Helen Dunmore Quotes

If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.

My primary and secondary education was in French, which had a lasting influence on my life.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.

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 don't speak Spanish, and I get so much crap for it. Oddly enough, it was the first language I learned, but somehow I lost it throughout the years. I can understand pieces of it, but I don't speak it. I need to speak it. I want to teach my kids Spanish.

Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French.

I definitely want to teach my daughter Spanish.

I think it's important if you're American to have a second language, and Spanish is the language to have.

I don't speak Spanish. I've done Spanish 1 and 2 classes. My grandma asked me when I was young if I wanted to learn Spanish, and I guess I was young. I should have, because it would have helped me a lot.

When I started writing, the first thing that came out was in English. I liked a few French things, but they were very overwhelming.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

I speak two languages, Body and English.

It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

I use Mandarin, Korean and English on a daily basis and usually only use Cantonese when I'm speaking with my relatives. I don't think it's very difficult for me to switch between each language because I've been doing it for so long.

It is not easy, but young people have to learn languages.

You always speak the language you hear most.

My opinion is that more languages you speak, better it is, but when you come to America, you speak English.

It's always lovely to know new languages.

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.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.