Quotes About Language

Another way in which younger and older learners may differ is in the amount of time they can actually spend learning a second language. We know that first language learners spend thousands of hours in contact with the language or languages spoken around them. Young second language learners may also be exposed to their second language for many hours every day—in the classroom, on the playground, or in front of the television.

all learners benefited from the deductive instruction regardless of differences in aptitude.

Decisions about when to start second language instruction in schools should be based on realistic goals and on realistic estimates of how long it takes to achieve them. One or two hours a week will not produce advanced second language speakers, no matter how young they were when they began. Older learners may be able to make better use of the limited time they have for second language instruction.

when learners focus primarily on meaning, they may not be able to also pay attention to the sounds that make up the words.

learners sometimes fail to notice certain language forms—grammatical morphemes, vocabulary words, syntactic patterns, pragmatic features—when their focus is on understanding meaning.

Bonnie Schwartz (1993), for example, concludes that instruction and feedback change only superficial aspects of language performance and do not affect the underlying systematic knowledge of the new language. She argues that language acquisition is based on the availability of natural language in the learner's environment. Interaction with speakers of that language is sufficient to trigger the acquisition of the underlying structure of the language.

learners who were given pronunciation lessons emphasizing stress and rhythm were judged to be easier to understand than learners who received lessons focused on individual sounds.

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)

Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting.

Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio. "The language of peace. You dig?" I did.

A language without words, where the mind must bow to instinct

A sudden gust of wind shakes the branches of trees scattering a swirl of leaves that shimmer eerily in the bright filtered light. Leaves as vowels, whispers of words like a breath of net. Leaves are vowels. I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for. The language of the lesser gods. But what of God himself? What is his language? What is his pleasure? Does he meld with the lines of Wordsworth, the musical phrases of Mendelssohn, and experience nature as genius conceives it?

Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation, submitted the eighty-five-letter Cherokee alphabet, hoping that her language would still be spoken a hundred years from now.

it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

Language, then, not simply as a list of separate things to be added up and whose sum total is equal to the world. Rather, language as it is laid out in the dictionary: an infinitely complex organism, all of whose elements […] are present in the world simultaneously, none of which can exist on its own. For each word is defined by other words, which means that to enter any part of language is to enter the whole of it

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.

All this belongs to the language of ghosts. There are many other possible kinds of talks in this language. Most of them begin when one person says to another: I wish. What they wish for might be anything at all, as long as it is something that cannot happen. I wish the sun would never set. I wish money would grow in my pockets. I wish the city would be like it was in the old days. You get the idea.

Kulland???m?z sözcüklere de?i?im dü?üncesini katmazsak çaresizli?imiz sürecek.

Non ho la minima idea di cosa stia dicendo. Harry svolazza nella magniloquenza scodellando le sue enigmatiche profezie per il puro piacere narcisistico di ascoltarsi, e non vedo il senso di protrarre la conversazione.

Unless we can begin to embody the notion of change in the words we use, we will continue to be lost.