Fredrik Bajer Quotes

On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

I wish I could speak Spanish, because it would be a lot easier to play more interesting roles.

Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.

I failed world geography, civics, Spanish and English. And when you fail Spanish and English, they do not consider you bilingual. They may call you bi-ignorant because you can't speak any language.

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.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

A lot of people who live in Denmark will understand Danish but not necessarily speak it.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm always drawn to stories about characters who are somewhat isolated inside themselves by their inability to communicate in some way. That's what interested me about 'Children of a Lesser God.'

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

Foreign languages was the only thing that interested me when I was at school, so playing in another language... it is quite demanding because if it is not your mother tongue, you are missing some connotations and some emotional depth of certain things.

At the time of the Cole Bombing there were only 8 Arabic-speaking agents in the entire FBI.

For the benefit of those who are not bilingual, I will now continue in English.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'

I feel it is unnatural and immoral to try to teach science to children in a foreign language They will know facts, but they will miss the spirit.

When I work in English, I'd say I don't see a big difference in my rapport with my team or the actors. When I work in English or French, the music of the language is different, but beyond that music, in the depths, it's the same.

You know it was really hard to do a set, or even to do interviews in English, because in Europe, we always had a translator with us.

I think we are living in an age where we really need to have bilingual leaders so that we can communicate with our constituents.