Learning A Language Quotes

1. "I loved those Latin words for their dignity, their foreignness, and the way my tongue had to wrap around them. I felt that in learning the special language of a scholarly order, I was amassing a kind of force. This was the pure and noble side of the world, uncorrupted by secrets and trickery. How extraordinary that a word could serve as a shorthand for an elaborate tale of disease."
Author: Abraham Verghese

2. "Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren't even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong."
Author: Anne Ursu

3. "The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. The very formula, "Naus means ship is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, as behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding."
Author: C.S. Lewis

4. "Though I had fallen in love with Narian a long time ago, I was continually learning more about him. I'd always been familiar with his principles and his personality, but it was the little things that made a human being. Little things like how he was not accustomed to sharing his space-had I not been forced to hide in his bedroom during his exchange with the High Priestess, I would not yet have seen it. There are other things, as well. He was nearly fluent in three languages in addition to our own; he absolutely could not sleep on his back; and he didn't now how to handle being irritated with me."
Author: Cayla Kluver

5. "I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent."
Author: Daniel Tammet

6. "I'm only just learning what language to use when I want my microphone turned down, you know, because it's all so new to me. It can be quite difficult on a daily basis to communicate with the people I work with, so I'm just looking forward to knowing more."
Author: Duffy

7. "I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born."
Author: Emily Carr

8. "It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar."
Author: Fred Frith

9. "Just learning to think in another language allows you to see your own culture in a better viewpoint."
Author: Gates McFadden

10. "Playing golf is like learning a foreign language."
Author: Henry Longhurst

11. "In this way, the labor of learning was very considerably lightened, and everyone came to know a few words of each language. Occasionally we amused ourselves"
Author: Johann David Wyss

12. "People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology—laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet—as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue."
Author: Ken Robinson

13. "As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up."
Author: Lewis Thomas

14. "Finally he steeled himself to read the final rule again. He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie. It was an integral part of the learning of precise speech. Once, when he had been a Four, he had said, just prior to the midday meal at school, "I'm starving." Immediately he had been taken aside for a brief private lesson in language precision. He was not starving, it was pointed out. He was hungry. No one in the community was starving, had ever been starving, would ever be starving. To say "starving" was to speak a lie. An unintentioned lie, of course. But the reason for precision of language was to ensure that unintentional lies were never uttered. Did he understand that? they asked him. And he had."
Author: Lois Lowry

15. "When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work."
Author: May Sarton

16. "Humanists were people who wanted to return to ideas found in old Greek and Latin writing of Greece and Rome, written many centuries earlier. Christian Humanists also wanted to get back to these ideas, but they were mainly concerned with learning about the early Christian Church, before it had become involved with money-making and superstition. They wanted to read the books of the early Church, especially the gospels of Christ, in the original language of Greek, so that they would know exactly what the writings meant. The leader of the Christian Humanists was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who attacked superstitions in the Catholic Church in his writing."
Author: Michael A. Mullett

17. "Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children."
Author: Michael Gove

18. "It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning."
Author: Michael Gove

19. "I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages."
Author: Peter Høeg

20. "So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self."
Author: R. Scott Bakker

21. "In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty."
Author: Rabindranath Tagore

22. "Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language."
Author: Richard Dawkins

23. "The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages."
Author: Roger Bacon

24. "I'm an infant with Shakespeare; I'm kind of learning how to walk. I am trying to decipher the code, you know? I do my research. And I get a clear understanding of what the language is. It is a tremendous process I have to go through as I am sure all actors do, finding the gems hidden in his language."
Author: Ruben Santiago Hudson

25. "A Thirsty FishI don't get tired of you. Don't grow wearyof being compassionate toward me!All this thirst equipmentmust surely be tired of me,the waterjar, the water carrier.I have a thirsty fish in methat can never find enoughof what it's thirsty for!Show me the way to the ocean!Break these half-measures,these small containers.All this fantasyand grief.Let my house be drowned in the wavethat rose last night in the courtyardhidden in the center of my chest.Joseph fell like the moon into my well.The harvest I expected was washed away.But no matter.A fire has risen above my tombstone hat.I don't want learning, or dignity,or respectability.I want this music and this dawnand the warmth of your cheek against mine.The grief-armies assemble,but I'm not going with them.This is how it always iswhen I finish a poem.A great silence comes over me,and I wonder why I ever thoughtto use language."
Author: Rumi

26. "At first when you're learning a foreign language, what seems strange is that a different set of words exists for the things you know. But then, after a while, what seems strange is that so many words are the same, that two entirely different peoples, an ocean apart, would choose the exact same sounds. In the end, what causes the most trouble are the words that sound the same but mean different things: déception, nostalgie, grâce."
Author: Stephanie Grant

27. "A werewolf." He said the word like he was learning a foreign language and wanted to get the accent right."
Author: Tielle St. Clare

28. "Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here."
Author: Yao Ming

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