Quotes About Learning

Dumb is just not knowing. 'Ditzy' is having the courage to ask!

Your hands already know too much.

Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.

learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.

Reading in another language implies a perpetual state of growth, of possibility. I

Should I dream of a day, in the future, when I'll no longer need the dictionary, the notebook, the pen? A day when I can read in Italian without tools, the way I read in English? Shouldn't that be the point of all this? I don't think so. When I read in Italian, I'm a more active reader, more involved, even if less skilled. I like the effort. I prefer the limitations. I know that in some way my ignorance is useful to me.

In Bengali class, Gogol is taught to read and write his ancestral alphabet, which begins at the back of his throat with an unaspirated K and marches steadily across the roof of his mouth, ending with elusive vowels that hover outside his lips

The unknown words remind me that there's a lot I don't know in this world.

Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky.

When you're in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don't want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an instructor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive.

They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. The

Une langue étrangère, c'est comme un muscle frêle, délicat. Si l'on ne s'en sert pas, il s'affaiblit.

It usually sits on the night table, so that I can easily look up an unknown word while I'm reading. This book allows me to read other books, to open the door of a new language. It accompanies me, even now, when I go on vacation, on trips. It has become a necessity. If, when I leave, I forget to take it with me, I feel slightly uneasy, as if I'd forgotten my toothbrush or a change of socks.

Le parole sconosciute mi ricordano che c'è tanto che non conosco in questo mondo.

Le parole sconosciute rappresentano un abisso vertiginoso, fecondo. Un abisso che contiene tutto ciò che mi sfugge, tutto il possibile.

he wanted to relive those confused days, that life of discovery, to be bound to those round tables and lectures and exams. There were things he had always meant to understand better [...] He wanted to read what he was told each evening, to do as he was told. There were great writers he had never read, would never read. His daughters would begin that journey soon enough, the world opening up for them in its entirety.

The only way to even begin to understand language is to love it so much that we allow it to confound us and to torment us to the extent that it threatens to swallow us whole.

My grandfather always says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. "To travel without moving an inch.

She asked her parents to buy him the books she'd been read by her first teachers, Peter Rabbit and Frog and Toad. "What's the point of buying books for someone who can't read?" her parents asked, legitimately enough, and so she checked them out of her school library and read them to Rahul herself.

Quando ci si sente innamorati, si vuole vivere per sempre. Si vagheggia che l'emozione, l'entusiasmo che si prova, duri. Leggere in italiano mi provoca una brama simile. Non voglio morire perché la mia morte significherebbe la fine della mia scoperta della lingua. Perché ogni giorno ci sarà una nuova parola da imparare. Così il vero amore può rappresentare l'eternità.

Perchè alla fine per imparare una lingua, per sentirsi legati a essa, bisogna avere un dialogo, per quanto infantile, per quanto imperfetto.

Ci sono tantissime cose che continuano a confondermi in italiano. Le preposizioni, per esempio.

So che non è possibile conoscere una lingua straniera alla perfezione. Non a caso, ciò che mi confonde di più in italiano è l'uso dell'imperfetto rispetto al passato prossimo.