Herman Badillo Quotes

Bilingual education doesn’t work, and it has never worked.

If a child cannot speak English the first day at school, that child is not ready to learn.

Over 90 percent of parents in Puerto Rico want their children to be totally fluent in English.

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

Latin America must follow the education model, that allows children to handle the English language from a very early age.

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

Rapid acquisition of English should be the paramount goal of any immigrant language instruction program.

Miami is America’s most diverse city… We have 140 languages we speak..

Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English.

Because education is such a broad area, I chose to focus on language learning.

If you do not learn English in this country, you cannot get anywhere. We are in America. We are not in Mexico, we are not in China, we are not in Saudi Arabia - we speak English in this country! And what bilingual education does, is keep them from learning English, so they are doomed to be second-class citizens.

I feel my poetry has contributed through all these languages that I needed to learn leading up to English.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

I don't speak Spanish, I speak a little of Italian but no Spanish.

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.

First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English.

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

Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.

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

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

Move beyond the educated elite, and the great majority in most countries outside Europe don't speak English.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.