Jenny Zhang Quotes

I didn't speak English until I came to Pittsburgh.

It took me a year to really learn the American lingo. I really feel for people who are coming here and don't speak English at all. It must be hell.

When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?'

I had to struggle with the language. I can understand Hindi now, but I still can't communicate. And things get lost in translation; I feel rejected all the time.

The fact that I didn't speak English I think was the most difficult thing for me.

When I first arrived in the country, I really didn't speak much of the language. I knew two words coming here, and they were 'Hello' and 'Shut up.'

Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

Sometimes people have a difficult time understanding my English.

I think the biggest difficulty is that when I'm here in America, there's a necessity of using English, so I really have a great sense of really wanting to learn, but unfortunately when I head back to Japan, the necessity vanishes and so does my enthusiasm about learning.

Because I had an accent, people had this impression that I was dumb.

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

When I first came to this country, I didn't know how to speak English.

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

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

My accent was horrible. In Mexico, nobody says, 'You speak English with a good accent.' You either speak English, or you don't: As long as you can communicate, no one cares.

From 1 till 7, when we moved to England, I spoke only Portuguese.

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.

I started acting when I was really young. I came to the States and didn't know anyone, and I spoke with a weird Irish accent.

Every Hispanic player goes through that. It's a lot of hard work, to be able to communicate with your teammates. English is fundamental to be able to express yourself fully in a game.

You do see very few English players going abroad and those that do are largely good players otherwise they wouldn't have gone, but I feel a lot of their downfall is in the language. On the pitch you can learn the different basics of 'left,' 'right' and 'behind you' but off the pitch you want to have that influence around the team.

While I was doing Hindi, people there laughed at me because I couldn't speak Hindi and English properly.

Speaking in broken Telugu is one thing, and dubbing is another.

Being here in the United States, English is not my first language. It's kind of a challenge for me, a big challenge for my family.

This will sound really funny, but I'm so used to shooting in Hindi that shooting in English took a while to get used to.

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.'