Helen Keller Quotes

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

No one has to learn to spell to talk, right? You see a little kid holding a conversation with an adult. He probably doesn't know the words he's saying, but he knows where to fit them to make what he's thinking logical to what you're saying.

In the first year of a child's life we teach them to walk and talk. And then for the rest of their lives we want them to sit down and be quiet.

Usage is the best language teacher.

The child does not begin to fall until she becomes seriously interested in walking, until she actually begins walking. Falling is thus more an indication of learning than a sign of failure.

Children pick up words as pigeons peas And utter them again as God shall please.

Fatherhood is helping your children learn English as a foreign language.

Most children's first words are 'Mama' or 'Daddy.' Mine were, 'Do I have to use my own money?'

The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one teaches them anything.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

How many languages can a child learn? As many as you will take the time to teach them.

See that your children are properly educated in the rudiments of their mother tongue, and then let them proceed to higher branches of learning.

At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.

Children or babies learn to mimic the vibration of the adults who surround them long before they learn to mimic their words.

Why, it is as easy to teach the name of an idea, if it is clearly formulated in the child's mind, as to teach the name of an object.

At one year of age the child says his first intentional wordhis babbling has a purpose, and this intention is a proof of conscious intelligenceHe becomes ever more aware that language refers to his surroundings, and his wish to master it consciously becomes also greater.Subconsciously and unaided, he strains himself to learn, and this effort makes his success all the more astonishing.

Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.

Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.

The little child learns to speak, though it has no learned teachers - because it lives with those who know how to speak.

If we taught children to speak, they'd never learn.

Just the attempt to learn a [new] language is like running different software through the brain.