Susie Dent Quotes

I think speaking English is beautiful.

Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

I would love with all my heart to be able to speak Greek, classical or modern or both. It is a beautiful language, both aurally and in terms of the intricacy of its construction. I took four semesters of Ancient Greek in college, but it's all rusted away now - and I never learned to speak it anyway.

For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

I'm very proud that I have learned German and Russian. Especially Russian, because of how difficult and beautiful it is and because of how much I struggled in the beginning to get my head around how it works.

Hindi has never been a trouble. In fact, Hindi is the only language I can speak and write apart from Malayalam and English.

When I got into languages, I needed to amass things to make myself more palatable or more acceptable as a human.

I can manage in six languages - Marathi and Gujarati, in addition to Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Bangla.

I love the English language, the colors of it, the many, many nuances, the different influences. I find German stilted, in a way, by comparison.

I've been working in three-four languages. I'm happy to do it.

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.

English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

They say he's an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages! I've got a 15-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages!

I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses :)

A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

I don't speak anything fluently, but I love picking up languages and I do this Duolingo app. I started when I moved to Sweden, when I was about 19, 20. I really loved the language; it was super melodic and really sexy.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

I live in New York now, and miss France quite a bit. Of course, the reality of living in a small village in the south of France was very different than the fantasy I had of living in France. Over the years I spent there, that fantasy was worn away and I found a more realistic version of France than the one I began with. I wouldn't say the spell ever goes away, but transforms. Now that I understand French culture more intimately, and speak fluent French, I have a different, more solid, relationship to the country.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

Her voice was slightly accented but her French was perfect. Someone who'd not just learned the language but loved it. And it showed with every syllable. Gamache knew it was impossible to split language from culture. That without one the other withered. To love the language was to respect the culture.

The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.

For being able to use language was a critical skill that could carry one far. One could use it professionally, as a crafter of everything from political speeches to modern novels. One could use it personally, as a tool of discovery or a means of staying connected to others. One could use it as an outlet that would feed the artistic spirit of the creator, which existed in everyone.