Learning a new language is a fairly difficult task, let alone learning a fictional language. Getting the intonations and pronunciations to the point takes months of dedicated practice. Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel was faced with one such humongous task of learning Valyrian for her role. In an interview with The Rolling Stone, Nathalie talked about various topics including how she learnt the fictional language.
She said, “Yes, I remember the first time I got sent the script. It was like there were whole paragraphs of speaking in this fictional language. I was like….. Huh… okayy! And I remember freaking out for a minute. Because it was just written in the script and I had no kind of like other materials that taught me how to pronounce, how to say it, what it sounded like. I had nothing.”
She added, “I had so many great resources from David who wrote the language. So I used to get these pages of it, written down phonetically and in English. And I also had recordings of him saying it phonetically, saying it at speed and then saying it slightly slower, then slightly slower in English. We had a lot of support and we also had direct coaches that were really wonderful. I remember the first time I listened to one of their recordings, and I just couldn’t speak for a minute. I was so dumbfounded, I was like how am I gonna do this. Basically, what I realized I kind of got stuck, it was that. It was repetition, that’s all. That’s the only way to learn this stuff.”
Nathalie recently teamed up with Game of Thrones alum Jacob Anderson for a special project. Have you ever tried learning a new language? Share with us your experience in the comments below!
