Describe a person who speaks a foreign language well

I want to talk about my friend Nok. We were in same high school in Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, and we still meet when she comes back home.

She speaks Japanese, and honestly her Japanese is really good. When she talks on the phone with Japanese people, I can't believe she is Thai, because her accent sounds very natural.

She started learning it when she was thirteen. At that time she was crazy about anime, so she learned hiragana by herself from song lyrics, and she watched cartoons with Japanese subtitle. After that she studied Japanese at university for four years, and in her third year she got a scholarship for living in Osaka for one year. She stayed with a host family and she said that this year improved her speaking more than all her classes together, because nobody speaked Thai with her.

Now it is very useful for her. She is working as an interpreter in a Japanese company which make rice cookers, near Bangkok, and she translates between the Thai workers and the Japanese engineers. Her salary is much more higher than our other friends. But it's not only about money. She has many friends in Japan, she reads Japanese novels, and she told me that learning a language gave her a lot of confident.

I'd like to talk about Nok, a friend of mine from secondary school in Chiang Mai. She lives near Bangkok now, but we catch up whenever she's home for the holidays.

The language she speaks is Japanese, and she speaks it astonishingly well. I've watched her take business calls in Japanese, and if you closed your eyes you'd assume she'd grown up in Tokyo; she even makes the little polite noises Japanese people make while they're listening.

How she learned it is quite a story. It started with an obsession for anime when she was about thirteen. She taught herself to read from song lyrics and watched everything with Japanese subtitles, which our parents thought was a complete waste of time. She went on to major in Japanese at university, and in her third year she won a scholarship to spend a year in Osaka with a host family. She says that year did more for her speaking than all her classes put together, because her host mother didn't speak a word of Thai and simply refused to slow down.

These days it's her livelihood. She works as an in-house interpreter for a Japanese firm that manufactures rice cookers, so she spends her days going back and forth between the Thai production staff and the engineers from Japan, and she earns considerably more than most of our classmates. But I think the real benefit is personal. She's got close friends in Japan, she reads novels in the original, and she once told me that being able to think in a second language made her far more sure of herself.

The person who springs to mind is my old school friend Nok, who grew up a few streets away from me in Chiang Mai and now lives just outside Bangkok.

She speaks Japanese, and not just competently; she's genuinely close to native-like. The first time I heard her on a work call I was stunned, partly by the fluency and partly by the body language: the slight bows, the little murmurs of agreement Japanese listeners make, all of it completely unselfconscious.

The way she learned it is a lesson in what motivation can do. At thirteen she was hopelessly hooked on anime, and rather than wait for Thai dubs, she taught herself the two Japanese scripts by copying out song lyrics and pausing episodes to decode the subtitles. Our parents rolled their eyes, but it laid the foundations. She went on to do a degree in Japanese, and then a scholarship took her to Osaka for a year, where she lived with a host family who spoke no Thai and very little English. She's always said that year was the turning point; she simply had no choice but to cope.

Nowadays it underpins her whole career. She's an in-house interpreter at a Japanese rice cooker manufacturer, mediating between the Thai production line and visiting engineers, and she's paid well above what most of our contemporaries earn. Still, the practical side is only half of it. She's built friendships in Japan that she'd never otherwise have had, she devours Japanese crime novels in the original, and, as she puts it, having a second language to think in has given her a second kind of confidence.