Georg Brandes Quotes

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

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

It's always better to speak the language of the team. Not only for the direct contact with everyone - sometimes it also helps you to understand the mentality of the people in the team a bit better.

If you want to know what's important to a culture, learn their language.

I think once you understand a language, you understand the culture surrounding it as well.

I face no problem in communicating with the people of Orissa whom I meet everyday.

It took me a while to figure out the U.S. sense of humor, a lot of trial and error. I would write down jokes to casually tell my American friend over Skype to see which ones he'd laugh at.

The last thing an Englishman wants to hear is a man from Brussels trying to imitate his language - you want to hear a different point of view. You may not be able to understand the details, but you can understand the feeling.

I don't like to have these words banded about, like "British sense of humor," "American sense of humor," though I'll be damned if I know what they are.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

I am a candid interview and I have a dark and dry sense of humor - a very Canadian sense of humor and I am only learning now stupidly that you can't read tongue. When I say something funny in a newspaper and I meant it to be funny, it doesn't read that way.

The two cultures of East and West are very different, and the priorities are very different. So when you understand that - if you are from this side or this side - when you understand that the other is different than you, and you respect these differences, you can build communication.

I never found it frustrating not speaking.

I thought that subtitles are boring because they're there generally to serve us with information to make you understand what people are saying in a different language.

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

Now it is evident that a little insight into the customs of every people is necessary to insure a kindly communication; this, joined with patience and kindness, will seldom fail with the natives of the interior.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

The most advanced minds as well as the least advanced are obliged to use the same words. If we adopt new words, it will be even more difficult - if not impossible - to make ourselves understood. The new man must therefore express himself in conventional language.

I'm not an expert on the Malaysian sense of humor.

The biggest lesson I've learned by living abroad for the last four years is the importance of communication.

Education happens to be something that all people, all cultures, need to embrace. Math, science, the words of the world. To be able to speak and be able to have clarity and to be able to think. Those are the greatest of gifts.

I'm a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I'm able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.

Honestly, I'm cool with everyone, and people pick up on that. I'd say, 'I'm not gay, but it's all good.' It's kind of like going to Paris when you don't know the language; some Americans get into trouble over there, but I'm just like, 'Sorry, I don't speak French.'

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

American teachers have one indisputable advantage over foreign ones; they understand the American temperament and can judge its unevenness, its lights and its shadows.