George Bernard Shaw Quotes

The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.

Languages are fluffy big pillows stuffed between nations - what others say is muffled and nearly lost in them, and when we speak their grammar we get feathers in our mouth. It's worth it. What pleasure to phrase an idea, even in child's words, slowly, and sail it across the gulf in another language to a different-speaking human being!

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'

I'm always saying normal things, and people usually understand me, but they're like, 'Where are you from?!'

I think that a lot of teams aren't as close-knit as we are because a lot of the Spanish speakers don't know English and some of the English guys don't care to try and learn Spanish and relate to Latin players.

It's rare to find an Indian who speaks Chinese. It's rare to find a Chinese who can speak any of the Indian languages. Neither of them at the trading level - I want to repeat this, at the trading level - can speak English, either.

The diversity of language alienates man from man

Two nations divided by a common language.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.

My grandmother died in 1991 and I was born in '86. We only met once, but I didn't speak English and she didn't speak Spanish - so we had a communication problem.

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

Let the teachers teach English and I will teach baseball. There is a lot of people in the United States who say isn't, and they ain't eating.

When I heard Puerto Ricans in New York City, it sounded very strange. And the first time I heard someone from Spain, I thought they had a speech impediment!

Everyone thinks England and America are the same, as we have the same language, but I felt like an alien as an English person living in America.

When you arrive in L.A. as an Englishman, you might as well be on the moon. People just don't understand you if you speak too fast, and most people there think you're Australian. Ordering was incredibly complicated. I was speechless.

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

My boyfriend - Matt Kaplan - is American, so any time I'm unsure of how to say something, I say, 'Hey how do you say this?' and he yells it out.

I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.

On a bus ride through China, my family and I had talked for hours before a police officer boarded to conduct an inspection. My mother and brother couldn't speak Chinese, so they pretended to be deaf and mute, and none of the Chinese passengers said anything, sparing us.

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn't exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.