Top 53 Quotes About Foreign Languages
#1. Screw technicolor, red, and foreign languages. I dream in status updates.
Fierce Dolan
#2. 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
#3. It's an irony... that we understand humans like the foreign languages... full of miss understanding and miss conceptions.
Deyth Banger
#4. They have courses teaching you foreign languages and ballroom dancing and etiquette and cooking. But there are no classes to learn how to be by yourself in a furnished room with chipped dishes, or how to be alone in general without any words of concern or familiar sounds.
Irmgard Keun
#5. Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.
Arthur Miller
#6. Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#7. Gemma had blond hair and blue eyes. I did not.
Gemma was always an A student. I was more of a B-all-you-can-be kind of gal.
When Gemma was into science, I was into skipping.
When Gemma was into foreign languages, I was into the hot Italian guy down the street.
Darynda Jones
#8. Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
Marilyn Hacker
#9. Many autistic people have this ability to learn weird foreign languages, and I think I've heard of autistic Americans who have been obsessed [with] Icelandic and learned it and speak it fluently, and I've seen it done in interviews on television.
Jon Gnarr
#10. I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.
Joseph Epstein
#11. The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.
Emma Bonino
#12. Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. - DAVE BARRY
Timothy Ferriss
#13. Foreign languages was the only thing that interested me when I was at school, so playing in another language ... it is quite demanding because if it is not your mother tongue, you are missing some connotations and some emotional depth of certain things.
Tom Wlaschiha
#15. She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages ...
Salman Rushdie
#16. There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
Barbara Ehrenreich
#17. This was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with foreign languages.
John McWhorter
#18. My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.
Lawrence R. Klein
#19. Teaching methods are often inadequate for the goals faculties are trying to achieve. Important courses such as expository writing and foreign languages are frequently taught by untrained graduate students and underpaid adjunct teachers.
Derek Bok
#20. As the president of Kosovo, I am more concerned about the current situation with the employment standing at around 70 % of the population, which is young, with great potential, speaking many foreign languages and having wide expertise.
Ibrahim Rugova
#21. What I look for these days is that I don't have long speeches, the characters gets to sit down a lot, I don't have to learn any foreign languages, and it doesn't shoot in Minneapolis in February. That's mainly what I look for.
Alan Arkin
#22. 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
#23. After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967.
Paul Nurse
#24. Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.
John Millington Synge
#25. I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.
Bill Gates
#28. Udden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it's like a normal midlife crisis only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.
Ben Aaronovitch
#29. If your kids attend school and grades are up that will make $1,000 contributions to some 10,000 kids across the country, are challenging kids to learn foreign languages or challenging kids to get summer jobs or seek summer enrichment opportunities?
Harold Ford Jr.
#30. I will not allow my daughters to learn foreign languages because one tongue is sufficient for a woman.
John Milton
#31. The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
Ross Macdonald
#32. The things you leave school knowing - some dates and long division - so much of it has been of no use to me. Schools should teach the basics of cookery, first aid, how to look after your money and how to speak foreign languages. Useful things.
Jane Asher
#33. I wanted to learn a few foreign languages, and therefore I had to go abroad.
Ella Maillart
#34. Give your mind a chance to travel through foreign languages.
Neil Simon
#35. Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
#36. Conversation can be as mutually incomprehensible as foreign languages. We need the different and complementary perspectives of the various yogas - and ideally of all religions - not only to reach God but to reach each other.
Huston Smith
#37. My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.
Arabella Weir
#39. There's a huge and hungry market for the books on style and fashion in Russia, though the books should be done in Russian, not English since there are few readers who've master foreign languages well enough to buy foreign editions.
Alexander Vassiliev
#40. I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.
Michio Kaku
#41. My jaw was on the floor right about then. How could I not know he spoke French? My boyfriend's hotness had just skyrocketed. Dear God. That body and he speaks foreign languages. As
Jaymin Eve
#43. Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.
Christopher Barzak
#44. When I try to write in English, I feel like a bird without wings still trying to fly.
Debasish Mridha
#45. Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.
Chuck Thompson
#46. Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.
Lawrence Venuti
#47. Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages.
Minae Mizumura
#48. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this.
Fareed Zakaria
#49. When he is dissected after his death," a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, "a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them.
Kato Lomb
#50. No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. 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
#52. Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised.
Ruth Ahmed
#53. 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
