David Crystal Quotes

The globalized environment where speaking a lot of languages is rewarded and getting access to learning materials is easier. A talent for massive language learning has not been supported by the environment until very recently, so this is a phenomenon that is going to become more common and more visible.

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

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

I like to travel, and I would love to be fluent in at least four languages.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

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.

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.

I love commuting between languages just like I love commuting between cultures and cities.

Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

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.

In our generation, everybody told us that it's really important and it's nice to be able to speak a lot of languages. It's an art, too. It really impresses me, people who speak, like, seven languages. I admire them so much, so I began with English, and then Spanish and maybe Portuguese.

Just learning to think in another language allows you to see your own culture in a better viewpoint.

I think we should have a President who is fluent in at least one language.

I've always thought that speaking a foreign language from a young age makes you a little bolder when it comes to speaking and doing accents and things like that.

I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.

The language skill in the U.S. for the most part has been awful. Many Americans don't learn any foreign language.

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.

All the kids are learning different languages. I asked them what languages they wanted to learn, and Shi is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language; Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Mad has taken to German and Russian, Z is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.

Growing up in Switzerland, you learn German pretty much from day one in school. You learn French and Italian as well. I took English as an extra language because I figured that was the language of the world.

The fact that I did a Tamil film is going to help me a lot in learning Telugu.

When I got into languages, I needed to amass things to make myself more palatable or more acceptable as a human.

I think the thing that allows me to go into so many markets is that I can speak all the languages. Korean, Chinese, English, whatever. Thank you, my parents, for teaching me all the languages.

I could teach you how to speak my language, Rosetta Stone.

In addition to the research, I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country.