Emo Philips Quotes

I lived for a year in Scotland. British sign language is very different from American.

My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

What's funny in Italy may not be funny in Spain.

When you go to school in Holland you learn to speak English and write in English - but English is different from the Scottish language!

Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.

Sometimes you can do things with Spanish - like verbs and genders - easier than you can in English.

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

When I go home to England, my friends all make fun of me for sounding American.

The fact that that's the difference between Mexicans and Cubans is pronounced. It's so immediately recognizable, the way a Cuban speaks, the way a Cuban moves the hands.

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 only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.

When you work in a different language you are not so attached to the words.

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.

Everyone tells me I have a funny accent. It's because I copy people. I learned English at school but have best friends who are French, Australian, English and American; a very weird mix.

When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute.

My father was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. His family is from Spain. My father never taught me how to speak Spanish when I was little. That's very disappointing to me. I'm still planning on learning it on my own. I really want to travel to Spain and immerse myself in the culture and learn it on my own.

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

Violet speaks Spanish and understands it. She loves Cuban food! My mom is very good at teaching her about our culture, whether it be the food or Spanish or explaining to her that she's Cuban.

American audiences and European and Asian audiences are so different.

Telugu is a lot like Kannada, so I don't have a problem with Telugu. But Tamil is very difficult to learn, man.

Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what has been changed or added.

The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.

I worked at a job where 90 percent of my coworkers were Spanish-speaking, and some of them were only Spanish-speaking. My rule was if someone came into the office needing something - I worked in HR at the time - they had to bring a Spanish word to teach me. That was the deal.

Coming from the Malayalam sets, when I went to Telugu, people told me that I wasn't acting and that it felt dead. It was very subtle in Malayalam, while it is slightly dramatic in Telugu. It is quite fascinating to understand what each industry expects of you and work according to that.