Juan Felipe Herrera Quotes

Over 90 percent of parents in Puerto Rico want their children to be totally fluent in English.

My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.

If a child cannot speak English the first day at school, that child is not ready to learn.

If you spend your time trying to learn English, you fall behind in your course content… I know because when I came here I could not speak English. So that was the idea of Congress when we passed bi-lingual education. But that was to only go on for a short time—one and one half years. But many of the bi-lingual education programs of today go on for year after year and they are destructive because the primary objective is to learn English.

Because education is such a broad area, I chose to focus on language learning.

What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

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.

Rapid acquisition of English should be the paramount goal of any immigrant language instruction program.

I grew up speaking Korean, but my dad spoke English very well. I learned a lot of how to speak English by watching television.

I can speak a little bit of Hindi but understand every word.

I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned.

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

I am fluent in Spanish and I understand French, Italian and Portuguese.

I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.

My primary and secondary education was in French, which had a lasting influence on my life.

I'm learning Spanish - I got Rosetta Stone for Christmas.

I finish so many books it's amazing. I'm also doing Rosetta Stone, learning some French.

I definitely want to teach my daughter Spanish.

I learned English kind of late. I remember when I got my first opportunity to work in America, I didn't speak a lot of English, so I only really knew my lines for the movie I was doing.

I speak as much Spanish as anyone who has grown up in Southern California or Texas or Arizona. I had my three years of high-school Spanish and a couple of semesters in college.

I speak Spanish to my children and they speak it better than me.

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

I failed world geography, civics, Spanish and English. And when you fail Spanish and English, they do not consider you bilingual. They may call you bi-ignorant because you can't speak any language.

It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.