George Thorogood Quotes

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.

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.

When you go to school in Holland you learn to speak English and write in English - but English is different from the Scottish language!

Being a Malayali, I had to learn Punjabi and Haryanvi to be able to jump into the music scene.

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

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.

I don't know if my sense of humor goes over Americans' heads.

Some words, you know, it's amazing but some words would come only in French, and when I speak French, it would only come in English. And so the adjustment is very difficult sometimes.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.

I board with a poor Scotchman: his wife can talk scarce any English.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

I only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.

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

Well, I'm trilingual myself. I am, I know how to speak Spanish, English, obviously, and I speak pretty good Ebonics.

Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

I don't really have that much contact with Americans. I mean, I see the oddest things on the Internet, I suppose. And I've got a couple of American friends, but they are Anglophiles anyway because they've decided to come live here.

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

If, in English, we speak words, the French speak thoughts.

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!'