Robert Giroux Quotes

Since I learned English, I've become a motormouth!

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

My parents are both Belgian-born, and so am I, actually. I'm bilingual, so I had experience with French.

Italian was my first foreign language. I speak it better than English.

When I first came to this country I could not speak English. Now I get paid to write it.

I speak, Hindi, English, and American. I'm trilingual.

I learned Punjabi before I learned English in spite of the fact that I was born in Canada.

I use Mandarin, Korean and English on a daily basis and usually only use Cantonese when I'm speaking with my relatives. I don't think it's very difficult for me to switch between each language because I've been doing it for so long.

Hindi has never been a trouble. In fact, Hindi is the only language I can speak and write apart from Malayalam and English.

Language has never been a barrier for me. I grew up learning Telugu, Hindi, and Tamil.

I was German-speaking, and I arrived 10 years old to Croatia, and really wasn't speaking a lot at home with my parents in Croatian, so it was really difficult to write in Croatian. It took me two years after I went back to learn everything again in Croatian.

It is a conscious decision that I do films in different languages.

Because there'd be two languages I couldn't speak, French and English.

Making my English better is a hard job, a slow job. But it's getting better. Three years ago it would have taken me a half hour to say this sentence.

A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

Usage is the best language teacher.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set.

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

I learned English in one month. I told myself I should listen. In the next month I could talk to everyone. I was so happy because I could do one thing...I could talk.

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

My mother, she's the one who's gifted with language. She can speak Japanese, of course, Tagalog, which is a Filipino dialect, Spanish as well as English. And I speak a little bit Japanese because I've had the opportunity to work alongside Japanese people. And a little bit of German, a little bit of Portuguese because of work. A little bit of French because of work. But then, if you asked me to carry-on an everyday conversation, I would fail miserably.

One of the first things that my English teacher told when I began studying in New York was, "You're here because if you pick it up from the street, not everyone speaks good English." And it happens all the time, anywhere. If you pick up Spanish from the streets, you're not going to be able to speak it correctly.

Even if people are suspicious of the motives I think that learning and speaking two languages can only be a good thing for people.