John Osborne Quotes

English is not my language.

English is not my first language.

I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.

I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.

I didn't speak English until I came to Pittsburgh.

French is a foreign language, but I've been speaking it since I was 18 so it's second nature to me.

Being able to be dry in a second language is almost the last thing you learn.

Fluency in even one other language would be fantastic.

I am learning English and can understand better than I can speak it. But having said that, I am learning as quickly as I can.

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

We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.

There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

I spoke English when I moved to the U.S.A. but I had an accent. To get rid of it, I watched a lot of TV-shows and tried to repeat after the tv-hosts. I liked shows about hip-hop.

I was German-speaking, and I arrived 10 years old to Croatia, and really wasn't speaking a lot at home with my parents in Croatian, so it was really difficult to write in Croatian. It took me two years after I went back to learn everything again in Croatian.

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.

I'm not a native English speaker but do post tweets in English.

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

Through my former experiences, writing poetry and learning other languages leading up to English I find ways to stitch words together that may seem a bit odd, but somehow, sometimes they do work.

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

One of the first things that my English teacher told when I began studying in New York was, "You're here because if you pick it up from the street, not everyone speaks good English." And it happens all the time, anywhere. If you pick up Spanish from the streets, you're not going to be able to speak it correctly.

Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

I admire David Hare as much as I admire certainly any writer ever. What I like about his writing is it is very conscientiously, in one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it's not just an attempt at naturalism. It's stylised and it's heightened, to great effect. It's elegant and it's funny and that's the way to my heart, frankly.

I ended up majoring in English, which I'm not particularly fluent in.

I've got to learn French because I've been going there for years and still, the only words I know are the swear words.