Andy Partridge Quotes

At the age of 25, I gave up my study of Japanese language and culture at university in Brisbane and moved to the town of Alice Springs.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

In addition to the research, I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country.

On my first days here I did not start work immediately but, as planned, I took it easy for a few days - flicked through books, studied Japanese art a little.

The best way to travel abroad is to live with the locals.

It's like a dream to come to Spain and stay for a couple of years and get somebody to teach me Spanish music.

In my time, you needed to speak a little Italian, and that was it.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.

When I was at U.C.L.A., I decided I was going to go to Japan and learn Japanese.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

I'm certainly curious about people. As a kid, I moved around a lot. I was raised in a lot of different places, and thanks to working in the movies, I've gotten to keep traveling. I've always been interested in other cultures and languages.

As with Cesc Fabregas, some players who go and play for foreign clubs improve on a cultural level. It makes them grow on many levels; intellectually, because you have to learn a new language and adapt to another culture, and on a footballing level too.

I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English.

I don't ever want to stop learning. And I really want to learn French fluently. It would be great to go and live in France.

I always try to learn a few words from a new language wherever I go.

When I was in Mexico and started to dream in Spanish, I knew that was a good sign that I was learning the language. It was cool.

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

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

Mum and Dad sent us to a bilingual school, so we had half the lessons in English and half in French. But I remember being hugely lost.

I want to broaden my horizons, speak a new language, meet new people, and experience a different culture.

People are getting more used to another language; that's how I learned English and Spanish. I listened to other singers and tried to sing with them. Of course, I studied it, and I took classes, but music helps me a lot.

I can identify with Riho because I was the talent that didn't speak the language in Japan. I'm very excited for the fans to kind of build a relationship with her because it's going to take work from both sides to understand one another.

As a child, it was really hard because I'd be thrown into a new school and have to make new friends, or I'd sit in class for months without speaking the language, but as I got older, I welcomed the possibility of discovering new cultures and languages.

I learned to say 'hello' in German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Indonesian, and Italian - languages of the countries I've visited.