Peter Sis Quotes

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

When you become an American, they give you an injection so your accent changes.

I didn't move to Miami to live in a Spanish-speaking province.

My wife has a horror the children will start talking American if we spend too much time out there.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

I've been a loner all my life, so it didn't bother me that Hungarian was my first language and that I had to learn English. I had a pretty heavy accent in junior high school and would say things like 'wolume control' instead of 'volume control.'

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

When I went to London, they told me I spoke with a funny accent - English with a Chinese accent.

I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

Even though I am very tied to and close to my heritage, I learned Spanish in college; I didn't grow up with it. Growing up in South Texas is different from Miami or L.A. where it is a necessity to speak Spanish.

My mom used to call me a parrot, because the way I spoke would change in every country we'd go to.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

My mum made a conscious decision not to teach me any Indian languages so I wouldn't talk with an accent.

I certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that.

Latinas who come to the U.S. should adapt, learn English and become a part of the community.

Anyone that has come to America past the age of eighteen will be able to understand when I say that you can never shake your accent.

Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics' English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups'.