Quotes About A Second Language

“For me, therapy is partly translation therapy, the talking cure a second-language cure. My going to a shrink is, among other things, a rite of initiation: initiation into the language of the subculture within which I happen to live, into a way of explaining myself to myself. But gradually, it becomes a project of translating backward.
The way to jump over my Great Divine is to crawl backward over it in English. It's only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge.”

— Eva Hoffman

“Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face.”

— Brian Christian

“Music is a second language to my heart.”

— Mara Arps

“After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, "All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before." Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions
from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate
are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation.”

— Marina Gorbis

“When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.”

— Zadie Smith

“That one of history's greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.”

— Ross King

“Barry Gifford, Author of Wild at Heart, says:
Marisa Lankester's unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why.”

— Barry Gifford

“Live the life you'd be envious of if you saw someone else living it. This is my personal mantra. Whenever I'm going through a difficult time, like a breakup, and I'm wishing to be the person who could get over it and move on, I tell myself to be that person. Instead of waiting to be inspired by someone else and being jealous that they're living a life I wish I had, I tell myself not to wait for that moment and to start being the person I want to be. If you wish you were the woman who went for that big promotion, learned a second language, dumped that guy who cheated on you, then just be that person. Think, if I have the energy to wish for it, I have the energy to do it.”

— Olivia Munn

“I stared at the pictogram of a burger nestled between similar representations of shakes, sodas, and fries, on the front of my register. I wondered why humankind seemed so dead set on destroying all of its accomplishments. We draw on cave walls, spend thousands of years developing complex language systems, the printing press, computers, and what do we do with it? Create a cash register with the picture of a burger on it, just in case the cashier didn't finish the second grade. One step forward, two steps back
like an evolutionary cha-cha. Working here just proved that the only thing separating me from a monkey was pants.”

— Lish McBride

“There are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side, which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment.”

— Roald Dahl

“He was devastatingly handsome, kind, and spoke a second language. If the sweet potato fries turned out to be all that he'd promise, I might have fallen out of my chair.”

— Jamie McGuire

“They found the corpse in the closet of Alcide's apartment, and they hatched a plan to hide his remains." Eric sounded like that had been kind of cute of us.
"My Sookie hid a corpse?"
"I don't think you can be too sure about that possessive pronoun."
"Where did you learn that term, Northman?"
"I took 'English as a Second Language' at a community college in the seventies.”

— Charlaine Harris

“I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.”

— Edgar Ramirez

“In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.”

— Gael Garcia Bernal

“To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.”

— Stewart Brand

“I dropped out of the business for 8 years, and I taught English as a second language. Then I decided to go back to acting, and I got 'Mad Men'.”

— Randee Heller

“Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you're as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, 'When you are ironic, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightning and I am the thunder.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.”

— Marilyn Hacker

“I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.”

— Christopher Walken

“I think it's important if you're American to have a second language, and Spanish is the language to have.”

— Thalia

“You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?”

— Theresa May

“Everybody needs to understand that I learned Arabic from the United States Army as a second language. I never spoke it at home.”

— John Abizaid

“I've noticed you only speak ghetto half of the time." - Stephanie
"I'm multi-lingual," Rancher said.
I followed him to the door, feeling jealous, wishing I knew a second language.”

— Janet Evanovich

“The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

“Rose turned to me. "Did she just speak to him in Spanish?" "Yeah," I said. "She only speaks to him in Spanish, actually. It was in some parenting book she read about kids learning a second language.”

— Richelle Mead

“If you talk to a man in a second language , your talking to his brain ,if you talk to him in his mother language you're talking to his heart -”

— Nelson Mandela

“French is a foreign language, but I've been speaking it since I was 18 so it's second nature to me.”

— Kristin Scott Thomas

“We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.”

— Lynn Abbey

“Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn't understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn't peculiar to science. It's sad if some citizens can't tell a proton from a protein. But it's equally sad if they're ignorant of their nation's history, can't speak a second language, or can't find Venezuela or Syria on a map.”

— Martin Rees

“Jamie Keehn, our second Australian punter. Again, you have to learn the language. You just can't speak to those guys. You have to know how to speak Australian ... Australians have a higher voice. When you just speak regular English, it doesn't quite get across. Of course, we've had experience with our Australians, so we're pretty comfortable with adjusting our dialect so that it fits the ability to communicate.”

— Les Miles

“There is a subset of Democrats who tend to mis-fill out ballots. The way you mark the ballot is like an S.A.T. - you fill in the circle. And the subset of people who tend to, like, put a check there instead, or an X, or fill it out wrong, tend to be people who didn't take S.A.T.s, or first-time voters, or people with English as a second language.”

— Al Franken

“Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.”

— Niall Ferguson

“The whole thing is this: If you don't use just basic grammar, if you don't get the language down, you're not going to have access to a tool that people use as a weapon against you. The only reason I was never taught to read and write was because it was easier for them to lead me. But the second I learned to read and write, I began to lead myself.”

— Jimmy Santiago Baca

“For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.”

— Garth Greenwell

“People acquiring a second language have the best chance for success through reading.”

— Stephen D. Krashen

“Learning to read in one language helps us read a second language.”

— Stephen D. Krashen

“Those who read in a second language write and spell better in that language.”

— Stephen D. Krashen

“Before we got engaged, he never farted. Now it's a second language.”

— Caroline Rhea

“Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.”

— Casey Miller

“Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person's ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue.”

— Norman Doidge

“I am a very simple man. I am a man first, an artist second. My first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow man. I will endeavour to meet this obligation through music, since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries.”

— Pablo Casals

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped the significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew
and I knew it was important to know
that Papa worked hard all day long.”

— Vivian Gornick

“Many of us have to spell words such as "out," "cookie," and "bath" when conversing with other people, lest we unnecessarily excite our pets. And even then they often understand. I've actually had clients who resorted to using a second language around their dogs, but after a while their perceptive pooches caught on. Who says dogs don't understand us?”

— Warren Eckstein

“We have a president for whom English is a second language. He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators,' but he's pretty much one himself.”

— Robin Williams

“If you listen to the urban speech patterns in India you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.”

— Salman Rushdie

“So it may be a language that separates you - again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.”

— Michael Emerson

“Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.”

— Mignon McLaughlin

“I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?”

— Ellen Goodman

“Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.”

— William Golding