Another distinctive trait or Hotaru is the way she speaks.

Since Hotaru is an American learning Japanese (and she's pretty good for someone who's just learning it), she's obviously going to have a different way of speech.
It's not entirely obvious in the English version of the manga, but in the Japanese version, there are ways you can see it. Notice in her first e-mail, there's pretty much next to no kanji in it, compared to everyone else who uses kanji left and right. Kanji seems to be an extremely difficult alphebet to learn, and for someone who hasn't been in the language very long, Hotaru doesn't seem to know very many kanji.
Hotaru also speaks formally a lot, and never really uses slang like Shugo or Mireille. Like anyone else learning a new language, you usually learn to speak formally before you start picking up the slang, but Hotaru doesn't seem to have a hard time understanding anyone, except from time to time. Again, you can't tell in the English version (since everything's in English anyway), but in the Japanese version of the manga, Hotaru will use simple English phrases from time to time, and even uses Internet slang used in the US.
Despite the cultural differences between Hotaru and the rest of the group, they all seem to communicate perfectly fine with no misunderstandings.



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