Quotes About Bilingualism

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.

they were slowly learning English, not to the superseding of the native tongue but to the supplementing of it, bilingualism being the proper present goal of the Yukon Indians.

There's nothing wrong with me, and I'm not going to apologize for the amount of time that I spent in two countries and I'm not going to apologize for the fact that I speak two languages and I'm not going to apologize for the fact that I have two versions of my name.

If you are educated in English-medium schools, you get a better view of the world, develop more liberal values, have more gender sensitivity and become more forward looking. But you pay a price because you don't know your own language.

Real talent was required to use so many words in two languages to say nothing.

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

I feel comfortable in Spanish, I chat like a parrot, but I don't have the confidence in Spanish that I do in English.

Lucian doesn't seem to have mastered the English language but is fast forgetting all his German; this seems to be quite a good argument against his taking up French.

Being able to be dry in a second language is almost the last thing you learn.

I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.

Sprechen das Englisch!

I think the education system is great just the way it is. There's kids in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, seven years old, that can already speak fluent Spanish.

English is not my first language.

English is not my language.

I had to know at least two languages.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

I learnt French in school and can already speak English.

It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual.

No way of knowing how language re-created a family. His own children didn't want to learn Spanish, when he had given everything to learn English.

The children learned English, taught it to their parents, and rarely spoke the mother tongues at home.

Lupe's language was incomprehensible—what came out of her mouth didn't even sound like Spanish.

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.

Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?