Quotes About Bilingualism

My Chinese name is Chen Wei. I can speak a tiny, tiny bit, just basically get around, but I understand it decently well.

People's voices change a lot when they speak a different language.

When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.

BERRI: "Yes," I remember my first word in American English was "yes," and I remember as a boy speaking quickly, effortlessly, without a trace of an accent in American English. And, just as swiftly, I remember losing my Hebrew vocabulary, as my parents spoke German at home, which I understood but never spoke.

As I am a Bengali and am used to conversing in Bengali and English, I thought my Hindi would show an accent.

Bilingualism lets you have your cake and eat it. The new language opens the doors to the best jobs in society; the old language allows you to keep your sense of 'who you are.' It preserves your identity. With two languages, you have the best of both worlds.

It's easier for me to act in Spanish, but as soon as I get the lines in English and I know them by heart, it becomes really easy. You don't have to worry about the language anymore. It just takes more time. In Spanish, I can learn lines in 10 minutes. In English, it's going to take an hour.

Apart from English, I speak my mother tongue Malayalam, as well as Tamil, Telugu, and a bit of Kannada and French.

I speak English, so I am no longer cute. My tongue itches for French.

The biggest issue for me has been the language because I speak so much German now. I've had to focus on my English and find more words to describe what I want to say and also soften my tone. It was quite stiff from 20 years of speaking German, so when I started speaking more English, oh my god, my tongue was like: 'Argh'!

Tamil is almost like my mother tongue and for quite some time, I had been concentrating on Telugu.

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.

First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English.

I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.

My American and Japanese personalities are distinct, and I carry myself differently depending on which language I'm using and which mode I'm in.

Hindi has never been a trouble. In fact, Hindi is the only language I can speak and write apart from Malayalam and English.

As far as Irish writers being great, I think the fact that there have been two languages in Ireland for a very long time; there has obviously been a shared energy between those two languages.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

It's problematic being an Arab who writes in Hebrew.

So the poor translator must not just go back and forth between two languages, but if he is worthy of his calling must shift between two selves, with all the perils of this induced schizophrenia.

She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English; it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.

She's fifth-generation Mexican American, which means she learned Spanish in class just like I did.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one.