Guenther Steiner Quotes

I learned how to speak English watching television.

I lived in Holland for one year when I was younger and, although they speak Dutch there, I learned a little bit of English while I was there, but really I learned from movies and TV series like '24' and 'Prison Break.'

We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.

If you were to sit me down in a classroom, with fluorescent lights humming and some woman trying to teach me Italian, there's no way. But scream goes to Italy, we stay in a squat, and the only way you can ask someone where to take a piss is to do it in Italian. So I learned Italian.

Isaac Singer always wrote in Yiddish. He was so unsure of his English at the beginning that he was easy to edit and he learned fast.

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

My English was limited to vacationing and not really engaging with Americans. I knew 'shopping' and 'eating' English - I could say 'blue sweater,' 'creme brulee,' and 'Caesar salad,' - so I came here thinking I spoke English.

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 educated myself. To me, school was boring.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

School seemed unimportant, since I learned so much more on my own.

There's a lot out there for me to learn that isn't in college, so I think it's fine for me if I don't go yet.

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.

When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.

I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Italian was my first foreign language. I speak it better than English.

I had never attended high school, but I was fairly well read.

I studied history and English in college, got a master's in writing, but I was always sort of an autodidact in science.

I speak, Hindi, English, and American. I'm trilingual.

I learned Romanian very late, when I was fifteen, in town, and I wanted to learn it. I like the language very much.

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.

I didn't have much of a formal education myself.

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

I never actively went out and studied the American accent. I just came over here to the States, and it was something I was able to do. Like, I never struggled with it.