Top 100 Quotes About Foreign Language
#1. 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
#2. And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said.
Michael Chabon
#3. Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don't speak English?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#4. Translation is a two-edged instrument: it has the special purpose of demonstrating the learner's knowledge of the foreign language, either as a form of control or to exercise his intelligence in order to develop his competence.
Peter Newmark
#5. The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#6. Foreign-language books are sometimes more beautiful when you can't tell what's being said. It's like you ruin it by reading.
Craig Thompson
#7. Evidently there is difficulty, real difficulty, in learning a foreign language at all, as if it sprinkled all the sweet flavor of the Greek mythical stories with a foul taste.
Augustine Of Hippo
#8. Singing beautiful melodies is one thing, but to deliver the text so that the people understand it, even in a foreign language, has to be worked at very hard.
Maureen Forrester
#9. Elimae was a magician with a key in her mouth, a foreign language, a matryoshka doll: uncomplicated on the surface, but with a dozen secret selves hidden inside. She thought I didn't notice her, but she's all I did notice.
Kirsty Logan
#10. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.
Robert Stone
#11. The Indian struggle is not anti-British, it is anti-exploitation, anti-foreign rule, not anti-foreigners.
Mahatma Gandhi
#13. Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
Theodor Adorno
#14. My mother had a mantra: musical instrument, foreign language, martial art.
E.L. James
#15. Parents should conduct their arguments in quiet, respectful tones, but in a foreign language. You'd be surprised what an inducement that is to the education of children.
Judith Martin
#16. Kethry had once described summoning as being like balancing on a rooftree while screaming an epic poem in a foreign language at the top of your lungs.
Mercedes Lackey
#17. we seem to be on a constant quest to keep America a country of citizens who can only talk to one another
Kari Martindale
#18. I speak languages with more ease than I read or write them, she explains. It is something in the feel of the sounds. I could attempt to put them on paper but I am sure the result would be appalling.
Erin Morgenstern
#19. I'm always impressed by people who can speak another language, two people talking what sounds like utter gibberish, yet making complete sense to each other never fails to entertain.
Tom Reynolds
#20. She might be the best-dressed little girl in her elementary school class, but she was still a Greek. Her parents spoke a foreign language, their food was different, and she looked different from the children she went to school with in Corktown.
Suzanne Jenkins
#21. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#22. The strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.
Ernest Gellner
#23. Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language.
Julia Glass
#24. I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.
Richard Peck
#25. I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.
Jeanette Winterson
#26. The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
Learned Hand
#27. They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!
Harry Hopkins
#28. Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.
Slobodan Milosevic
#29. Italian was my first foreign language. I speak it better than English.
Iman
#30. I am all for the inclusion of foreign cultures, not their omission in our media. Foreign names, brands, and inventions must be allowed to show and to compete in US publications. Today, most foreign words are still banned. And almost 7 billion people whose first language is not English are silenced.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#31. Spanish - how shall I say this? - is like
Portuguese spoken with a speech impediment.
Sol Luckman
#32. In the United States there's not a lot of people interested in foreign language films. Every time, it's more difficult for foreign language films to survive here.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#33. No one would starve in independent India. Its grain would not be exported. Cloth would not be imported by it. Its leaders would not use a foreign language and finding justice in it would be neither costly nor difficult.
Vallabhbhai Patel
#34. Writing in a foreign language - has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.
Assia Djebar
#35. Facing a language you don't know is like returning to your infancy when your mother tongue used to be a foreign language to you
Munia Khan
#36. A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The
Jhumpa Lahiri
#37. Fatherhood is helping your children learn English as a foreign language.
Bill Cosby
#38. The ability to communicate scorn should be the true test of fluency in any language.
Jennifer DuBois
#39. I will not allow my daughters to learn foreign languages because one tongue is sufficient for a woman.
John Milton
#40. Independent India's leaders will neither use a foreign language nor rule from a remote place.
Vallabhbhai Patel
#41. The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.
Havelock Ellis
#42. She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.
Anthony Marra
#43. Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.
Michael Gove
#45. Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.
David McCullough
#46. England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.
Robert Graves
#47. - When you learn a foreign language, you learn a lot more about your own language.
Anonymous
#48. The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek.
John Courtenay James
#49. Remember that lettuce doesn't grow on a spruce; and it also doesn't rhyme with it.
Jakub Marian
#50. words in a foreign language never wound us like words in the language to which we're born. But
Garth Greenwell
#51. One of the characteristics of New Labour - and Miliband is irredeemably of that species - is that, in the guise of a new liberal language, it has adopted the age-old default mode of British foreign policy, namely military intervention.
Martin Jacques
#52. Being able to read a book in another language is a source of ego-stroking pride.
Emily O'Beirne
#53. What senseless violence does is to prolong the lease of life of the British or foreign rule.
Mahatma Gandhi
#54. The foreign-language Oscar is something that doesn't go to the producer or the director; it goes to the country.
Deniz Gamze Erguven
#55. There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
Edith Hamilton
#56. The river's vowels and the trees' consonants speak a not-quite-foreign language.
David Mitchell
#57. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#58. I speak the truth but I guess that's a foreign language to ya'll!
Lil' Wayne
#59. Ho ho ho, tell me why you are not at home' is something Santa Claus could ask you if you stayed in a hotel over Christmas. It is most certainly not the reason why it is called 'hotel', but it will hopefully help you remember that the stress is actually on the second syllable.
Jakub Marian
#60. Do you speak perfectly in your native language? No, and you don't blame yourself for making mistakes in your native tongue. So why feel bad when you make mistakes while speaking a foreign language?
Rocket Learning Books
#61. But is good to meet fellow intellectual," he continued. "I celebrate occasion with small drink. Unfortunate, I am impossibility to move."
"Why?"
"Because I find myself in sitting position.
Tom Rachman
#62. Of village: it is not called so because its inhabitants are of higher age on average; in fact, there is no connection between the words "village" and "age" whatsoever.
Jakub Marian
#63. I think it's very hard to direct foreign language actors, but Carl Rinsch found a great way. A special super visional way.
Hiroyuki Sanada
#64. I'd studied Latin for five years now, which meant that I could, on rare occasions, actually translate something.
Kate Hattemer
#65. A common creation demands a common sacrifice, and perhaps not the least potent argument in favour of a constructed international language is the fact that it is equally foreign, or apparently so, to the traditions of all nationalities.
Edward Sapir
#66. My heart trips over itself in a race to get closer to her. Something is happening. Something strange and completely foreign. My heart is speaking a language I don't understand as it tries to fling itself at Charlotte. Great. Now, that's two organs I have to do battle with every day.
Lauren Blakely
#67. A werewolf. He said the word like he was learning a foreign language and wanted to get the accent right.
Tielle St. Clare
#68. Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?
Edith Wharton
#69. All this yummy muscleness first thing in the morning is almost too much for me to take," she cooed, and gave him a playful wink as she scooted herself into the front seat. I shook my head. If "Flirt" qualified as a foreign language, my sister and Ambrose would both have PhDs in it.
Amy Plum
#70. When a woman tilts her head to fasten an earring she so often becomes for the moment a quintessence of herself, he thinks. She becomes a thrilling foreign language.
Glenn Haybittle
#72. My ideal vacation isn't about complex maneuvers. I want to arrive somewhere foreign where I don't speak the language, go hiking, then plop down in a sunny square, have drinks, read a book, and see what happens.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#73. If I have a foreign accent - which I much regret - it is cosmopolitan, but not Teutonic. I am a daughter of the great Jewish race, and my somewhat uncultivated language is the outcome of our enforced wanderings.
Sarah Bernhardt
#74. As with Cesc Fabregas, some players who go and play for foreign clubs improve on a cultural level. It makes them grow on many levels; intellectually, because you have to learn a new language and adapt to another culture, and on a footballing level too.
Vicente Del Bosque
#75. Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
Milan Kundera
#76. I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it.
Bayard Taylor
#77. Then the movie started. It was in a foreign language and had subtitles, which was fun because I had never read a movie before.
Stephen Chbosky
#78. Never invite someone who is speaking a foreign language in your presence to "Go back to your country." The only time that phrase is every acceptable is if you are British and you are speaking to Madonna.
Celia Rivenbark
#79. Clary looked at Jace closely, trying to read his face. It was like a book written in a foreign language that she'd studies all too briefly.
Cassandra Clare
#80. I think foreign countries really do like it when American artists sing in their language. And when you go over there and say, 'Hi, how are you?' in their language, they love it. It makes them feel like you're doing it just for them. We in America take so much for granted.
Natalie Cole
#81. Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.
Rabih Alameddine
#82. They're on their way to the foreign-language wing. That's no surprise. The foreign kids are always here, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they'll choke to death on too much American.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#83. Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.
Aravind Adiga
#84. I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!
Rex Stout
#86. I realize that it's impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For
Jhumpa Lahiri
#87. Every human being born within the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.
John Bingham
#89. Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.
Marcel Proust
#90. Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language.
Langston Hughes
#91. I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.
Peter Hoeg
#92. The first few weeks football players look at you like you are speaking a foreign language. My job is to get them to trust me, trust the system. I ask them to run in a way that makes no sense to them.
Ato Boldon
#93. He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#94. Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here.
Yao Ming
#95. I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one's own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#96. For me, French is so rich and so sacred that learning it is like learning a foreign language.
Fabrice Luchini
#97. It's quite clear : an outsider can, on principle, only value foreign literature that translates well; the truly great artists of language and the fecund experimenters are inaccessible to him; are usually unknown to him in fact !
Arno Schmidt
#98. My limitations are - I'm not Meryl Streep. I'm not playing anything in a foreign language, or anything too far from who I am.
Greg Grunberg
#99. I'd like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes. I'd like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt David. I'd like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence.
Robert Fulghum
#100. I have a one-question language test that people who have lived abroad do better on than those who studied in a classroom. Try my test yourself: In a foreign language you've studied, how do you say 'doorknob'?
Nicholas Kristof
