Some of the greatest movies ever made sound funny.

That's what happens when actors speak foreign languages, and it shouldn't keep you from seeing a film nor drive you to seek a dubbed version on videotape.

Nothing substitutes for hearing the actors capture the subtleties film directors are after. And it is really easy to read subtitles, even on an average-sized television.

A few minutes into any good foreign film and you've already forgotten you are glancing down for a translation and you feel like you are speaking the language by the film's end.

Foreign films are often different than American films.

That is one reason why the Academy Award nominations announced this week include a Best Foreign Language Film category. The Academy gave ''special'' awards to foreign films it wanted to recognize before creating the foreign film category in 1956.

Great foreign films explore different times, myths, cultures and characters and the common conditions people face everywhere.

''Yojimbo'' (1961), by legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, is a 19th century samurai morality tale that seems as American as the old West or Sam Spade.

Kurosawa's film transformed Dashiell Hammett's 1930 detective story ''Red Harvest'' and inspired Sergio Leone to make his 1964 spaghetti western, ''A Fistful of Dollars.'' The cycle will be complete this year with ''Yojimbo'' being remade as a modern Bruce Willis crime saga.

''Rasho-Mon,'' one of Kurosawa's best films, was remade as ''The Outrage,'' a 1964 American Western starring Paul Newman.

''Rasho-Mon'' (''In the Forest'') is a great film in any language: wonderful writing, complex and innovative plotting, intriguing characters and a distinct visual style and vision.

The 1951 film (which won a special Oscar) doesn't have a conventional plot or ending. It is the same story -- a violent rape and murder in the forest -- retold four times from four different viewpoints.

Viewers don't learn which of the conflicting views is the truth. The truth ''Rosho-Mon'' reflects is Kurosawa's favorite theme: how small and vain is man amid all of nature.

Just as ''Rasho-Mon'' shocked the Western world when the film emerged from war-ravaged Japan, the film industry took notice when director Zhang Yimou's stunning ''Ju Dou'' came from China's tightly controlled society in 1989.

'Ju Dou,'' the first Chinese film ever nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film, was banned in China when censors saw it as an allegory for the evil old men suppressing their society.

Yet the 1920's tale of a beautiful peasant woman sold as the wife of a tyrannical old man is as modern and universal as today's news about wives who kill their abusive husbands.

Yimou has made a half-dozen more terrific films showcasing the beautiful actress Gong Li and a Chinese landscape and culture Americans rarely see.

That is a similar part of the attraction to ''Jean de Florette'' (1986) and ''Manon of the Spring'' (1986), two films about farmers in France's beautiful Provence countryside.

Based on Marcel Pagnol's novel, film director Claude Berri's tragic two-part tale of innocence, greed, deceit and revenge uses the landscape and human nature as characters and plot devices.

Gerard Depardieu stars as a hunchback accountant who yearns to support his family as a farmer and would have succeeded except a neighbor hid their well because he covets their land.

The plot twists through three generations and has a heart- wrenching emotional quality that too many filmmakers today replace with car chases and gratuitous sex and violence.

Italian cinema giant Vittorio de Sica brought a similar tenderness to the masterpieces he directed as his country recovered from its devastation in World War II.

His best -- ''Shoe-Shine'' (1947) and ''The Bicycle Thief'' (1948) -- received the first and third ''special'' Oscars issued.

De Sica paints postwar Italy as morally adrift. His life-on-the streets style, called neo-realism, focuses on small, commonplace stories of average people trying to survive daily hardships.

''Shoe-Shine'' follows two boys whose friendship and dreams turn tragic when they encounter the black market and reform school.

''The Bicycle Thief'' is the sad tale of a poor man trying to support his family. The bicycle he needs for work is stolen in broad daylight on his first day on the job and nobody cares.

Unlike neo-realism, the magic-realism of ''Like Water for Chocolate'' (1992) celebrates the mystical and the romantic in a mouth-watering love story set early this century in Mexico.

Director Alfonso Arau used the novel by his wife, Laura Esquivel, to make a movie that has earned more money than any other foreign film ever released in America.

The plot is standard. An evil mother thwarts her daughters love, but the girl communicates so strongly through cooking that this fable will make you ravenous before it ends.

And if you want plots that aren't standard, try German director Werner Herzog's most accessible films: ''Aguirre, the Wrath of God'' (1972) and ''The Mystery of Kasper Hauser'' (1975).

Aguirre is a power-mad Spanish conquistador futilely traveling through Peruvian jungles on treacherous rivers in search of Eldorado, the legendary city of gold.

Kaspar Hauser is a true and haunting story about a 19th century man kept isolated in a basement until he emerges as an innocent adult trying to find a place in society.

Herzog's films are grandiose, almost operatic, difficult, disturbing and unforgettable portraits of maddening loneliness and alienation amid unfamiliar environments.

But they and many other foreign films are worth the effort.

Mary Shaffer works at Cal Poly. Jerry Bunin is a news reporter for the Telegram-Tribune.