Top 100 Quotes About A Second Language
#1. You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?
Theresa May
#2. Those who read in a second language write and spell better in that language.
Stephen D. Krashen
#3. Music is a second language to my heart.
Mara Arps
#4. Double your life experience by learning a second language.
-Taru
Taru Nieminen
#6. If you talk to a man in a second language , your talking to his brain ,if you talk to him in his mother language you're talking to his heart -
Nelson Mandela
#7. Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.
Mignon McLaughlin
#8. Everybody needs to understand that I learned Arabic from the United States Army as a second language. I never spoke it at home.
John Abizaid
#9. Rose turned to me. "Did she just speak to him in Spanish?" "Yeah," I said. "She only speaks to him in Spanish, actually. It was in some parenting book she read about kids learning a second language.
Richelle Mead
#10. C19: People make fun of our speaking a minority language. How should I react? It is often people who can't speak a second language who tend to poke fun at those who can speak two or three languages.
Colin Baker
#11. There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.
Marilyn Hacker
#12. I think it's important if you're American to have a second language, and Spanish is the language to have.
Thalia
#13. Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you're as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, 'When you are ironic, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightning and I am the thunder.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#14. People acquiring a second language have the best chance for success through reading.
Stephen D. Krashen
#15. I dropped out of the business for 8 years, and I taught English as a second language. Then I decided to go back to acting, and I got 'Mad Men'.
Randee Heller
#16. Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.
Niall Ferguson
#17. For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.
Garth Greenwell
#18. We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.
I have no native tongue.
Chuck Palahniuk
#19. That one of history's greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.
Ross King
#20. To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.
Stewart Brand
#21. I've noticed you only speak ghetto half of the time." - Stephanie
"I'm multi-lingual," Rancher said.
I followed him to the door, feeling jealous, wishing I knew a second language.
Janet Evanovich
#22. We have a president for whom English is a second language. He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators,' but he's pretty much one himself.
Robin Williams
#23. The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.
Jeffrey Kluger
#24. He was devastatingly handsome, kind, and spoke a second language. If the sweet potato fries turned out to be all that he'd promise, I might have fallen out of my chair.
Jamie McGuire
#25. For those learning English as a second language, there is little to do but roll the eyes, tear at the hair, and grimly memorize each one.
Anne Stilman
#26. The person who thinks dogs can't talk doesn't want to learn a second language.
Mark Winik
#27. Before we got engaged, he never farted. Now it's a second language.
Caroline Rhea
#28. In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.
Gael Garcia Bernal
#29. I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?
Ellen Goodman
#30. I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.
Christopher Walken
#31. To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.
C.S. Lewis
#32. PUBLISHER'S NOTE To seize the knowledge of the UNKNOWABLE needs a language, which is at once symbolically creative, revealingly poetic, infinitely plastic, luminously rhythmic, automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable descent of truth of idea, word and action.
Maa Krishna Sri Aurobindo
#33. The gods speak to us, and irony is their language.
Tim W. Burke
#34. He no longer heard Kellhus speak so much as observed him cut and carve, whittle and hew, as though the man had somehow shattered the glass of language and fashioned knives from the pieces.
R. Scott Bakker
#35. I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.
Richard Dawkins
#36. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
Billy Collins
#37. Does 'submissive' mean 'baby' in your language, Master Mason? Because I'll have you know
...
No, but Dominant does mean lover, caretaker, disciplinarian, and whatever else the situation warrants.
Bianca Sommerland
#38. I prefer perfumery, it's the language of love.
Jan Moran
#40. In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.
Mary Louise Pratt
#41. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#42. When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don't normally use hi-falutin' language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus.
Philipp Meyer
#43. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.
Edwin Gaustad
#44. Abuse may consist of physical maltreatment or language that is belittling, discriminatory ...
Asa Don Brown
#45. No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on "the given." Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.
Thomas S. Kuhn
#46. [...] it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them [...]
Jose Saramago
#47. Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.
Gilbert Highet
#48. I had never really done voice-over. If you've ever seen me, I'm more the communicator through body language and movement ... I'm a physical actor.
Daniel Logan
#49. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt?
Sherman Alexie
#50. Directing non-actors is difficult. Directing actors in a foreign language is even more difficult. Directing non-actors in a language that you yourself don't understand is the craziest thing you can possibly think of.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#51. We learn the language of prayer by immersing ourselves in the language that God uses to reveal Himself to us.
Eugene H. Peterson
#53. Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.
Octavio Paz
#54. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.
Sebastiao Salgado
#55. I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
Dennis Lehane
#56. I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.
Ciaran Carson
#57. I wasn't saying you were heartbroken." I sound like English is a new language for me, the way I stutter out the words. "I just meant it was hard for me to ... to watch."
He neither confirms nor denies that he might or might not have been even a teeny bit heartbroken.
Susan Ee
#58. There is nuance now, subtext, body language, and pheromones.
Andre Agassi
#59. Black-on black crime' is jargon, violence on language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#60. We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#61. The primary needs can be filled without language. We can eat, sleep, make love, build a house, bear children, without language. But we cannot ask questions. We cannot ask, 'Who am I? Who are you? Why?
Madeleine L'Engle
#62. This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently have ensured the invisibility or 'other' nature of females ...
Dale Spender
#63. It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
Henry David Thoreau
#64. This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don't ask, don't tell, stay civil.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#65. Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#66. Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.
Steven Pinker
#67. We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language ... We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.
Lewis Thomas
#68. My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.
David Bohm
#70. I dislike math, yet I respect and appreciate the fact that math is the language of the universe.
Lucas Grabeel
#71. Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.
Oliver Sacks
#72. What is music? Music is language. A human being wants to express ideas in this language, but not ideas that can be translated into concepts ...
Anton Webern
#73. I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.
Chelsea Clinton
#74. That's what they do, psychopaths. They figure out your language, your currency, your needs, your dreams and fears. Then they figure out how to use those things to get what they want from you. Most
Lisa Unger
#75. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.
Paul Auster
#76. To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.
Eero Saarinen
#77. Our language is rich with implication, so it is easier for us to accept the existence of things that cannot be explained. The Lethani is the greatest of these.
Patrick Rothfuss
#78. It is silly to call fat people 'gravitationally challenged' - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
Terry Eagleton
#79. The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.
Mary McCarthy
#80. Don't speak to them in the language of the dead, Mr. Marinville.
Stephen King
#81. Man can think of divine things only in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language.
Swami Vivekananda
#82. The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.
Antonio Machado
#83. On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
Andrew Dalby
#84. Cadence, n.
I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I'm talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Suthern truncation, and I know it's because I'm swimming in your cadences, that you penetrate my very language.
David Levithan
#85. Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#86. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.
Slavoj Zizek
#87. The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.
Simon Van Booy
#88. When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.
Akshay Vasu
#89. Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J.G. Ballard
#90. My fans are all pretty cool, you know; I've never really seen anybody fighting on Twitter, no death threats, no harsh language, no gay slurs, nothing like that.
Drake Bell
#91. I believe terrorism cannot be won over by military action. Terrorism must be condemned in the strongest language. We must stand solidly against it, and find all the means to end it. We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time to come.
Muhammad Yunus
#92. The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
Steven Pinker
#95. Painting is ... a richer language than words ... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
Jean Dubuffet
#96. In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.
Roman Jakobson
#97. It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.
Max Barry
#98. My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.
Corin Tucker
#99. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.
David Plotz
#100. If you go to France, you have to speakFrench. If you speak in English, no one looks at you. On the one hand we sayEnglish is a global language.
Raj Thackeray
