluently speak French.
- Bob's from Montreal but can speak European French perfectly even though he only gew up with Qubecois.
- Justified: Bob is an alien who can decipher electromagnetic signals in the air to learn human tongues in seconds.
- Inverted: Miguel, a Spaniard, and Luigi, an Italian, cannot understand each other even though in real life, Spanish speakers and Italian speakers understand each other just fine.
- Subverted:
- It turns out Bob studied French.
- It turns out the French people are just speaking English...
- Double Subverted: ...which they never learned.
- Parodied: When asked, Bob claims he can understand them due to his “inexplicable language fluency”
- Zig-Zagged: Bob speaks with a French man, much to everyone's surprise including himself, for comedic effect. In a later episode, he doesn't understand French.
- Averted: Bob goes to France and can't understand anyone.
- Enforced: Bob's actor is french and is incapable of pretending that he doesn't understand his mother tongue and the writers decided "screw it, we can't explain why Bob understands French without breaking the flow of the story, so we won't."
- Lampshaded: "How can you understand me?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Bob and Alice go to France. Knowing that Bob can understand any language just from hearing it, she asks him to translate what everyone says.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: Bob is surprised when he doesn't understand what French people are saying. Alice explains that in real life, people can't understand a language without learning it first.
- Conversed: "That is so unrealistic. Why would he understand French when he's never even heard it before?"
- Implied: Bob is sent to deal with some french-speakers, and when we catch up to him he's done well.
Back to Inexplicable Language Fluency
