Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

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

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.

I met my wife in New York, so, we lived together there for five years, so my Swedish was kind of a gradual learning process.

My mother had an incredibly strong accent - although I couldn't hear it - and she was the main person there, so I'll have learnt to speak English from her.

I was always influenced by language.

As we embrace the American dream and the freedoms it represents, we must also ensure that those who wish to enjoy those freedoms become a part of our society and learn to speak our language.

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.

One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

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 am a 10th class pass in Hindi. From 7th grade to 12th grade, I was in Delhi; before that, I was abroad. I came in not knowing a word of Hindi in 7th grade and learned Hindi and passed the exam in 10th. I think I was north of 50 percent, so I feel very proud of that accomplishment.

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

You always speak the language you hear most.

Learning another language is like becoming another person.

I certainly enjoyed having my sister, because when she came I felt a certain responsibility to help her fit in, and help her learn English. I wanted her to play with all my toys. I was actually, I think, really scary to her, because I had so much energy.

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

I grew up bilingual, I grew up speaking Chinese in the home, Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and I learned English because I was born and raised in the U.S. That really gave me an edge. I understand that, from the experts, if you grew up bilingual, your brain kind of gets wired to accept a new language. It was a very serious deal because not only did I have to learn Russian to a high degree in order to function as a necessary member of the crew, but also I knew that the Russians that came over that made an effort and had some success in learning English, those were the folks we trusted.

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

Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect.

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

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