Quotes About Bilingualism

I actually speak Spanish fluently.

Spanish is actually my first language, growing up, and I understand the culture. I understand the culture; I understand what the people want.

I'm not too bad at reading, but I've got a bit of a confidence problem with speaking, with going from Scouse to Spanish.

I speak Spanish, not perfectly; it's definitely my second language.

I speak Spanish to my children and they speak it better than me.

Most of my family doesn't speak English. It's so important for the baby. He's going to know all his American roots, but he also needs to know about his Brazilian side.

I so want to be able to speak another language. I love the way my friends who are half Italian and half English break from one language into another without even pausing.

Speaking two languages fluently makes each language not so important.

My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate.

I grew up speaking both languages, and for me that's really important.

I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.

When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French.

I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.

I learned Punjabi before I learned English in spite of the fact that I was born in Canada.

My first language is both English and Spanish. My mom was raised in Los Angeles, so with her we spoke English, but my father was born in Cuba, so with him we spoke Spanish.

Although I feel very French, a part of my heart is in the States. When my brother and I arrived, we didn't really speak any English, and when we left, that's all we spoke when we played together. It was just a beautiful place to grow up.

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, but they didn't force me to speak Mandarin. In retrospect, this was sad, because they believed that my chance of doing well in America hinged on my fluency in English. Later, as an adult, I wanted to learn Chinese.

I probably spoke Spanish growing up about 95 percent of the time.

You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, when I read a book, I spoke English perfectly. No one could correct my Spanish. And I think that I retreated to books as a way, you know, to be, like, masterful in a language that was really difficult for me for many years.

I spoke Franglais growing up.

My dad is an ob-gyn - he's retired now - and he wanted to come to the States to make a better life, for opportunity. My mom said that, on the plane ride here, I did not want to speak a word of English - I spoke Tagalog. And then, after the first day of school, I didn't want to speak anything but English.

The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.

Being a third-generation Mexican-American and speaking English exclusively, I heard Spanish spoken by my relatives all my life, especially when they didn't want me to understand what they were talking about.