Ron Unz Quotes

If you spend your time trying to learn English, you fall behind in your course content… I know because when I came here I could not speak English. So that was the idea of Congress when we passed bi-lingual education. But that was to only go on for a short time—one and one half years. But many of the bi-lingual education programs of today go on for year after year and they are destructive because the primary objective is to learn English.

Over 90 percent of parents in Puerto Rico want their children to be totally fluent in English.

Latin America must follow the education model, that allows children to handle the English language from a very early age.

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

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

I didn't move to Miami to live in a Spanish-speaking province.

It is not easy, but young people have to learn languages.

I've studied Chinese in college, but basically, I'm not bilingual.

You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.

I don't speak Spanish, and I get so much crap for it. Oddly enough, it was the first language I learned, but somehow I lost it throughout the years. I can understand pieces of it, but I don't speak it. I need to speak it. I want to teach my kids Spanish.

My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.

I never found accents difficult, after learning languages.

I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.

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

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?

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

With the United States in slow long-term decline, how will that affect the position of English? And where will all that leave monolingual Britain? Our political leaders like to boast about how global Britain is, but when it comes to languages, it is near the bottom of the global league, together with another island state, Japan.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

I learned English, my sixth language at this point, quite quickly.

Citizens of Canada of whom any child has received or is receiving primary or secondary school instruction in English or French in Canada, have the right to have all their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in the same language.

The language skill in the U.S. for the most part has been awful. Many Americans don't learn any foreign language.

You can't be an American if you don't speak English. Our public schools should be mandated to teach all children in English.

Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

My primary and secondary education was in French, which had a lasting influence on my life.

I don't speak Spanish, I speak a little of Italian but no Spanish.